The excavations at Shimao, on the Tuwei River, have revealed all this, along with abundant evidence for sophisticated crafts – including bone-working and bronze-casting – and warfare, including the mass killing and burial of captives, in around 2000 BC.110 Here we sense a much livelier political scene than was ever imagined in the annals of later courtly tradition. Some of it had a grisly aspect, including the decapitation of captured foes, and the burial of some thousands of ancestral jade axes and sceptres in cracks between great stone blocks of the city wall, not to be found or seen again
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