Out with the old, in with the new

The work of one young Chinese archaeologist is capturing the imagination of his peers, breathing new life into old artifacts, Wang Xingwei reports.

"Pit Manager", that's the nickname of Xu Danyang, a 27-year-old archaeologist, as given by his colleagues.

Xu is a member of the archaeological team working at the Sanxingdui Ruins site in Deyang, Sichuan province, which provides glimpses of an ancient civilization dating back more than 3,000 years. Xu's nickname stems from the excavation of sacrificial pits at the site.

"After its excavation in 2020, I was assigned to Pit No 4 and became the team leader in charge of half a dozen people, so they started calling me 'Pit Manager'," Xu smiled.

The 3,000-year-old Sanxingdui Ruins are home to a large number of bronze statues, most of which were the first of their kind to be discovered in China. Among them were unique and huge objects, such as a peculiar "sky-reaching" bronze sacred tree, a dragon-shaped bronze statue with a "tiger head" and a standing figure appearing to look like the Japanese superhero Ultraman. These works have aroused people's curiosity and gone viral online, with many netizens also creating memes of the findings, giving their modern take on the ancient remains.

Initially, the popularity of the Sanxingdui site surprised Xu, but later he found out that many young people are interested in not only the site's bizarre-looking artifacts but also his painstaking archaeological work done there.

"At first, I wondered why people wanted to interview me. After all, I'm just a young, ordinary archaeologist. But later I found that many people now prefer to learn about archaeological findings from younger people," he said in a previous interview with China Daily.