Sanxingdui
Sichuan pits full of giant bronze masks from a civilisation with no name and no writing.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 100 years
- Known to
- ± 100 years
- Era
- Iron Age, Holocene
Sacrificial pits at Sanxingdui, first opened in 1986, contained bronze heads with protruding eyes, a mask 1.4 metres wide, a two-metre standing figure, gold foil, elephant tusks and a bronze tree four metres tall — all deliberately broken and burned before burial. The style resembles nothing in Shang China. The culture flourished for a few centuries and vanished around 1200 BCE, leaving no texts and, in the pits, no human remains.