Who really made China's Terracotta Army? Fingerprints reveal new clues

October 19, 2026 report Who really made China's Terracotta Army? Fingerprints reveal new clues Paul Arnold Author Lisa Lock Scientific Editor Robert Egan Senior Editor The Terracotta Army near Xi'an, China, is a breathtaking sight: thousands of life-size terracotta figures created in the third century B.C. to guard the tomb of Emperor Qin Shihuang. They were discovered in 1974, and people have assumed they were built exclusively by men. But new research on this underground army and its chariots, horses and weapons suggests women and children lent a helping hand. Searching for clues in the ancient clay To find out who really did the work, researchers led by Xiaoxi Li at the Mausoleum Site Museum in Xi'an searched for clues on the figures themselves. The team studied 79 fingerprints from 36 figures in a single excavation pit. These prints were pressed into the clay in different parts of the statues, including the arms, body armor and heads. The scientists photographed them and measured the distance between the fingerprint ridges, which tends to increase as children grow older. Previous studies struggled to tell the difference between adult women and teenage boys based on the fingerprints they left behind. So in this research, the scientists turned to a clever statistical model. Called a Bayesian mixture model, the technique analyzes the entire group of prints at once rather than trying to classify every single mark individually. And it compares ancient prints with modern fingerprint data for different ages and sexes. Not just a job for men The results, published in the Journal of Cultural Heritage, suggested a far more diverse workforce than expected. "The model results indicate that the artisan community was not exclusively composed of adult males," the study authors wrote in their paper. In fact, the model estimated that adult men accounted for only about 45% of the fingerprints. Adult women made up nearly 33%, while juveniles under 15 were estimated to have left 22%. While these results suggest the involvement of women and children, they may not tell the whole story for the entire site. The sample size is small and only from a single spot within this vast burial complex. Additionally, multiple prints could belong to a single individual, which could skew the overall demographic results. "Unit T23 represents only a localized area of Pit 1, so the results may reflect the labor structure of a specific phase or production group rather than the entire project." But even with all these caveats, the findings challenge long-held assumptions about the labor force at this historic site. Written for you by our author Paul Arnold, edited by Lisa Lock, and fact-checked and reviewed by Robert Egan—this article is the result of careful human work. We rely on readers like you to keep independent science journalism alive. If this reporting matters to you, please consider a donation (especially monthly). You'll get an ad-free account as a thank-you. More information Xiaoxi Li et al., Who produced Emperor Qin Shihuang's Terracotta Army, China? A Bayesian mixture model approach to fingerprint age and sex determination, Journal of Cultural Heritage (2026). DOI: 10.1016/j.culher.2026.09.014 © 2026 Science X Network