STAR TRIBUNE (Mpls.-St. Paul) Newspaper of the Twin Cities

Rip Rapp and the Lost Cities of China
Poking in the ground and peering at a picture taken by a satellite in space, a UMD professor found ancient cities that had been buried for centuries.

10/16/00
Larry Oakes; Staff Writer

It's like an Indiana Jones adventure, minus the eyeball-eating tribesmen and rat-infested catacombs. But this archaeological adventure story is true. And the discoveries it chronicles rival anything that Hollywood could conjure. In our real-life tale, the American professor who circled the globe and defied the odds to unearth amazing things - in this case, two ancient lost cities - is a 70-year-old Minnesotan. He is Prof. George of the University of Minnesota-Duluth. But, like Indy, he disdains titles: "Cut that professor/doctor stuff and call me Rip," he says. Rip Rapp, a regents professor of geoarchaeology and head of UMD's Archaeometry Laboratory, has spent more than 40 years helping to find and explain ancient civilizations, from Tunisia to Turkey.

But he may have saved the best for last.

In the past six years, working at the invitation of the Chinese government, Rapp has played a key role in locating the buried ruins of two ancient Chinese cities.

Experts say they are among the most significant modern discoveries in East Asian archaeology, and have helped strengthen a fledgling scientific alliance between the two countries.

But posterity may be the biggest winner. Artifacts and skeletal remains likely to be found in the cities could expand the world's knowledge of two great dynasties.

While the discoveries have caused a stir among experts, the story has yet to be told in the mainstream media outside China. Here's that story.

Satellite clue

The first discovery, in 1994, was the City of Song (pronounced "sung"), a 2,700-year-old capital of the Zhou ("joe") Dynasty. Chinese archaeologists had been searching for the city, mentioned in ancient texts, for 40 years.

It happened as Rapp and his former doctoral student, Chinese-born Zhichun Jing, now a research fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, were working with Harvard University on a project to find Great City Shang ("shong"), the first capital of the earlier Shang Dynasty.

Harvard archaeology Prof. J.C. Chang, now retired, had sought Rapp's expertise in reading the landscape and using technology to guess where early people would have built.

While studying a satellite photo of the area around the modern city of Shangqiu ("shong-chio"), Rapp and Jing zeroed in on a faint circular shape.

Such shapes can indicate disturbed soil. They drilled core samples and, 6 feet down, hit what proved to be a packed earthen wall. Further study revealed a buried 35-foot-high wall, belonging not to the first Shang capital, but to the City of Song.

"It happened to be their most famous lost city," said Rapp.

And the discovery may kill two birds with one stone: Ancient writings say Song was built on the same site as Shang, and excavations are planned to see if that is true, said Boston University Prof. Robert Murowchick, director of the International Center for East Asian Archaeology and Cultural History.

Murowchick, a co-leader on the project, said excavation will take years because Song is buried under 35 feet of flood sediment, and relics from Shang could be 15 feet farther down.

But at least the archaeologists know where to dig. Murowchick said: "While this was a team discovery, there's no question that the work of Rapp and Jing was absolutely critical. They discovered the city wall."

On behalf of UMD, Rapp later entered into an agreement with China's Institute of Archaeology to start a new project.

Working under grants that Rapp obtained from the Henry Luce, National Science and Malcolm H. Wiener foundations, the international team set out in 1997 to make an extensive archaeological survey of the area around Anyang, a center of activity during the Shang Dynasty.

Tale of two cities

The Shang is the oldest proven Chinese dynasty, with kings that ruled from about 1700 B.C. until about 1100 B.C.

Anyang is the site of Yinxu ("yin-shu"), an ancient city whose excavation began in 1928 and which is believed by many to be the last Shang capital.

Anyang, like Shangqiu, is in a valley that has flooded and filled with silt repeatedly throughout history, occasionally forcing settlements to be abandoned, and eventually covering them.

At Yinxu, archaeologists unearthed royal tombs, chariots, pottery, weapons, musical instruments and other priceless relics of the Bronze Age. But perhaps more valuable for posterity were some of East Asia's earliest writings, on animal bones.

"There are over 100,000 oracle bones at Yinxu. . . . The entire history of Shang can be traced through them," Rapp said.

The writings mentioned at least five Shang capitals, only two of which had been found and confirmed. They are Yinxu and Zhengzhou ("jeng-joe"), 90 miles to the south.

Relics from Zhengzhou show less sophistication, suggesting that it represents an early Shang period, while Yinxu represents the late Shang period.

However, near Yinxu, archaeologists and farmers occasionally found Shang pottery that fit neither period, according to Prof. Jigen Tang of China's Institute of Archaeology. Tang is Rapp's principal host and partner on the Anyang project.

Those uncharacteristic artifacts convinced Tang and other scientists that the writings were true - that after Zhengzhou, but before Yinxu, the Shang had at least one other capital city, during a middle Shang period.

It was only a theory. No such city had ever been found.

What lies beneath

Rapp, Tang and Jing didn't set out to find a lost Shang city at Anyang.

Their goal, boring by comparison - except, perhaps, to archaeologists - was to take extensive core samples from the countryside and map changes in the landscape and human settlement patterns through the eons.

Rapp calls that method "trying to get the third dimension" rather than simply studying the surface of the ground as traditional archaeological surveys do.

By examining pottery shards and other evidence, they hoped to learn more about such things as how the Huan River's changing course influenced where people lived.

Using helpers armed with Chinese tools called Luoyang spades, the scientists directed the systematic extraction of cores, cataloging what they found.

No one expected this kind of fishing expedition to snag a lost dynastic capital. But, one day in 1997, that's what happened.

"In one field we hit what we thought was another Yinxu-related site of artifacts," Rapp said. "But some of the pot shards didn't fit Yinxu. In fact, they didn't fit much of anything."

Confirmation that they were atop something extraordinary came the next year in the same area, when the scientists' coring tools struck the compacted earth of a building platform and the similar "rammed" earth of what proved to be a city wall.

By the fall of 1999, after taking thousands more cores, scrutinizing the area with sophisticated instruments and doing preliminary excavations, the scientists had mapped and exposed small parts of what was undoubtedly a large city, hidden 3,500 years under 8 feet of flood sediment.

A missing link

They named it Huanbei Shang City ("hoo-on-bay," meaning "north of the Huan"). Carbon dating and other evidence indicated that the city was built up and used during the 14th century B.C., Tang wrote in a recent e-mail.

"The day when we located Huanbei Shang City," he wrote, "I understood I was realizing a dream . . . and the Shang archaeology of China would be rewritten soon."

Each of its four walls is about 1 1/3 miles long; together they enclose an area of more than 1,200 acres. It's the largest walled Shang city ever found. Archaeologists think it must be one of the lost capitals. More important, it appears to date to the little-understood middle Shang period.

"For specialists in Shang history, this discovery is immensely important," said David Keightley, professor emeritus of history at the University of California, Berkeley.

Keightley and other historians hope that the excavation will yield more clues to the origin of "virtually everything seen in the late-Shang culture," including its burial rituals, sophisticated bronze castings and fully developed writing.

"This city doesn't occur in any literature," Rapp said. "It represents a missing period in Shang history."

Minnesota connection

Tang wrote that they have only begun to unlock the secrets of the city, which is closer to the surface than the City of Song and can be excavated more easily. Said Tang:

"What we are concerned with now is its internal layout - the locations of the palace and the workshops. The final purpose is to investigate how people socially organized and lived. . . . It may take us one or two decades."

Tang credited the intensive coring survey pioneered by Rapp as leading to the discovery.

He added that the huge success of these collaborations between Chinese and foreign scientists - something prohibited by the Chinese government until about 10 years ago - bodes well for future cooperation.

Rapp said he'll leave future discoveries to Jing, Tang, Murowchick and others. He plans to retire, although he has said that before.

He vows to stay involved long enough to help host an international conference on the project in Minneapolis in 2003, accompanied by an exhibition of Shang artifacts.

The exhibit is sure to contain artifacts from Huanbei Shang City, a place that now can go down in history after a 3,500-year delay.

"Anywhere they talk about early civilization, they talk about China - and from now on, when they talk about early Chinese sites, they'll talk about Huanbei Shang City," Jing said.

Rapp, who has been involved in dozens of excavations worldwide and has written all or part of 15 books, said the latest discovery "will probably eclipse all other excavations I've been involved in because no city from that period had been found before."

He added: "The people of Minnesota should feel a connection to it because this was a UMD Archaeometry Lab project. This story of the discovery of an ancient Chinese city is also a Minnesota story."

Staff librarian Roberta Hovde contributed research to this story.
Larry Oakes can be contacted at loakes@startribune.com.

Anyang - A 3,500-year-old Shang Dynasty city was found near Anyang.

Shangqiu - The 2,700-year-old lost City of Song was found near Shangqiu.