Fingerprints on 36 Terracotta Army Soldiers in China Suggest Women and Children Helped Build Them

Fingerprints pressed into the wet clay of 36 Terracotta Army soldiers suggest that women and children may have worked alongside adult men on the figures. Xiaoxi Li and colleagues reported the result in the Journal of Cultural Heritage. The team studied 79 well-preserved fingerprints from Unit T23 in Pit 1, part of the mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang near Xi’an, China. Workers left the marks by accident while shaping and assembling the figures.

How the team estimated age and sex

The authors used a Bayesian mixture model that estimates age and sex at the population level from average ridge breadth. They say earlier studies treated ridge breadth and ridge density as independent, which introduced statistical errors. The model estimates that about 45 percent of the fingerprints came from adult men, 32.7 percent from adult women and 22.3 percent from people under 15. The result challenges the assumption that adult male craftsmen did all the work. Lacquerware inscriptions from the Qin period mention adult women, young girls and young boys in state-supervised craft production, though those records concern lacquerware and not the terracotta figures.

What the numbers do not show

The percentages describe the estimated distribution of fingerprints, not the share of individual workers. One person may have left several prints, and others may have left none. The age and sex reference data come from modern European populations, which may overestimate women and juveniles. The sample covers 36 figures from one excavation unit, so it cannot establish the workforce of every workshop. The authors say the findings add evidence to the debate but do not settle it.

Sources: Li et al., Journal of Cultural Heritage 82, 274 to 281, DOI 10.1016/j.culher.2026.09.014; Arkeonews, 19 October 2026.