Probably yes. A study published in October 2026 in the Journal of Cultural Heritage estimates that adult women left about 33% of the fingerprints found on a sample of Terracotta Army figures and children under 15 left about 22%, while adult men accounted for only about 45%.
The researchers, led by Xiaoxi Li of the Mausoleum Site Museum in Xi’an, examined 79 fingerprints pressed into the clay of 36 figures from a single excavation unit, T23, in Pit 1. They measured the spacing between fingerprint ridges, which widens as people grow, and used a Bayesian mixture model that analyzes the prints as a group and compares them with modern fingerprint data for different ages and sexes. The life-size figures were made in the third century B.C. to guard the tomb of Emperor Qin Shihuang and were discovered in 1974, and their makers have long been assumed to be men. The authors caution that the sample is small and comes from one area, and that one person may have left several prints, so the results may reflect a single production group rather than the whole workforce.
Source: Phys.org, “Who really made China’s Terracotta Army? Fingerprints reveal new clues” (October 19, 2026), reporting on Li et al., Journal of Cultural Heritage, DOI 10.1016/j.culher.2026.09.014.
Image: Qin Terracotta Army, Pit 1, by Gary Lee Todd, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.