"This is the Tiger Ridge Dam?"

Stretching out his hand to support his somewhat sore waist, standing at the foot of the mountain, Kong Jianwen overlooked a green depression below, and sighed.

Finally found a place.

The overall structure of the peripheral water conservancy system of the ancient city of Liangzhu was discovered in 2018 and officially announced in 2021.

The water conservancy system is distributed in the territory of Bottle Kiln Town, Yuhang District, HZ City, located in the north and west of the ancient city of Liangzhu, and consists of a total of 11 embankments.

Depending on their location and shape, these dams can be divided into three types: long embankments in front of mountains, high dams connecting valley mouths, and low dams connecting isolated hills in plains.

To put it simply, it is a water conservancy dam almost parallel to the foot of the mountain range to the north of the ancient city of Liangzhu.

As we all know, the end of the plain outside the ancient city of Liangzhu is surrounded by mountains on three sides, and only the east side facing the sea has no big mountains.

Because Liangzhu has experienced an overwhelming flood, the local hydrology has been seriously changed.

So 5,000 years ago, what the water system near Liangzhu was like is now unclear.

However, according to the dam built by the Liangzhu people on the mountain, it can be seen that when the Liangzhu people lived here, there was a danger of flood discharge in the north and west.

That's why the Liangzhu people built 11 dikes around the mountains to the north and west.

This can also be said to be the earliest, most mature and largest group water conservancy project in China.

Let's put it this way.

The Liangzhu people were able to build such 11 dikes 5,000 years ago, which is no different from the modern people who built the Three Gorges Dam.

All of them belong to the projects of the century, and they belong to the power of the country to be built.

This is also the reason why there is no opinion at home and abroad that the Liangzhu civilization is a country and not a tribe.

Where can a tribe build such a large-scale water conservancy project?

This is the same as saying that the Qin, Zhao, Yan and other countries that built the Great Wall were just a few small tribes.

Isn't that a fuss?

However, if the embankment is discovered, it is natural to explore it after that, and it does not mean that traces have been found, even if the archaeology has been completed.

In fact, archaeological work has only just begun.

In order to further understand the structure and construction method of the dam body and obtain the archaeological stratigraphic basis, after reporting to the State Administration of Cultural Heritage for approval, the ZJ Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, together with the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, will excavate the sites of Gaoba Laohuling, Low Dam Lion Mountain, Liyu Mountain and Changqing Lake in the middle section of Tangshan Long Causeway, and explore part of the dam body and reservoir area.

The main goal of this excavation and exploration is to obtain important information about the dam structure and construction technology, and at the same time to explore the key stratigraphic overlapping relationships of the dam age, and to verify the reliability of the previous carbon 14 dating of the dam.

To put it simply, it is to find out the structure of these dams, what they are made of, and the most important age, whether they are the same period as the ancient city of Liangzhu.

Make no mistake, that's the Big Oolong.

This time, the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences is responsible for carrying out key exploration and small-scale excavations of the Laohuling Dam, which is in a better state of preservation and working conditions.

It is expected to take three months.

The Gukou high dam system to which the Laohuling Dam belongs is located in Penggong Township, northwest of the Liangzhu site group, and consists of six dams: Ganggongling, Laohuling, Zhoujiajia, Qiuwu, Shiwu and Bee Lane.

According to the location analysis of the dams, the above six dams are divided into two groups, east and west, and the Laohuling Dam, together with the Ganggongling and Zhoujiajia dams in the east, block the water from the main valley on the west side of Ganggongling and the branch valley on the east side of Qianshan to form a reservoir.

The Laohuling Dam connects Laohuling on the east side and the Wanjiwu on the west side, in a northwest-southeast direction, with a length of about 135 meters and a residual height of 13.5 meters. The height of the existing dam crest is about 24 meters above sea level.

In other words, the dam was more than 100 meters long, at least 14 meters high, and the highest possible dam was 24 meters.

This size, for a modern engineering dam, can only be regarded as pediatric.

But consider that this was built 5,000 years ago.

5,000 years ago, building an earthen dam more than 20 meters high and more than 100 meters long was not a small project.

Of course, compared with the Egyptian pyramids of the same period, it is indeed incomparable.

Holding a few drawings, Kong Jianwen looked at them in detail and said:

"Combined with the direction of the dam, the preservation status of the dam body and the academic purpose, the basic scheme of archaeological exploration is determined."

"In order to avoid greater damage to the dam body, the exploration work still uses the Luoyang shovel as the main tool."

"The exploration work has laid out a total of four rows of exploration holes, which are roughly distributed in the shape of "wells". ”

"The first row of boreholes is located in the middle of the top of the dam, in the same direction as the direction of the dam, with a spacing of 5 or 10 meters, with individual boreholes spacing of 20 meters, and one of the boreholes near the east end is 1.5 meters westward due to the position of the reservoir."

"The second and third columns do the same!"

What does it mean?

To put it simply, Chen Han and others will go to punch holes like oil workers.

On the dam site, they will use a Luoyang shovel to drill a probe hole every five or ten meters along the traces of the dam.

There are three columns in total, about forty or fifty probing holes.

The reason for this is simple, in fact, it is to explore the location of the entire dam and determine the soil structure of the site, which is a kind of archaeological preliminary investigation.

In fact, most archaeological projects are explored first and then excavated.

Generally, there is only the kind of archaeological project where the tomb robbery is discovered, and then the rescue excavation is carried out, because the tomb has been determined, and there is no tomb and not a "ruin", so there is no need to take the Luoyang shovel to explore, and it can be excavated directly.

A water conservancy project like this 5,000 years ago has not been excavated, and archaeologists do not know the specific situation, of course, they have to dig a lot of caverns to figure out the details.

Fortunately, the workload of forty or fifty caving is actually not large, and the archaeological team has more than ten people, and the average one person only plays three or four cavings.

It's just that this hole is a little deep.

But the results are still very encouraging.

Soon, Chen Han and others had a judgment on this dam.

The existing width of the dam should be about 54.5 meters, and the overall slope is in the form of a flood, and the slope is not large.

The original width is nearly 100 meters.

The accumulation can also be divided into five large layers, according to the soil brought out by Luoyang City, it can be judged that there are five soil layers: gray-yellow soil, gray-brown soil, yellow-brown soil, light yellow clay, and green gypsum mud.

As for the five soil layers, which periods are they and which soil layers belong to the dam, it is necessary for the explorator to carry out detailed excavation before making a judgment.

On the basis of the previous archaeological investigation and exploration, Kong Jianwen determined the working area of this archaeological excavation.

In order to reduce the damage to the dam body caused by the excavation work, the method of trench dissection excavation was adopted.

The two exploration trenches named "T1" and "T2" were officially excavated under Kong Jianwen's order!