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10. 

Of all the shafts we opened in the thrashing ground, this pit is the best preserved. Althou the cultural stratum as a whole was more than two meters thick and the soil conditions changed both in appearance and contents, it is essentially homogenious and there is no reason to suppose that it was not formed at one time. 
But, typical as the above-described pit may be of the main cultural stratum, it hardly answers the problem of the surface changes which must have taken place uninterruptedly ever since the abandonment of the site by the people of the Shang Dynasty. The conditions under which the cultural stratum was formed, which certainly have a strong bearing on the nature of the artifacts contained therein, cannot be fully explained unless some definite ideas concerning the surface changes can be formed. This question may be best answered by the examination of a section which a geologist would consider as a 'contact', found at the joint corner of WSsBe and SC([[strikethrough]]Fig.[[/strikethrough]]^[[(Map VB, Fig. 9)]]).
The burial underneath is undoubtedly the most important key to the dating of the stratification of both sections. It is one of the four burials whose sepulture is that of the seventh century. This dating is based on ^[[the]] inscription ^[[of]] a square brick recovered from a similar burial in the village during trench digging a year ago. It is accompanied by glazed pots and clay figures. The pots were sold; but the clay figures and the brick have passed into our hand. While we have found no similar brick inscriptions, the clay figure which we found in two of the four burials with similar pots,are exactly similar to those discovered together with the inscribed brick; which records the year of death of the occupant of the sepulture as the second year of Ta-yeh, 606 A.D.
It is to be observed, as the section clearly shows, at the time when the burial took place, the sandy gravel stratum with inscribed bones was already formed. The alluvial deposit above the burial is no