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Even after nearly a hundred years of excavations, many of the ancient Shang dynasty capital’s secrets remain buried in the earth. HENAN, Central China — It was only mid-May, but the sun was beating down as Niu Shishan picked his way across a pockmarked field in the central Chinese city of Anyang. Niu, a tall, bespectacled 57-year-old archaeologist, is used to the treacherous ground, but he kept his head down as he worked his way around the mounds of earth. Each tiny pile represented a shot in the dark: the remains of an exploratory dig for signs of China’s oldest archaeologically attested dynasty. Beneath our feet lies Yinxu, the last capital of the Shang dynasty (c. 1600–1046 BC) and the holy land of Chinese archaeology. First excavated by Dong Zuobin in 1927, over the past century it has yielded a treasure trove of information on the origins of Chinese civilization, from thousands of oracle bone fragments to some of the best-preserved early tombs ever discovered on Chinese so
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