Sanxingdui: Bronze Age city with massive walls and elaborate ritual pits

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Key facts

• Site named Sanxingdui ("three star mounds") after three earthen mounds rising from the plain
• Located about 40 km outside modern-day Chengdu in Sichuan, on a flat river plain
• Wooden samples date the city to around 1600 BC; it lasted roughly 500 years
• Tens of thousands of people lived at its peak
• Walled city covered over 3 square kilometers with palace area and workshops in the north and ritual pits in the south
• City walls measured 40 m thick at the base, sloped outward, likely built as flood defenses
• Two ritual pits in the southern quarter yielded more than 100 bronze heads, each with a triangular cut for attachment to wooden bodies
• Pit 2 contained 60-70 elephant tusks and thousands of cowrie shells, some sourced from the Indian Ocean
• Massive walls and palace traced in 1984; artifacts uncovered in 1986

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