Imperial Logistics: The Making of the Terracotta Army

On 29 March 1974, a group of farmers digging a water well in Lintong, to the east of Xi’an, struck upon one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of all time. The Terracotta Army would become the icon of the 2,200 year-old city-like mausoleum of China’s First Emperor. A further four decades since its discovery, have we learned anything about serendipity?

I arrived back from my first trip to Xi'an to initiate the ceramics phase of the project. Was great to see the Terracotta Army, to see the Mausoleum, and to experience China. Inspirational!

I have just returned from a spell of a few months in Xi’an, where I have been continuing the data acquisition while working on ongoing publications. A highlight of my time there was the visit by a distinguished delegation led by Professor Dame Helen Wallace, Foreign Secretary of the British Academy, to the Emperor Qin Shihuang’s Mausoleum Site Museum. That was an official visit to mark the adoption of our “Imperial Logistics” as a British Academy project.

Last year ended with a substantial amount of media and blog coverage triggered by our publication in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory. What was all the fuss about? And how accurate was the news coverage?

Our first blog entry has to be devoted to the very news behind the origins of this blog: we have been adopted! The British Academy has recently announced that Imperial Logistics is one of the five projects they have decided to adopt as “Academy Research Projects”.