Fingerprints pressed into clay more than 2,200 years ago suggest that women and juveniles worked on China’s Terracotta Army alongside adult men. A study in the Journal of Cultural Heritage examined 79 clear prints on 36 soldiers and estimated that adult men left about 45 percent of them, adult women about 32.7 percent and juveniles under 15 about 22.3 percent.
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The soldiers were made for Qin Shi Huang, who unified China in 221 B.C. and died in 210 B.C., and the army is estimated to include about 8,000 life-size figures near Xi’an. For decades the workforce has been pictured as skilled male craftsmen, partly because inscriptions on the figures name individual makers. The prints now offer a different kind of evidence, one that records hands rather than names. Earlier research on the figures has examined manufacturing techniques, clay composition, inscriptions naming craftspeople and whether complete figures were built by multiple workshops, and the fingerprint approach adds a question those studies could not answer directly: who, by age and sex, was actually touching the clay.
Where the 79 prints came from
The sample comes from a single section of Pit 1 known as T23, which holds 227 figures. According to HeritageDaily’s report on the study, each of the 36 soldiers carried between one and five usable prints. A separate account from GreekReporter says the study was led by Xiaoxi Li and that the marks were found mostly on arms, heads and armor, especially where clay pieces were joined or decorations were attached.
That placement matters because it points to specific jobs. Women and children may have smoothed clay, fixed armor decorations in place and assisted experienced craftsmen, as the GreekReporter summary puts it, though the authors acknowledge that the prints cannot show how tasks were divided among workers. Seeing the marks concentrated on joins and decorations suggests assembly and finishing steps rather than the shaping of whole bodies, but that reading remains an interpretation and not a finding about any named person.
How ridge breadth was turned into age and sex
The method rests on mean ridge breadth, the average distance between the ridges of a fingerprint. According to the report, the measurement can indicate age and sex at the level of a population, which is a weaker claim than identifying any single person. The team used a Bayesian mixture model instead of conventional linear regression, a choice meant to handle the uncertainty and the overlap between demographic groups. A related method appears in an earlier paper, a Bayesian mixture-modelling approach to inferring the age and sex of ancient potters from ridge densities, which is also archived in the University of Chicago repository. Applying that kind of statistics to a famous monument turns a scatter of smudges into a population-scale dataset, though it also inherits every assumption built into the reference sample.
Juveniles were defined as people under 15, a threshold drawn from the age of legal responsibility in surviving Qin texts. Lacquerware inscriptions that refer to adult women, young girls and young boys supply further context for the presence of women and young people in Qin state craft production. The study is listed on ScienceDirect in a paper titled “Who produced Emperor Qin Shihuang’s Terracotta Army, China?”, and the authors conclude that the print assemblage cannot readily be explained by a workforce consisting only of adult men.
Why the percentages are not a headcount
The authors are careful about what the numbers mean. The shares describe the frequency of fingerprints, not an exact census of workers, and the HeritageDaily article quotes the study as saying they should not be interpreted as the precise demographic composition of the workforce. One worker could have left several prints while another left none that survive, and firing changes the dimensions of clay, which can distort ridge measurements.
The reference data raise a second caution. The model draws on a modern European dataset, and differences in ridge dimensions between populations could lead it to overestimate the share of women and juveniles. GreekReporter adds that experienced craftsmen may have erased their own prints while smoothing the clay, which could push the estimate in the same direction, and that only one section of the complex was studied, so the results may not represent the whole project.
The team recommends examining more warriors and building better reference data for ancient Chinese populations. The authors suggest that population-level Bayesian analysis of fingerprints could become a new way to study craft labor at other sites, a method that would let archaeologists recover who did the hands-on work in places where texts say little about the people who made the objects. For now, the evidence supports a modest but meaningful claim: the workshop floor of the First Emperor’s army probably included women and young people, in numbers still to be determined.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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