The Terracotta Army was long thought to have been made exclusively by adult male craftspeople. Discovered in 1974, the vast burial site near Xi'an contains thousands of life-sized clay soldiers, horses, and chariots created for Qin Shihuang, China's first emperor. Now, fingerprints preserved in the clay are offering a more complex picture of the people who may have helped produce them.
Researchers from the Emperor Qinshihuang's Mausoleum Site Museum and Shandong University studied 79 well-preserved fingerprints from Unit T23 in Pit 1. The impressions were left more than 2,200 years ago when people pressed or handled the clay while it was still wet. Most appeared on separate parts such as heads, arms, and armor.
The team measured the average width of the fingerprint ridges and analyzed the results with a Bayesian mixture model. Rather than identifying the age and sex of each person, the model estimated the overall demographic distribution represented in the sample.
It suggested that about 45 percent of the sampled fingerprints were attributable to adult males, 32.7 percent to adult females, and 22.3 percent to juveniles under 15. The results do not prove the exact makeup of the workforce, but they suggest that adult women and young people may have participated in making, handling, or assembling parts of the figures.
The juvenile estimate is also consistent with historical records describing young apprentices who assisted craftspeople during the Qin Dynasty. However, the study cannot establish what specific roles these young people performed.
The researchers emphasized several limitations. The fingerprints came from only one small part of the enormous site, and one person may have left more than one print. Other workers may have left no usable prints at all. The analysis also relied on a modern European reference dataset, while firing could have changed the size of the prints.
Despite these uncertainties, the study provides new quantitative evidence that the Terracotta Army's makers may have been more diverse than previously assumed. Further research on fingerprints from other parts of the burial complex will be needed to test whether the same pattern appears across the wider site.