| Chapter 2: | Metalworking in Bronze Age China |
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they had clearly mastered.88 A marked change in workshop organization, likely stimulated by the demand for greater efficiency of production, seems to have accompanied this new trend in using pattern blocks.89 Compared with the traditional section-mold casting inherited from the early Bronze Age, the pattern-block technique made better use of the highly sought-after carvers at the cost of increased difficulty in mold making.90 Mold makers, in contrast, required no artistic training, and a finer division of labor among them may have been possible—the making of mold sections, reproduction of the pattern units, handling of units and planting them in the mold, and baking of the mold could all have been done individually by different groups. Although it is impossible to reconstruct the exact procedure of mold construction, the work must have been subdivided in a new way.91
The mold-making technique of Houma craftsmen was unparalleled in its quality and complexity. This distinctiveness is most clearly manifested in a bronze frontlet of exceptional intricacy and delicacy (fig. 12) and a similar clay model discovered at Houma, demonstrating full three-dimensionality and formidable undercuts (fig. 13a).92 Were the clay model not known to us, the bronze frontlet might have been unhesitatingly labeled a lost-wax casting. As will be shown, although lost-wax casting was indeed practiced elsewhere during the Houma era, this example, an unmistakable section-mold casting, was created utterly independently of the lost-wax process. It exhibits the amazing transfer skills of the Houma craftsmen, who could do extraordinary things with clay.
No evidence of lost-wax casting has yet been found at Houma or any of the closely related foundries. Additionally, the pattern-block technology best known from Houma was by no means a monopoly of the Houma workshops. It was likely used elsewhere at an earlier date, because the sixth-century BCE burials of the state of Chu at Xichuan Xiasi in southwestern Henan yielded some stylistically quite different bronzes that were nevertheless cast by the pattern-block process.93 But those same Chu burials also contained virtuosic lost-wax castings. Considering