Chapter 253 Let's find it first.

All departments acted swiftly upon hearing the news, and the road north of the village was jammed like a parking lot.

Tan Wu brought over the old Party Secretary, who was about seventy years old and in good spirits.

Lin Sicheng greeted him and asked Fang Jin to take notes.

"This place used to be called Black Slag Slope. In the past, all the village's garbage was dumped here. Ash and slag from burning furnaces, broken bricks and tiles from building houses, you name it."

In the 1950s, the commune ordered the construction of terraced fields, leveling the entire mountain area and burying the piles of tiles and garbage. At first, they planted alfalfa, then wheat, and a couple of years ago, during the "Grain for Green" program, they planted trees again…

"Old Party Secretary, did you ever dig up any porcelain back then?"

"There are no porcelain pieces, but when the road was being built in the 1970s, quite a few broken pottery jars were unearthed... right where you just dug up!"

The old Party Secretary pointed to the abandoned porcelain pit, "After the road was repaired, we just filled it in!"

"When the road was being built back then, were any old rivers dug up in the deeper parts?"

Lin Sicheng gestured, "The top layer is fine sand, the middle layer is sand mixed with rice grains, then there's coarse sand and pebbles, and finally, there's really hard soil, the kind you can't even move with a shovel?"

"There are so many! Just keep going uphill from here, it's hundreds of meters long!"

The old Party Secretary pointed to the foot of the mountain, "Back then, people from the commune came to inspect it and told us to use local materials to sift road slag (pebbles for road base) here. The deepest part is eight or nine meters deep..."

"Thank you, old Party Secretary!"

Lin Sicheng thanked him and let out a sigh of relief.

How long would it take for the sediment to settle in an ancient riverbed that's eight or nine meters deep?

This is it, no doubt about it...

With a "beep," the walkie-talkie crackled to life, and Gao Zhangyi's voice came through: "Teacher Lin, the third layer of the abandoned pit has been uncovered!"

"Okay, I'll be right there!"

Not far, about a hundred meters, Lin Sicheng descended the terraced fields and walked over.

A large pit, about eight or nine meters in diameter, was surrounded by a fence, and a crowd of people stood outside. Upon seeing Lin Sicheng, the crowd automatically parted to make way for him.

In three days, the waste porcelain pit has been dug to a depth of four meters. The first two meters were mostly construction waste that was filled in during road construction, and the second layer is the rotten pottery that the village secretary mentioned.

It is indeed pottery, but more of it consists of coarse black porcelain and sandstone. Thermoluminescence dating determined the age to be 800±60 years, which falls precisely at the end of the Jin Dynasty and the beginning of the Yuan Dynasty.

In addition, there was a lot of waste ash mixed in: wood ash, coal ash, slag, unburned coal ash, etc., indicating that both wood-fired kilns and coal-fired kilns were used.

It was extremely thick, a full two meters, and it took two whole days to clean it.

Next is the third layer, which is the one we are currently excavating.

The abandoned pit is funnel-shaped, narrowing as you go down. At this point, the diameter at the bottom is about five meters, just enough for six technicians to turn around.

The slope was reinforced and protected, and a ladder was built every half meter. People were specially arranged to transport cultural relics and waste ash uphill.

The waste ash at the bottom has been cleared, and the waste exposed at the bottom of the pit can be roughly seen: there are ceramic molds (printing molds), saggars, and supports such as kiln pads and firing nails.

Wang Qizhi stared intently: Where is the promised white porcelain?

He and Sun Jiamu looked for three days, but they didn't see a single piece of porcelain, let alone white porcelain.

What a disappointment...

"There are indeed white-glazed porcelains; Tadokoro wouldn't deliberately lie to you!"

Lin Sicheng joked, pointing downwards, "But at the very bottom, it's about 5.7 to 6.3 meters. However, the quality is quite poor; most of it is chipped glaze porcelain (the glaze is cracked and peeling off) and yellow porcelain..."

"But it's only about four meters?" Wang Qizhi calculated. "What's the 1.7 meters in the middle?"

"The box, the support, the clay mold, it's roughly the same type you see here, and most of them are quite intact."

Wang Qizhi was taken aback: 1.7 meters tall, filled with fire-making tools, and most of them intact?

What are you doing? Smashing it instead of burning it?

Where did the black porcelain and pottery on it come from?

As he was pondering this, Lin Sicheng pointed to the box and mold that had been brought up: "Teacher, look!"

Wang Qizhi squinted at it, then bent down and picked up a box that had just been cleaned out.

At a glance, Wang Qizhi could tell that it was made from carefully selected white porcelain clay and quartz. The body was light white, dense and hard, and while the exterior was slightly rough, the interior was smooth and delicate, no less than fine white porcelain.

The key point is that this is a single box. In other words, each box contains only one porcelain blank.

The coarse black porcelain and pottery unearthed from the second layer just now had no need for such a fine box.

Wang Qizhi frowned as he glanced at the printing molds next to him: The second layer was two meters deep, and nearly a thousand pieces of black porcelain shards and waste pottery were dug out, but not a single one had a print. What use were these molds?

Wang Qizhi pondered for a moment: "Initially, this place was probably used to fire white porcelain, so the bottom of the ash pit was filled with waste white porcelain. But later they switched to firing black porcelain, and the original boxes and supports became unusable, so they had to be thrown away?"

"That's roughly it!" Lin Sicheng nodded. "I guess the technique wasn't good enough, and the quality of the white porcelain they produced was too poor, so they gave up and switched to firing black porcelain and pottery!"

Sun Jiamu pondered: "The bottom layer is mostly chipped glaze porcelain and yellow porcelain. This is because the temperature wasn't controlled properly when firing the white porcelain?"

Lin Sicheng nodded again: "Yes!"

Wang Qizhi and Sun Jiamu suddenly realized: if white porcelain is fired at too high a temperature, the glaze will crack or even split. If the temperature is too low, the glaze will turn yellow or even become smoky porcelain.

The soil layers unearthed during the exploration also confirm this.

Strangely, the bottom layer of discarded porcelain is less than a meter deep, and at most only a few hundred pieces can be found. Even relying solely on the single kiln on the terraced fields, the output can only be three or four kilns at most.

Then another question arises: it's impossible to abandon firing white porcelain and switch to firing black porcelain after only firing three or four kilns after the new kiln is built. Putting aside everything else, just the cost of the nearly two-meter-deep firing box alone must be enormous.

"So I speculate that this was just a test firing. After a few batches, the quality was too poor, so they simply changed course. Therefore, there should be even earlier kilns nearby, otherwise these firing tools specifically for white porcelain cannot be explained."

Wang Qizhi's eyes lit up: "Egg white jade?"

Lin Sicheng thought for a moment and shook his head: "Even if it is, it is probably of relatively poor quality. It is at least worse than the bowl that Chief Engineer Shui received, and much worse than the bowl that Yongji received."

Because technology cannot simply be discontinued overnight; even if it deteriorates, it is a gradual process. Therefore, while white porcelain was certainly fired, it is unlikely that the craftsmanship of eggshell-white jade could be recreated using it.

Looking at the black porcelain and pottery unearthed from the second layer, the technique is clearly quite advanced, suggesting that the nearby kilns mainly produced black porcelain and pottery. It's even possible they also fired earthenware.

Sun Jiamu remembered: Wang Qizhi had mentioned that they had received a porcelain pillow from the Jin Dynasty in Yongji, which used clay from Hejin.

It seems that the pottery Lin Sicheng was referring to was this.

So, in the end, even if there are kilns nearby, they are at most kilns from the Jin Dynasty.

"Could there be egg white jade?"

“Difficult!” Lin Sicheng shook his head: “Looking at the porcelain shards at the very bottom of the soil layer, they don’t even reach the quality of Tang Dynasty jade-bottomed white porcelain!”

Doesn't this mean that the more it's burned, the worse it gets?

But it's not surprising: it's generally acknowledged in the archaeological and ceramics communities that, due to the wars, the porcelain-making techniques during the Jin Dynasty in the north regressed significantly compared to the Northern Song Dynasty.

Just as he was silently marveling at the situation, Lin Sicheng's walkie-talkie crackled to life: "Teacher Lin, ash pits have been discovered about one and a half kilometers southwest of the terraced fields, beneath the platform. Three waste porcelain pits have been identified. The upper layer consists entirely of waste ash and black porcelain, the middle layer contains pottery and a small amount of celadon porcelain, and the bottom layer is still being explored..."

"Okay, I'll be right there!"

Lin Sicheng hung up the phone, waved into the distance, and with a "whoosh," the pickup truck drove up.

The back seats were removed and used to store tools, so no one could sit there. Sun Jiamu and Wang Qizhi quickly ran to the Grand Cherokee.

As soon as he got into the car, Sun Jiamu looked puzzled: "Lin Sicheng said there must be another kiln nearby, and I believe that, but how did Tian Jie find it so quickly?"

All in all, it took no more than three days.

If it were right next to the terraced fields, it would be understandable, but it's more than a kilometer away, with roads, fields, and residential areas in between. How did Tian Jie manage to find it?

"Lin Sicheng drew up a map for Tian Jie. It was roughly based on the No. 1 kiln and ash pit on the terraced fields to deduce the ancient river course, and then based on the porcelain clay mines in the surrounding area, to delineate the possible distribution points of ancient kiln sites from the same period!"

Wang Qizhi said matter-of-factly, "Just like he said, once the ancient riverbed is found, the kiln site will be transparent!"

Sun Jiamu paused for a moment, the rest of his words stuck in his throat.

Yes, Lin Sicheng said that, but I didn't expect it to be so easy to do.

It was only a little over a kilometer, just a few minutes' drive, and the two vehicles followed the dirt road along the ditch to the bottom of the platform.

The ditch was wide, about twenty meters, and in the middle, three shovels were making a rumbling noise.

Several thick steel pipes were placed nearby, revealing the soil layers that had been drilled out.

At a depth of about six meters, the layers are clearly visible: three meters deep is sandy loess, mainly from terrace loess washed down by mountain torrents. Below that is an intermittent layer of about one meter, and further down, there is a sudden burst of waste ash and porcelain shards.

Lin Sicheng squatted down, put on gloves, and slowly began to scrape.

The abundance of ash and scarcity of porcelain indicates a relatively mature firing technique. The predominance of black porcelain suggests that the area primarily produced civilian-use black porcelain in its later period.

After flipping through the ashes, Lin Sicheng paused briefly and then pulled out a palm-sized piece of pottery from the ash.

The body is brick red in color and has a very rough texture, with sand grains clearly visible within it. The inner wall is basically unfinished, while the exterior is covered with a green glaze, and the edges are neat and smooth.

At first glance, it looks like the corner of a ceramic box.

Lin Sicheng narrowed his eyes: "If I'm not mistaken, this should be the bottom edge of a ceramic pillow. If fully restored, it should look like this:"

Looking at the degree of aging, it is slightly older than the ancient kilns in the terraced fields, roughly belonging to the early Jin Dynasty.

Therefore, this should be a Jin Dynasty tricolor pottery pillow.

Suddenly, Lin Sicheng recalled the few porcelain pillow fragments he had received in Yongji, and even more so, the white-glazed, carved-flower child pillow in the Forbidden City that Long had mistaken for Ding ware white porcelain and had even inscribed a poem on…

He suddenly stood up and looked at the positions of the three drilling rigs: they formed an obtuse triangle, with the two furthest rigs about seven meters apart in a straight line.

Lin Sicheng picked up the awl and first drew a triangle: "These are the three ash pits, number one, two, and three. Centered on these, there should be ash pits within a range of fifty to one hundred meters. The number is estimated to be quite large, at least ten or more..."

"The ancient riverbed is here, about 200 meters southeast, which is the downstream section of the river, and about 100 meters from the ash pit. There should have been a burial site and a washing pool..."

Lin Sicheng drew another circle and then pointed a few times: "Go south, within 100 meters of the ash pit area, find the kiln!"

Sun Jiamu and Wang Qizhi simultaneously peered into the hole: an oval circle marked with four points. Judging from their positions, the three smaller points were the three identified ash pits, and the larger point was the kiln.

Roughly calculated, the site is about 200 meters from north to south and 50 to 60 meters from east to west. According to Lin Sicheng's estimate, the area of ​​the site should be around 10,000 square meters.

It's very small, only one-sixth the size of the Laoyaotou site, and only half the size of the Beiwuqin Tang Kiln. It's even smaller than the one below the terraced fields.

As the two were figuring things out, Lin Sicheng instructed his team to stop the drilling rig and retrieve the shovel.

This time it was quite deep, about eight meters below the surface. When the shovel was disassembled, the bottom layer contained not only fragments of tricolor glazed pottery but also some white porcelain shards.

The pottery shards have edges and corners, as well as curves... Jin Dynasty tricolor carved pottery pillow.

The white porcelain glaze is lustrous, but it has a subtle grayish-blue tint. It is darker than the Tang Dynasty jade bowl with a bi-shaped base that Shui Zonggong had, and it is also darker than the egg-white jade bowl that he received in Yongji. It is closer to the color of a duck egg.

Subconsciously, Lin Sicheng recalled his previous deduction with Chief Engineer Shui regarding the site of the Luanbaiyu kiln: Luanbaiyu originated in the late Tang Dynasty or the Five Dynasties, flourished in the Northern Song Dynasty, and declined in the Jin Dynasty.

However, it was merely a decline, not a complete extinction. Even if the craftsmanship deteriorated, there was a gradual process, and some techniques were certainly passed down.

Just like these few pieces of white porcelain: nine times out of ten, the kiln temperature was not up to standard, so the only solution was to add wood ash to the glaze to aid melting, which resulted in the glaze surface turning gray or bluish.

As recorded in "Notes on Southern Kilns": More ash results in a bluish glaze, while less ash results in a white glaze... The difference between bluish and white glazes lies in the amount of ash added or subtracted.

To put it bluntly: there must be even earlier kilns nearby, such as those from the early Jin Dynasty, or even the Song Dynasty...

Lin Sicheng glanced at the terrain, opened his bag, took out paper and pen, and while drawing a map, he instructed Tian Jie: "Tian, ​​you notify Team Leader Gao to evacuate everyone here, and hand over the terraced fields to the city archaeological team."

Then, they split into three teams. First, they went to the ancient river path north of Guzhen Village (downstream of Zhema Valley), then south for 500 meters, exploring along the northern stream. One team searched for the riverbed in the ravine, while the other two teams explored southwards along both banks. The exploration points didn't need to be too dense; they would drill every 200 meters to test the waters…”

Wang Qizhi recalled: "Beijianjiangou... We just went there yesterday. A few years ago, they built settlements on both banks and dug sand to a depth of four or five meters. If there were an ancient riverbed, it should have been dug out long ago?"

Lin Sicheng sighed: They did dig four or five meters.

But what the old Party Secretary just said was: the deepest ancient riverbed of the Jianhe River is a full eight or nine meters deep.

Look here again. It's also a ditch under a terrace, with the bottom at least four meters deep from the flat ground. Then they dug another four meters before reaching the ash pit.

How deep is it? Nearly eight meters.

Regardless of how it was formed, whether it was due to silt deposited by flash floods or soil piled up during the large-scale land reclamation in the 1950s and 60s, the water level of the ancient riverbed must be deeper than the ash pit, at least nine to ten meters below!

Lin Sicheng handed the map to Tian Jie: "Let's look for it first, it won't take long anyway!"