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15.

As the work in the village became daily more promising, we decided to close Area II and concentrate all the working force in Area III. From the 24th to 30th, five new pits were added, numbered 36,37,38,39,and 40. Pit 36 is the cream of the whole season's work and will be described in detail in the next paragraph. Pit 37 is located behind the house of the Hans and on the road leading to the village. A number of scapulae inscribed with letters, some unprepared, are special discoveries from this pit; but they have been in general badly decayed. The stratum of this deposit is from one to five feet below the surface. The soil is yellowish, contains no sand nor any potshards. Very little were found either in 39 or 40 and nothing at all were found in pit 38.

Pit 36.

One of the workman told me that in the spring this year, a large number of inscribed plastrons were dug out very close to the village road south of the house of the Han-family. It occurred right after the offensive war fought by the Expeditionary Force of the Kuo-min Chun near the Huan River. The battle delayed the crops of this season so the villagers gathered to dig oracle bones for sale in order to get some compensation for the loss of the harvest. But the bottom was hardly reached, when the landlord protested, the digging naturally had to stop unfinished. As soon as I ascertained this place, excavation was started here on the 23rd; this continued till the thirtieth, the day when the whole season was closed. Inscribed plastrons began to appear at the fifth foot; superior to this, they had all been turned over in the spring; the northern side of this pit still showed strata of dark grey soil deposited secondarily (Fig. 2). Below the sixth foot, the soil turned sandy and yellowish. The nature of the tortoise shell stratum in the upper five feet is quite unknown, as