"It's time to exercise waist and abdominal strength again."

Lying on the suspended wooden board, Chen Han smiled bitterly and shook his head.

This square dumpling filled with soil, shell coins and pearls was tilted down in the pit, otherwise the shell coins would not be scattered out.

As a large bronze vessel with a length of about forty to fifty centimeters and a diameter of ten or twenty centimeters, this square lei is not light in weight.

If you want to pick it up, with Chen Han lying on the suspended wooden board, it will test the strength of your waist and abdomen.

Fortunately, during the cleaning and excavation of Pit No. 8, I basically spent all my time exercising my waist and abdominal strength.

Compared with before, Chen Han's waist and abdomen are indeed much stronger now, and his eight-pack muscles are almost showing.

After digging around the part of Fang Lei that was sunk into the soil, especially the mouth edge, and digging out a distance that allowed his hand to reach in and pick up the mouth edge, Chen Han took a deep breath, holding the mouth edge with both hands.

Hold the base and lift it up hard.

"Um……"

I pulled hard and it didn't budge.

The contact area between this bronze vessel and the soil is too large, and the lower half is stuck in the soil. It is difficult to pull it up by human power alone.

The result of not being able to move is that you have to dig it out slowly.

Only by hollowing out the entire bottom of the square where it is in contact with the soil can it be pulled up.

This is another big project that requires time and effort.

Lying on the floating board to operate is not an easy task.

The pressure on the waist and abdomen is not ordinary.

With a little analysis, we can find that the force received when lying prone on the suspended state is indeed many times the force under normal circumstances.

In fact, even if a normal person is lying suspended in mid-air, due to posture problems, blood will inevitably flow back into the head, and even if he is not doing anything, he will feel a little dizzy.

In addition, the abdomen has to bear the stress of the entire body and the excavation of cultural relics. Even as a young man, Chen Han was a little overwhelmed.

Every time he lies on the hoverboard for about half an hour, he needs to get down and stretch his waist to relieve stress before he can continue working.

He could not imagine how the archaeologists in their forties and fifties persevered when they excavated the sacrificial pits at the front of the list.

Chen Han, Zhuang Yunpeng, and their colleagues who were busy in other pits relied on repeatedly lying down on the hoverboard to clean and extract the thousands of cultural relics in these pits bit by bit.

.

The degree of hard work involved is indescribable to outsiders.

"We were too optimistic before." After resting beside him for a while, Chen Han said to Zhuang Yunpeng with a wry smile.

When we set out to Sanxingdui Archaeological Base before, everyone was very optimistic.

I feel that such a sacrificial pit, which is filled with cultural relics and only covers an area of ​​16 square meters, is easy to handle.

After all, the items are all concentrated. If you move faster, you can even extract a bronze in a few minutes.

Originally, they thought that they would be able to clean and extract all the bronzes from the sacrificial pit in two or three months.

But now it seems that this idea is completely too optimistic and is simply a dream.

The actual extraction difficulty was ten times that they imagined.

It is estimated that it will take a year to extract it all, which is considered a quick move.

Looking back now, Chen Han feels that he not only underestimated the difficulty of this project, but also underestimated the depth of this sacrificial pit!

With the deepening of archaeological work, pieces of bronze wares with Sanxingdui characteristics were unearthed.

Just when everyone thought that the excavation work was coming to an end, the appearance of large tracts of ivory shattered their illusions.

A new nightmare begins.

In Pit No. 8, a large amount of intact ivory was discovered, the kind that had never been processed.

And the number is astonishing, so much so that perhaps the first seven sacrificial pits combined may not have found as much ivory as this one pit.

"one two three four five six.."

"There are at least six layers of ivory here."

“In what year and month will this digging be completed?!”

Complaints are complaints, but in fact everyone is still enthusiastic about the excavation work.

While Chen Han was cleaning up the artifact layer, he was also carefully searching for any clues in the pit related to the ancient Shu civilization and the clues left by the ancient Shu people.

The hard work paid off, and soon, he did find some strange traces.

As the cleaning work progressed, Chen Han discovered some spots on some gold objects, mostly gold masks.

These spots were all red, and under careful observation, Chen Han found that these spots looked like traces left after some kind of liquid dried up.

He would never be wrong about this.

After discovering this strange thing, Chen Han immediately reported it to the Sanxingdui Cultural Preservation Center via WeChat, hoping to find out from the Cultural Preservation Center whether this was the case only in Pit No. 8, or whether it existed in other pits.

Soon, a reply came from the Cultural Preservation Center.

In fact, the team at the Cultural Preservation Center that is responsible for the cleaning of gold artifacts also has this question.

It turns out that the erythema discovered by Chen Han was not an isolated case.

Traces of this red spot have also been found in other sacrificial pits and even in cultural relics unearthed during the first large-scale excavation of Sanxingdui in 1986.

The Cultural Preservation Center also believes that these red spots are traces left after a certain liquid dries up.

However, there are currently no research results on what this liquid is.

After such a long time, it is really difficult to extract some components that can be studied from this erythema.

However, in fact, the Cultural Preservation Center has already made speculations.

How do these spots form?

Is it possible that some kind of liquid paint was poured onto these utensils?

After all, ancient ancestors did have the custom of applying colored pigments to their faces.

And this custom exists all over the world, and even now some tribes in Africa and some primitive tribes in the Amazon jungle do this.

The ancestors of China, especially those near the south, also had this habit.

In the earliest days, this habit actually originated from repelling mosquitoes. Ancient ancestors applied some herbs that could repel insects on their bodies.

Because the juices of some herbs are colored, ranging from green to red, the custom of applying paint on the face gradually formed.

Later, this custom took on religious overtones, so ancient religious people all over the world liked to paint their faces with paint of various colors.

It seems understandable that the people of Sanxingdui would paint these gold masks.

However, this explanation is not tenable enough.

If it's paint, why are there just some red spots instead of specific paintings, even simple lines or geometric patterns!

The red spots seem to be more likely to remind people of something else.

Bloodstains!
Chapter completed!