Fingerprints Pressed Into China’s Terracotta Army Reveal a Secret Buried for More Than 2,200 Years

When Emperor Qin Shihuang was carried to his tomb more than 2,200 years ago, he would not journey to the afterlife alone. Thousands of terracotta warriors would accompany him on the march into eternity. Possibly sculpted in the image of the men who served him in life, no two of the figures were alike—but whose hands brought this army to life? As it turns out, some of those hands left their fingerprints behind.

It was long assumed that only male artisans raised an entire army from clay. When archaeologist Xiaoxi Li of Emperor Qinshihuang’s Mausoleum Site Museum investigated with his research team, however, he found something astonishingly different. The fingerprints on the statues indicated that not all of the sculptors were adult men. An analysis of the prints, which were pressed into the clay while it was still wet and preserved forever once it was fired, suggested that the figures were made not only by men, but also by women and children. Earlier archaeologists had noticed the prints but had no way of learning anything more about them. Li’s team is the first to tease biological evidence out of them.

“These findings challenge the long-held assumption that Terracotta Army production relied exclusively on adult male labor, providing the first quantitative biological evidence for a diverse workforce including women and children,” he said in a study recently published in the Journal of Cultural Heritage.

The scale of the project helps explain why so many hands were needed. Alongside roughly 8,000 life-sized figures are 130 chariots drawn by 520 horses, plus another 150 cavalry horses. The Qin dynasty was known for pulling off undertakings of this magnitude, and past research has focused on how such an incredible feat was accomplished rather than on who accomplished it. The little that was known about the artisans came from their workshop marks—either the character “Gong” (宫) or “Xianyang” (咸阳)—and from differences in clay composition, which suggest that specific body parts were produced in separate workshops. Beyond that, the sculptors’ identities were a blank. And while scholars have generally assumed that only adult men were conscripted for such work in Qin China, inscriptions on lacquerware from the same period record the labor of women, boys, and girls.

To test that assumption, Li’s team focused on fingerprints found on the ceramic warriors in a single excavation unit of the tomb complex. The researchers photographed the prints, keeping only those that were neither distorted nor eroded and were therefore clear enough to analyze. The photos were then digitally enhanced to maximize the visibility of ridges and furrows so that details could be carefully measured. After this process, which also eliminated duplicate prints on the same body part of a statue (assumed to come from the same hands), the team was left with images of 79 prints on 36 figures. Most had been left on the heads and arms, probably while those parts were being attached to the rest of the body. Several others appeared on armor details, such as rivets and waistbands, that were pressed onto the surface.

Analyzing the magnified images, the researchers were able to identify certain fingerprints as belonging to laborers other than adult men. The key clue was the spacing between the ridges, which hints at age: because ridge spacing widens as the body grows, narrower spacing can give away younger hands. Still, the method leaves room for uncertainty. The morphology of some prints was consistent with either a juvenile boy or an adult woman, and it is possible that the clay shrank as it dried and was fired, shrinking the prints along with it, though by how much (if at all) is unclear. The location of the prints may reveal something else about the sculptors as well: less experienced workers may have been likelier to leave their marks behind, forgetting to smooth the clay after attaching heads and arms to a body.

Contrary to previous assumptions, fewer than half of the prints—just 45%—were linked to adult men. Nearly 33% appeared to belong to adult women. Children under the age of 15, the threshold of adulthood in China at the time, accounted for about 22%. These children may well have been apprentices learning the craft from masters, a reading supported by surviving Qin legal manuscripts that describe how long new apprentices needed to train before reaching artisan status.

Questions remain, however. Because only a fraction of the terracotta population was examined, the fingerprint distribution may not hold for the rest of this army, which took over a decade to build. Only by studying the remaining statues will researchers learn more about who created them.

“Notwithstanding these limitations, this study marks an important methodological breakthrough in Terracotta Army archaeology,” said Li. “It offers a new perspective into Qin state-run handicraft labor organization and validates [the methods used] for ancient craft studies.”