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4. 

condition of the site and get some souvenir for the first trip, so the purchase of a large quantity of these relics was not seriously considered.

A boy was hired to conduct us to the north of the village to search for places where oracle bones had been taken out. The boy pointed at a small sand-hill and said 'that's the place where the oracle bones were found'. I was somewhat surprized; as Lo Chen-yü was himself here in 1915 and said in his published Diary: 'the places productive of oracle bones measure over forty [[underline]]mu[[/underline]](畝); uninscribed bones are found everywhere in the field. Wheat and cotton are cultivated here. Every year after the crop, villagers gathered to dig, the deepest pit often reached more than twenty feet(Chinese). The pits were immediately filled in, after the contents had been taken out.' Mr. Chang Shang-te also said that the place is right in the farm. Are the places they visited somewhere else? But as I examined the western exposure of this sand-dune, near the junction to the cotton field, I discovered traces of recent diggings, numbering about ten pits. Near one of these pits, I found a piece of bone which actually bear marks of divination. This shows that the boy was not at all telling me a white lie.

Such being the case, what we can learn from this trip is that the oracle bone digging is still an unfinished job. It must be remembered that the site of Yin-hsü, since the year 1899, had been plundered many times;  and every new enterprize was fruitfully awarded. Althou Lo Chen-yü claimed as early as 1915 that the site had been exhausted, yet many new discoveries were made after his time. Added to this what I have found in the village shows even more concretely that there are still remains of these buried treasures, which can be located now with at least some approximation.