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The public is very familiar with the Terracotta Army, this
arrangement of thousands of warriors
that were buried in China just over two thousand years ago.
They are a small component of a much larger mausoleum,
the mausoleum that Emperor Qin *** Huang, the first emperor of China
had built for himself. So it’s a much larger
construction site. It's over 50 square kilometres. It's the size of a small city
and the Warriors are just one satellite component
that's there to protect the emperor in his afterlife. When we think of the
manufacturing
of anything that's being made on a very large scale
that’s made of multiple components and has to be very highly standardised ,
be them cars or terracotta warriors with their weapons,
we tend to envision a large production
chain that’s split in smaller, highly specialised units,
each of which is producing a component. And these may be
in separate locations, so there’s one factory producing engines, the other one
gearboxes, the other one breaking systems, and these different parts
join one another in the flow line production sequence
so there are then other experts, or specialists, who put them together,
others who then add the finishing touches and so on, and that's the idea
that most of us
associate with large-scale, standardised
production, and this was our initial assumption when we approached
the terracotta army.
Having conducted the chemical, statistical and medical analysis of a
large number of the 40,000 bronze weapons that appear with terracotta army,
we're not quite confident that their production mode was not the
long massive production chain, but rather that
the mode of production was around smaller,
cellular workshops, what we call today ‘Toyotism’.
Basically there are smaller production units
and in each of those you have all the resources you need, all the expertise,
all the knowledge, all the tools to produce finished items,
so they are much more highly skilled, the engineers, the workers in that
particular unit
but they are also more versatile.
Toyota, the modern car maker, has
done a great labour in developing this system
as an organisational model that may actually be
more efficient than the more traditional flow line production that we associate with Fordism. 002:30.480,0:02:33.590 Basically Toyota
engineers are on average more highly-skilled, more autonomous,
and so the smaller cells can turn out whatever car is needed at
any given time, so they produce in a system that's known as
‘just in time’. They avoid waste, they don’t need to overstock,
they just produce whatever is needed as it is needed.
This would also have been useful for the terracotta army.
Let’s not forget that this is the first
ever terracotta army. It was totally impossible for them to know
how many warriors they’re going to need, how many arrows, how long
it’s going to take,
and therefore having an adaptable workforce is going to make this much easier.
We are convinced that there may have been quite a few of these working
in parallel,
all to the same standards, but all of them working
at the same time. Then if there's a breakdown in one of them,
the others can continue working or even change activity to replace this,
because when you're creating the terracotta army, their all such
tightly packed information that all the work has to progress at the same time,
because once you've placed a
row of warriors, you cannot then go back to fit the
sword that you have now finished, the sword has to be ready at the same time as
the warrior
so they can all be placed harmoniously at the same time in the pit,
so that the work can move forward.
What's perhaps most impressive is when we look at the surface of
any of these arrowheads under this electron microscope what we find
is a pattern like this. We are looking at about
one millimetre across here, and what we see is this
arrangement of extremely shallow but perfectly
parallel and very densely packed marks, and these are the marks that you've got in
your kitchen knives,
they are the diagnostic marks of something has been sharpened using a rotary device,
a polishing wheel if you like, a sharpening wheel. This is
interesting as an anecdote because it is the earliest instance that
we have found
of the industrial, systematic use of
the rotary sharpening wheel, but perhaps it's also interesting at a different level
because it does show that no efforts and resources were spared in the construction
of the terracotta army.
You're looking at the smallest, unimportant item,
those tiny pics of the arrow heads that are going to be buried anyway,
but effort is placed in making sure that
every one of them is perfectly sharp and lethal.