When China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, died in 210 B.C.E., he was buried in style, with an army of some 8,000 terra-cotta warriors assigned to protect him in the afterlife. Forgotten for more than 2,000 years, the towering clay figures were only rediscovered in 1974, when farmers in northwest China stumbled onto them while digging a well. The sculptures are eerily life-like: The artisans who created them carefully carved the soldiers’ hair, eyes, ears, mouths, muscles and attire, ensuring that no individual is identical to another.
Experts generally agree that the clay soldiers’ torsos were modeled by hand, while their heads and hands were cast from molds. As art historian Wu Hung wrote in the 2003 book Chinese Sculpture, the process began with a rudimentary form crafted from coarse clay, which was then covered with layers of finer clay. Craftspeople carved details into this fine clay, adding touches that lent the figures their unique personalities.
To finish the job, workers fired the sculptures, painted them in vivid colors and outfitted them with real weapons. Researchers led by Xiaoxi Li, an archaeologist at the Emperor Qin Shi Huang’s Mausoleum Site Museum, have published a new analysis that may call into doubt the long-held assumption that the terra-cotta soldiers were created exclusively by adult men. As the authors write in the Journal of Cultural Heritage, “Our results provide the first biological evidence for a diverse workforce including adult females and juveniles.” To gain a clearer sense of the workforce’s makeup, the team identified 79 well-preserved fingerprints found on 36 warriors.
Of these prints, 45 percent appeared to come from adult women, with another 33 percent left by adult men. Juveniles accounted for the final 22 percent. (The paper defines juveniles as those under the age of 15, based on Qin dynasty records that suggest this was “the minimum age of criminal responsibility, as well as the threshold age for forced labor and military service.”) Although scientists have long relied on fingerprint analysis to estimate an individual’s age or sex, the study argues that the traditional methods used have clear limitations. These assessments are often based on measurements of mean ridge breadth, or the average distance between raised lines in a fingerprint, and ridge density, which measures the average number of ridges in a set area of the print.
Adult men tend to have more space between fingerprint ridges than their female counterparts, resulting in a lower ridge density—but this pattern doesn’t hold true for adult women and teenage boys, whose prints can be virtually identical. The paper’s authors also point out that conventional methods fail to account for “interpopulation variation and post-firing ceramic shrinkage.” The team addressed these limitations by using a Bayesian mixture model laid out by a separate group of researchers in a 2023 journal article. While 44 percent of the fingerprints were attributed to women, this doesn’t necessarily imply that women made up the same percentage of overall craftspeople.
The study’s sample size was relatively small, drawing from just one of three army pits. It’s also possible that a single individual left fingerprints on multiple sculptures. Finally, the authors note that inexperienced workers—probably including women and children—were more likely to leave behind fingerprints than trained artisans, who might have erased such traces after finishing their work.
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