Yangcheng Evening News reporter Wen Wen intern He Wentao.
The pace of the Spring Festival is getting closer and closer, and in the area of Education Road and Xihu Road in Yuexiu District, Guangzhou, workers are busy building scaffolds and marking stalls to make final preparations for the grand opening of the West Lake Flower Market.
The archaeological site of Guangzhou Xiaoma Station-Liushuijing Ancient City Ruins, which is separated from the West Lake Flower Market, is also a busy scene. Recently, when the reporter visited the construction site, he saw that a group of staff wearing red vests with the words "Guangzhou Archaeology" kept waving their hoes and shovels in their hands, nervously carrying out archaeological excavation work.
The walls of the Eastern Han Dynasty, the Eastern Jin Dynasty, and the Southern Dynasties are all under this. Following the direction of Cheng Hao, the person in charge of the project and director of the Survey and Exploration Department of the Guangzhou Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, the reporter saw that several sections of the brick wall had been exposed. Among them, the rammed earth city wall of the Eastern Han Dynasty found here is the earliest city wall found in Guangzhou, which has a history of 2,000 years.
According to Cheng Hao, in order to cooperate with the construction of the community protection project of Xiaoma Station Academy in Yuexiu District, the archaeological team of Guangzhou Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology will enter the site in January 2024 to start the archaeological excavation of the ancient city site of Xiaoma Station - Liushuijing in Guangzhou.
In fact, this is not the first excavation of the ancient city site of Xiaoma Station - Liushuijing in Guangzhou. Between 1996 and 1998, archaeologists had already discovered three generations of ancient city walls on the site.
After the first archaeological excavations, the original site was backfilled. Now, in cooperation with the College Community Project, we need to first clear out the sand that was backfilled in 1998, and then completely expose the three generations of ancient city walls, and at the same time carry out more thorough research and protection work. ”
At 10 a.m. on February 1, a team of 15 people, all amateur history enthusiasts, most of whom were young students, walked into the archaeological site with great interest.
Is archaeology the same as tomb robbing, or treasure digging? In the prefabricated room of the construction site, Cheng Hao first brought a small lecture hall of "Into Archaeology", popularizing "what archaeology is", "why archaeology", and "how to do archaeology" in easy-to-understand language.
Along the first exhibition board on the construction site, Cheng Hao then told the research team about the historical changes at the "doorstep" of Guangzhou people. "Guangzhou is a typical overlapping city between ancient and modern, and the location under our feet is the center of Guangzhou city that has remained unchanged for 2,000 years. Cheng Hao said.
Guangzhou Xiaoma Station - Liushuijing Ancient City Ruins is located in the Beijing Road Cultural Tourism Zone, and not far from its northeast direction is the location of the Guangzhou Dynasty Mansion - the site of the Nanyue National Palace. The archaeological site is also surrounded by important archaeological discoveries such as the remains of Tang Dynasty coinage, the Liumai Canal, the ruins of the palace of the Southern Han Kingdom, and the wooden sluice gates of the Nanyue Kingdom.
The research activity lasted nearly two hours, and after the end, Cheng Hao and his colleagues returned to intense work. He said that because of the tight schedule of the project, they will stick to the construction site until the Spring Festival holiday.