Sanxingdui owns a large group of exquisite and uniquely-shaped bronze artifacts which were all excavated from two sacrificial pits. Yet, in stratigraphic excavation bronze wares are rarely found. This undoubtedly renders a mystic colouring to the originally very unique Sanxingdui bronze civilization. In perspective of their functions, the Sanxingdui bronze artifacts were chiefly used in religious and sacrificial rites but rarely used in daily life and production.

With regard to their shapes, Sanxingdui bronze wares are primarily classified into three categories: The first category consists of various bronze sculptures imbued with profound religious colouring like human images, divine images and demon images etc.. Bronze artifacts of this category are the most typical of the Sanxingdui bronze sculptures and they include standing human statues, kneeling or sitting statues, head sculptures and masks---all of unique styles. Their forms are seemingly meant to meet the needs of sacrificial activities to be cast into images of comperes representing different capacities, or figures participating in the sacrifice or idols receiving sacrificial offerings. The completely bronze-cast huge erect human statue, standing high on the square throne with a height of 2.6m and a weight of over 150 kg, is so far the tallest and largest of all the ancient bronze sculptures ever found in the world. The bronze head sculptures and bronze masks are orderly arranged in size. The facial features of the masks are similar to those of the head sculptures, some inset with the design of the one-legged dragon on the forehead, which looks the same as the animal facial design often seen on the bronze ritual artifacts of the Shang Dynasty when viewed sidelong. Of the masks, a large one, 138cm in broadth and 65 cm in height, is very uniquely shaped with a human face and animal ears and two column-formed eyeballs bulging 16cm out.

The second category includes the bronze sculptures of animals and plants related to legend and mythology such as the sculptures of dragon, tiger, snake, chicken, bird, animal, fruit and bronze tree etc.. For example, the No.1 bronze tree, with a round seat at the buttom, has three arch forms cast on the upper part symbolizing three mountains and the trunk stands erect above the very centre of the three mountains with winding branches in which are cast flower petals, fruit and birds; on the lower part of the trunk and downward along the trunk is cast a "fying dragon" having a horse face, a snake body and a phoenix tail. The whole bronze tree, mysterious and interesting, is vividly shaped, making people associate it with the legendary holy trees described in the book Shan Hai Jing (Scriptures of Mountains and Rivers). Wine and sacrificial vessels belong to the third category, very small in number (only a dozen pieces or so), including cups and dishes etc.

It is not difficult to see that the Sanxingdui bronze wares with vivid human images and animal-plant sculptures as the main and with divine, demon and human images co-existing represent a cultural quality whose religious custom is entirely different from that of the bronze culture of Central China.

The casting of the Sanxingdui bronze artifacts includes block-cast, sub-model moulding and concave-convex moulding. For example, the human head sculptures, human face sculptures, wine vessels, battle-axes, daggar-axes and so on excavated from No.1 sacrificial pit and some human head images, human face images, and prismatic-holed wares and sun-formed wares excavated from No.2 sacrificial pit are made with block-cast.Sub-model moulding refers to the separate modelling and moulding of the artifacts. The bronze bell unearthed from the sacrificial pit of Sanxingdui is made with this method.The concave-conves moulding is widely used in the making of Sanxingdui bronze wares. The dragon-tiger wine vessel, the human head statues and the human face sculptures are made in this way. The linedesigns of the dragon and tiger on the wine vessel are all made with high relief moulding but the surface and the wall of the vessel are evenly formed and the concavo-convex of the interior of the vessel is coincid-ental with that of the exterior of the vessel.

Three kinds of artifacts excavated from the sacrificial pits are of special value. They are the bronze prismy eyes, the bronze upper eyelid and the bronze sun. The prism-eye is slantingly flat in the pericline and the eyeball in the centre is round and bulging out with a concave periphery. The two ends of the prism-eye (or diamond-eye) have triangular convex edges which look like share beaks and on eaeh tip of the two obtuse angles and the two acute angles there is a round hole used for fixing.Besides, there are two combined types of diamond eye.One is shaped like an obtuse triangle equalling a half of a complete diamond-eye cut in twins through the diagonal line. This kind artifact is used by combining two together. Another type is a quarter of a complete diamond-eye, shaped somewhat like a right triangle and four such right triangles put together constitute a whole diamond-eye.

The upper eyelid is of varied kinds. It may be hemispheric or arc-square or fillet-square or cylindrical. In terms of its basic form, it is same as the eyes of the excavated vertical-eyed animal mask or their variant. Some eyelids are basically parallelograms and these parallelogram-shaped (or diamond-shaped) bronze artifacts are named bronze prism-eyes or bronze diamond-eyes.

There is another bronze artifact which resembles a cartwheel very much, originally called bronze cartwheel. It is shaped round, the centre being a convex hemispheric eyeball surrounded by five radiant spokes and its outer edge being a ring linking with the spokes. This kind of cartwheel also has fixing holes on the convex centre and the periphery and some are colour-painted. Actually these artifacts are not cartwheels but the sun as described in the inscriptions on the bones and

tortoise shells of the Shang Dynasty and in the bas reliefs on precipices.

The usage of the above three kinds of artifacts is still a mystery.

Comparative studies of the primitive religions of many nationalities in the world prove: the divinities worshipped by almost all the nationalities experienced a transitional process from the animal-shaped deity to half-animal-half-human deity. This evolutionary process has reflected the changes of human status in nature and is the refraction of these changes in ideology. In this regard, the sphinx of ancient Egypt and the human-head and bird-body statue, the human-head and bird-feet statue and many other relics excavated from Sanxingdui ruins are all good examples.