The Missing Shamans

I just stumbled across this fascinating article by Magnus Fiskesjö about the mysterious fate of the artifacts from the first scientific excavation into neolithic sites in China. These excavations were the result of cooperation between Chinese geologists and the Swedish archaeologist John Gunnar Anderson. Between 1920 and 1924 Anderson directed digs at several neolithic sites in north China, including Yangshao, which gave its name to this period of Chinese history. The materials from this dig were all sent to Sweden for cataloging and conservation, but then half were returned to China. The returned artifacts included a large amount of painted pottery, including several pot lids in the shape of human heads. Anderson interpreted these as shamans' heads, and Fiskesjö agrees:

They may be renderings of shamans, complete with tattoos, snake-hair curls, and holes to insert feathers or plumes. One possibility is that they may have served as lids for special vessels that held the shaman's utensils.

Alas, almost all of the material Anderson sent back to China has been lost. It was sent to Beijing, then transferred to Nanjing when the Nationalists moved their capital there. In 1937 the Japanese conquered Nanjing and the Nationalists moved their capital to Chongqing in Sichuan. According to a recent Chinese documentary about the artifacts, there is a record that at least some of these materials arrived in Chongqing. Some, however, may not have made it:

Another rather more ominous piece of information in the film is that one entire ship with museum items sank in the Yangtze River in 1946 on its way back to Nanjing, but no records of its cargo have so far become available.

The last document anyone has seen that records the presence of these artifacts in China dates to 1948. Fiskesjö has been unable to find any evidence of them in Taiwan or Tokyo, either. A single crate of them surfaced in Beijing a few years ago, feeding speculation that they may still be in China somewhere, hidden in the back of some dusty storage room, or just misidentified in some museum's records.

This would be an excellent subject for an archaeological thriller, if anyone out there has the time and inclination.