3.  Sacrificial Pits at Sanxingdui 三星堆

 

concept: simulacrum

looking for “China:” models of “Three Dynasties,” center/periphery, macroregions

Sanxingdui, in Guanghan county 廣漢 Sichuan province 四川省 Sites excavated by the Sichuan Archaeological Institute and Sichuan University in 1980, 1982, and 1986; two sacrificial pits discovered in 1986.

Sanxingdui culture, late 13th-century BCE

Kizil Caves, Chinese Turkestan (present-day Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region)

Zhang Sengyou 張僧 繇 (420-79) .   Chinese painter who refrained from dotting in the eyes of his paintings of dragons for fear that this mysterious creature would jump off the surface of the image and fly away

Shu 蜀:   ancient name for Sichuan

slaves:   historically associated with blindness.   The famous historian and epigraphist (someone who studies inscriptions) Guo Moruo 郭沫若(1892-1978) noticed that in inscriptions of some Western Zhou period (c. 1050-771 BCE) bronzes, min (slaves) and mang (blindness) share the character, a graph which shows an “eye being pierced by a sharp blade”