Master Archaeologist

Chapter 329 Luminol Reagent!
"The main body of the house has been found!"

An exclamation broke the immersion in the archaeological base of the No. [-] sacrificial pit in Sanxingdui.

Outdoors, Qin Zhan, a researcher at the Sichuan Institute of Archaeology, who led a group of uncles and aunts to conduct archaeological exploration, shouted in surprise.

He found an obvious groove made of pottery fragments in a building area that had been knocked down again!
This trench is made up of pottery fragments standing upright one by one, which shows that this trench should have been a wall piled up with pottery fragments!
This house should be regarded as a very elegant house in the era when Sanxingdui civilization existed.

Many archaeologists from the Sichuan Institute gathered at the scene to study the age of the house.

After careful discussion, everyone agreed that this house, which is only 20 meters away from the No. [-] sacrificial pit, should be in the same period as this sacrificial pit.

That is, both are built at the same time.

Now, the meaning of this house is different.

What is the function of the house built next to the sacrificial pit?
Obviously, it is definitely not a residential building, but a sacrificial building on the ground!

Sacrificial buildings, this kind of thing has appeared as early as the earliest tribal era.

In the tribal era, when the ancient ancestors sacrificed to the gods and ancestors, they would set up high platforms, and then build sacrificial places and fixed sacrificial platforms.

This has been found in many Neolithic sites.

Later, it gradually evolved into places such as "ancestral hall" and "ancestor".

There are also supporting priest buildings next to the mausoleum of the nobles.

The archaeologists of the Sichuan Institute believe that this house, which is only 8 meters away from the sacrificial pit K20 in a straight line, is a sacrificial building.

With this guess, they started an in-depth archaeological excavation of the building.

Soon, they found some stone tools that were obviously made deliberately in the remains of the house.

Some of these stone tools look like chiseled animals, including incomplete stone cong, stone tigers, stone axes...

Stone tools like these should be regarded as a kind of ritual vessel in Sanxingdui.

Because there are stone cong and stone axes among them, the cong is one of the six major ritual vessels identified in the Chinese civilization, and it was widely distributed in various cultures at that time.

Therefore, these stone tools should have a lot to do with sacrifices!

This can be regarded as a direct proof of what these archaeologists guessed, the idea that this house is a sacrificial building!
On the other side, just as Pit No. [-] was buzzing about the discovery of a sacrificial building.

Chen Han himself is not at the Sanxingdui Pit No. [-] archaeological base, but at the Sanxingdui Cultural Preservation Center!

He came here because he wanted to participate in something.

Regarding the red spots found in the sacrificial pit, the Cultural Heritage Center has found a way to solve the mystery of its composition.

First of all, through the method of exclusion, the staff of the Cultural Heritage Center have ruled out the possibility that these red spots are cinnabar.

This was determined experimentally.

Next, the staff conducted research around to prove whether these red spots were blood stains.

In fact, this topic has been proposed by scholars one after another since the 80s.

It was just because the technology at that time was not advanced enough, and there were indeed not so many cultural relics with erythema found.

So it was not brought up again until the restart of Sanxingdui archaeology.

With the passage of 40 years, not only archaeological technology is improving, but science and technology are also making great strides forward.

First of all, there are two special experimental methods.

One is an infrared spectroscopy experiment.

The Cultural Heritage Center happened to have infrared equipment, so the staff tried it.

But the effect is very general.

It may be because the time of the sample is too long, 3000 years ago, such a long time, there are very few remaining erythema components.

Through the irradiation of infrared rays, it has been impossible to find any valuable samples from above.

It is impossible to tell whether these erythema are related to blood.

The first experiment was quickly declared a failure.

However, the staff also prepared a second experimental method.

This is also a new approach.

Speaking of which, this method is still inspired by criminal investigation.

A reagent called "luminol".

This is a technique widely used in forensics.

The usefulness is actually very simple.

For example, if there is a murder scene now, but the murderer has cleaned the scene once, and the blood on the ground has been washed away with water.

So how to find the remains of these bloodstains?
Just spray luminol.

This reagent, after a chemical reaction with the remaining traces of blood, emits a blue glow.

The idea is that the reagent detects the presence of iron ions in the blood and then binds to it.

No matter how much blood remains, even if there is only a trace of blood, it will glow.

Now this reagent is widely used in homicide investigations.

In the past, murderers could clean up the crime scene with water after killing someone, at least to the point where it looked very clean to the naked eye.

But now it won't work.

Because the blood cells in the blood are based on "molecules".

No matter how you clean it up, because of the unevenness of the ground itself, even if it is a tile floor or a wooden floor in a commercial house, some blood will still remain.

As long as the luminol reagent is sprayed, as long as there is blood sprayed on the ground, there will definitely be blue light.

This method is very useful!

The only thing that worries the staff, though.

In the field of forensic investigation, luminol is now only used in bloodstains that have been preserved for decades at most, and it has never been tried to be used in traces of blood left in hundreds of years.

Let alone 3000 years.

Whether this reagent can still work, all the staff have no idea.

But this kind of thing, always have to try to know.

Science, is to be brave to try.

The luminol medicine was not easy to handle, so I reported it to the higher authorities and waited a week for it to be delivered.

It was only after Chen Han heard the news that he came to the Sanxingdui Cultural Protection Center to watch.

When he arrived at the cultural relic protection center, the experiment was already half done.

The staff has used cotton swabs to extract some traces of erythema on the gold mask, and put the cotton swabs in purified water.

When Chen Han arrived, he happened to see a staff member wearing protective clothing and a mask dropping the luminol reagent into the test cup.

Seeing this scene, he hurriedly asked nervously: "How is it? Is there any reaction?"

Several staff members raised the test cups, looked at them seriously, and shook their heads.

There seems to be no trace of blue light.

At this time, a staff member's eyes suddenly lit up, he thought of something, turned his head and shouted: "Turn off the light!"

"Snapped"

The lights in the laboratory were turned off.

In the absence of an external light source, the laboratory instantly became pitch black, and it was impossible to see your fingers.

And at this time, a light blue light appeared in everyone's sight!
"Bright!"

(End of this chapter)