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5.
fairly homogenious for quite a considerable thickness. As the potshards become more numerous, the number of the inscribed bones also decreased. Th This is an interesting point to bear in mind, as it represents fairly well the relative positions of the distribution of the various artifacts underground. The grey layer is succeeded by another stratum, the contents of which, however, are hardly any different from those of the upper one. The inscribed bones found below this hard layer were better preserved, as they were embedded in more carbonized soil. This formed the lowest part of the cultural stratum(Fig. 6).

Of all of the shafts we opened in the thrashing ground, the pit described above 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 pit may be of the cultural stratum, it hardly answers the problem of the surface changes which must hve taken place uninterrupted 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 therin, cannot be fully explained unless some definite ideas concerning the surface change can be formed . This question may be best answered by the examination of a section, which, in geological term, can be considered as a contact, and was fo und at the joint corner of WSsBe andS SC (Fig. 7). 

The burial underneath (Fig. 7) is undoubtedly the most important key to the dating of the stratification of both sections. It is one of the four burials whose sepulture, on the typological ground, could be dated to the seventh century. This dating is based on an inscription on a square brick recovered from a similar burial in the village during trench digging a year ago. It was accompanied by glazed pots and clay figures. The pots were sold away; but they clay figures and the brick inscriptions have been purchases bu the institute. While we have found no similar brick inscriptions the clay figure which we found in two of the four burials with similar pot are exactly similar to those discovered together with the inscribed brick; which record the burial of the dead as having taken place in the second year of the Ta-yeh, of the Sui Dynasty, namely 606 A. D. 

Transcription Notes:
There are quite a bit of grammatical and spelling errors, but I left them as is. Also, in the second to last line, there are words crossed out. I have not included them in the transcription.