More than half the fingerprints on a batch of China's 2,200-year-old terracotta warriors came from women and children, a new study estimates, challenging the view that only adult men made the figures.
Researchers from Emperor Qinshihuang's Mausoleum Site Museum in Xi'an and Shandong University analyzed 79 well-preserved fingerprints on 36 warriors from Unit T23 in Pit 1 of the mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang, China's first emperor.
Their paper, with the museum's Li Xiaoxi as first author and Shandong University associate professor of archaeology Shen Jingyi as corresponding author, was published online on Oct. 13 in the peer-reviewed Journal of Cultural Heritage.
The model estimates that adult men left 45% of the prints, adult women 32.7% and children under 15 the remaining 22.3%. The age cutoff comes from Qin Dynasty legal texts that defined legal responsibility by age.
"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," the authors wrote.
The team photographed the prints and measured their mean ridge breadth, the average spacing between ridges, which widens as people grow, the South China Morning Post reported. Each warrior bore one to five distinct prints, on the head, arms, armor, hands, collar and even the feet, apparently left unintentionally during production.
73 of the prints were left as workers shaped, molded and assembled the clay, and six when pre-made decorations such as armor rivets and belts were pressed onto the figures.
Earlier studies struggled to tell adult women's prints from those of teenage boys, Phys.org reported. The team instead used a Bayesian mixture model, which analyzes the whole set of prints at once rather than classifying each one, and compared them with modern fingerprint data for different ages and sexes.
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Terracotta warriors, part of the clay army buried with China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang. Photo by Unsplash/Haydn |
Archaeologists had long assumed that large-scale craft production under the Qin relied on adult men alone, though there was little direct evidence of who made the army. When researchers reported finding more than 100 fingerprints on more than 40 restored figures in July 2025, most were attributed to adult men and a small number to minors, the Global Times reported at the time.
The authors suggest younger workers may have been apprentices given simpler tasks, such as attaching decorations to armor, and point to Qin legal texts on bamboo slips that describe a formal apprenticeship system, ScienceAlert reported. They also note historical records of women and children working in state-run workshops in early imperial China, notably in lacquerware production.
The authors cautioned that the shares reflect how often prints appear rather than how many people made them. Less practiced workers may have left more prints than skilled artisans, and the reliance on a modern European reference dataset may also overstate the share of women and juveniles.
"Unit T23 represents only a localized area of Pit 1, so the results may reflect the labor structure of a specific phase or production group rather than the entire project," they wrote.
The army of thousands of life-size clay figures was buried to guard the emperor's tomb after his death in 210 B.C. Farmers digging a well found it in 1974.