The new Sanxingdui Museum in Guanghan, Sichuan province in China, was opened for public.
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With a total area of about 54,400 square meters together with Halls No 1 and No 2 of the old Sanxingdui Museum, the combined facility now forms the Sanxingdui Museum complex.
The new museum has a display area of 22,000 square meters, with more than 1,500 sets of cultural relics comprehensively and systematically exhibiting the latest findings from archaeological excavations and research at the Sanxingdui Ruins, located 40 kilometers north of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan.
The relics include pottery, bronze, jade, gold and ivory. More than 600 of them are being displayed for the first time, including more than 300 newly unearthed items from the No 3 to No 8 sacrificial pits of the Sanxingdui Ruins.
The newly discovered relics on display include a bronze altar nearly 90 centimeters tall and a net covering a vessel shaped like a tortoise shell.
The museum is also offering its patrons a more immersive experience with its 3D technology, which enables them to view excavation sites from the perspective of archaeologists.
To piece together bronze ware fragments unearthed in different sacrificial pits, the relics preservation team of the Sanxingdui Ruins collaborated with a digital lab under Chinese tech giant Tencent, obtained the fragments' geometrical features with artificial intelligence technology, and verified the possibilities of different combinations.
This enabled researchers to restore the original appearance of relics in the virtual space without even touching physical items.
Covering 12 square kilometers, the Sanxingdui Ruins site, on which the museum sits, includes the remains of an ancient city, sacrificial pits, residential quarters and tombs.
Scholars believe the site was established 2,800 to 4,800 years ago, and archaeological discoveries show it was a prosperous, highly developed cultural hub.
Over recent years, a number of advanced technologies in multiple disciplines have been employed in archaeological excavations at the Sanxingdui Ruins site, which innovated the research models of major archaeological projects and built open platforms for interdisciplinary cooperation.
For instance, from the black ashes uncovered from the sacrificial pits at the site, experts revealed textile techniques over 3,000 years ago; with the artificial intelligence technology, a replica of a bronze altar was made by bronze ware fragments unearthed in different sacrificial pits.
The aging of relics is irreversible, no matter what materials they are made of. Recording the information of relics through digital means would give them a "new life." With digital technology, researchers and visitors from all over the world can obtain the information of relics anytime and anywhere. ■