On the afternoon of February 8, 2001 in Jinsha Village of the northwest outskirts of Chengdu, staff from a real estate company were excavating for sewers construction in the development of a road within their constructing district. Suddenly someone found in the soil excavated a large number of white bonelike wares, some stone figures, and a few circular stone and bronze objects. Immediately the discoverer shouted loudly “treasures here". And some white bone material debris and other objects were seen on the piles. People began wondering if they had been digging up a tomb. Some of them who were of enough conscience and of some knowledge of the heritage called the local police to report the discovery. When archaeologists learned the news and rushed to the scene, they found only a mess with the jade pieces, jade tablets, stone sculptures, stone pieces and a lot of bronzes scattered all over.They also found a large number of pieces of broken ivory. At once they decided it would be an important archaeological discovery. Because over recent decades of the archaeological history of Sichuan Province, such objects mentioned above only appeared in two of the dig trenches of Sanxingdui Relics.These are extremely valuable and rare ancient cultural heritage. From the debris, we can see that stone figures are the same in the shape as the kneeling stone portraits unearthed in the Shang&Zhou Dynasty Ruins at Fangchi Street of Chengdu in 1989. In addition, the jade tablets and pieces as well as the stone pieces are similar to those utensils discovered in Sanxingdui. All of these items were never probably for common people's burials. It is no doubt an extremely important discovery. So the archaeological team conducted a rapid isolation of the scene to clear up the scattered earth dug up earlier by machinery, marking the beginning of a large-scale exploration of this region.

　　Since 2001, archaeologists have conducted excavation of more than 20 other sites around the worship area including the Lanyuan site, more than 100,000 square meters in area. More than 3,000 sites of different types have been found with a large number of precious relics unearthed. As early as the end of 1995, large numbers of cultural relics of Shang and Zhou period (1600—256BC) were discovered in the area of the Huangzhong village on the north bank of the ModiRiver. By now, these remains found today seem to belong to the same ruins with thw worship area where gold, bronze and jade objects had been unearthed. Considering the particular concern attached to the Jinsha Village which had borne a large number of precious cultural relics, archaeologists decided to name it Jinsha Ruins in accordance with the basic archaeological naming principles. The so-called Jiansha Village is actually the whole area of the ruins of the Shang and Zhou period including Huangzhong Village.

　　Since the 1980s, in the south-east of the Jinsha Relics, more than ten sites of the Shang& Zhou period have been found and excavated like the Fuqin District, the 12-Bridge District, Fang Chi Street, Junping Street, Yanda Street, Minshan Hotel and the Minjiang District and so on. The sites extend over 10 km and some scholars have called it the 12- bridge-Site Cluster. From this point of view, the Jinsha ruins in Chengdu is not an isolated area, but with a large number of peripheral sites of the same period. Of all the sites, Jinsha ruins is the largest one with relics of the highest level and so should be the center of these ruins.