At the end of September last year, the National Bureau of Cultural Relics released the archaeological results of the Heposuo site in Yunnan Province at the press conference of the "Archaeological China" major project. A few days ago, the preliminary cleaning of the bamboo slips unearthed at the site of the Hebo Institute in Yunnan Province has been completed. The Yunnan Provincial Institute of Archaeology has cleaned up more than 1300 bamboo slips with words, more than 10000 bamboo slips without words and 837 seals in the Han Dynasty. The site of Hebosuo is located near Hebosuo Village, Shangsuan Town, Jinning District, Kunming City, Yunnan Province, and is the core site of ancient Yunnan culture. Since 2021, the archaeological excavations at the Hebosuo site have shown that the main body is the cultural accumulation of the Han Dynasty, and a large number of cultural relics have been unearthed. Among them, the most important discovery is the seal mud and bamboo slips. Their discovery shows that the central government of the Western Han Dynasty has exercised its authority over Yunnan, which is an important demonstration of the formation and development of a unified multi-ethnic country in China. According to Jiang Zhilong, the archaeology leader and researcher of the Yunnan Provincial Institute of Archaeology, the bamboo slips were mainly unearthed in the ash pit at No. 18, north of Shangsuan No.1 Primary School. Last August, archaeologists extracted more than 1000 boxes of soil samples from ash pits. In the next four months, archaeologists carefully sorted out the suspected bamboo slips, wooden components, pottery, iron, animal bones and other cultural relics from the soil samples, and then focused on the infrared scanning of the bamboo slips to distinguish the bamboo slips with and without characters, and stored them at low temperature. "The cultural relics cleared up this time are very rich and of many kinds. Among them, more than 1300 pieces of bamboo slips with characters and more than 10000 pieces of bamboo slips without characters have been cleared up. The bamboo slips with characters have been identified, such as' Dianchi to Tingxing ',' Jianling County ', and' the fourth year of the Yuan Dynasty '. The typefaces include seal script and official script. Wuhan University has been entrusted to interpret the contents of these bamboo slips with characters," said Jiang Zhilong. A total of 837 seals, including official seals, private seals and wordless seals, were also cleared up this time. Among them, the largest number of official seal covers, including the "Yizhou Governor's Seal", "Jianling Order Seal" and "Tonglaocheng Seal", covering the Yizhou County set up in the Western Han Dynasty and 20 of the 24 counties under its jurisdiction. Jiang Zhilong said that the preliminary cleaning of the bamboo slips unearthed at the site of Hebosuo has been completed, and the next step will be to further identify, protect and study the bamboo slips with experts from outside the province through decolorization and other technical means. (Xinhua News Agency)