Master Archaeologist

Chapter 96 Start!
After having a nice start-of-work banquet.

The next day, a large team from the Institute of Archeology of the Academy of Social Sciences was ready to carry out rescue and excavation.

The mobile prefabricated house they live in is very close to the construction site, at the very edge of the construction area.

At eight o'clock in the morning, Chen Han got up from the bed.

In Hubei at the end of January, the temperature was even below zero.

Even if there was a little sun blowing at him, after getting up from the warm blanket, Chen Han still couldn't help shivering.

Compared with the straightforward dry cold in the north, the coldness of minus 1-5 degrees in the Lianghu area is more tormenting.

When I go to bed at night, the upper half is warm where the little sun shines, but the lower half is cold and damp, and I can't cover it for heat, it's like a double sky of ice and fire.

After patting his face to force himself to wake up, Chen Han turned over and got out of bed, put on his clothes and walked to Zhuang Yunpeng's bedside.

"Brother Zhuang, get up and go to work!"

After patting Zhuang Yunpeng's quilt and waking him up from his dream, Chen Han walked to the corner again, picked up a washbasin, opened the door and walked out of the prefab room.

The biting cold wind that hit Chen Han immediately hit Chen Han hard. He rarely swears, and it is rare for him to swear.

"Damn, it's so cold!"

Hubei and Hunan are mixed in the middle of the north and the south, and the climate has the characteristics of both the north and the south.

If winter in the south is a magical attack, winter in the north is a physical attack.

The winter in Hubei is double penetration! !

But no matter how cold it is, you have to adapt. Excavation projects will not be arranged according to the weather, let alone appear according to the seasons.

Holding the washbasin in his arms, Chen Han quickly walked into the hot water room, connected a basin of hot water, and began to wash on the washstand outside the door.

Coming and going, there are also other colleagues holding the washbasin to pick up the hot water for washing.

It has the life atmosphere of some university dormitories.

This is the condition of the mobile prefabricated house. If you want to wash or take a bath, you have to go to a special public bathroom. Don't even think about independent bathrooms.

After a brief wash, Chen Han had almost adapted to the cold. He went to the cafeteria area to get a few steamed buns and fritters, and held them in his hand, eating while walking to the excavation site.

The old houses in the Wenfengta community were all built in the 60s and [-]s of last century.

It is also because they have become old and dilapidated that they were sold by the government to real estate developers and all were demolished and rebuilt.

The Wenfeng Pagoda cemetery was discovered by the construction unit during the construction of "Wenfeng Pagoda also built a community".

During mechanical construction on the construction site, a tomb passage was dug out directly.

It was also because of the appearance of this tomb passage that the project was suspended. The local archaeological institute intervened and conducted archaeological investigation and drilling on the construction site.

This exploration immediately discovered dozens of tombs of different ages at the location of the original "Wenfengta Community" that had been demolished.

The first to be discovered were the three tombs dug up at the construction site.

They are two Eastern Zhou tombs and a small brick-chambered tomb in Ming Dynasty.

The numbers are M1, M2, M3 respectively.

This newly determined Wenfeng Pagoda cemetery is part of the Yidigang cemetery on the east bank of the irrigation water in Suizhou.

The Yidigang tomb group was discovered by exploration as early as the 90s, but the Wenfeng Pagoda was not noticed by the local cultural relics bureau before.

After all, this place was full of houses before, and it was impossible for the archaeological team to conduct underground exploration.

However, the tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng in Leigudun is only 5100 meters away.

The cemetery of the early Western Zhou Dynasty in Yejiashan, which was discovered last month, is also located 9100 meters northeast of the Wenfeng Pagoda cemetery.

It can be said that these burial groups are related to each other.

And the specifications are large.

So even if the official excavation had not yet started, both the city and provincial leaders guessed that the two cemeteries must also be related to Zeng Guo.

Kong Jianwen also told everyone in private that he also guessed that this cemetery should be the tombs of high-ranking nobles in Zeng State, possibly at the level of a monarch!
The mobile prefabricated house is not even one kilometer away from the discovered tomb M1, but within five or six minutes, Chen Han walked to the excavation site.

At this time, a group of colleagues from the Academy of Social Sciences were already drawing exploration squares, smoothing strata, and surveying and drawing.

In the eyes of many people, archeology is just digging up the soil and taking out the cultural relics.

At most, we should be careful when picking up cultural relics, and use a brush and bamboo stick to clean up the soil.

It seems like anyone can do it.

But in fact, "digging the soil and taking things out" is the behavior of grave robbers.

Archaeological excavation work is a systematic work that requires a lot of preliminary work, and it is also very troublesome during the excavation process.

The extraction of cultural relics that appeared in the documentary may take a total of ten seconds, so in the eyes of the audience, it is just a person reaching out to take the cultural relics out of the soil.

But in fact, before the extraction, countless arguments, preparations, and observations have to be done to ensure that the extraction process will not lead to secondary damage to the cultural relics.

It may take several days of preparation and more than ten hours of demonstration and research before the cultural relics can be extracted.

Moreover, some extreme cultural relics, such as silk fabrics and bamboo slips mixed in the soil, cannot be extracted by field archaeologists.

Don't even dare to touch it,
It is necessary to specially invite some technical personnel, such as professional restorers from the Jingzhou Cultural Relics Protection Center, to fly to the archaeological site to extract them in person.

For some important tombs, the excavated soil may have to be screened back and forth several times!

It has to be manually sieved!

The excavation was not completed until the soil was sifted until the soil was only as big as gravel, and no cultural relics were missed.

Because it is common for some small cultural relics or fragments of cultural relics to be only one or two centimeters in size, it would be a pity if they were missed.

For the coffin of Tomb No. 168 in Fenghuang Mountain, it only took more than ten days to extract the large cultural relics.

But the follow-up screening of the sediment in the coffin took a full two and a half months.

Archeology is a job that requires slow work and careful work.

So even if it is a rescue excavation in a hurry, even if everyone in the Institute of Archeology of the Academy of Social Sciences gave up the Spring Festival holiday and rushed to start work.

However, the tomb was not dug directly as soon as the construction started.

Instead, follow the process, carry out surveying and mapping bit by bit, and start exploring.

It is estimated that it will take a few days just for surveying and mapping and exploring.

But this doesn't mean that Chen Han can't see anything.

Because this Wenfeng Pagoda tomb group is a rescue excavation, the construction unit has already dug the tomb passage in advance.

So Chen Han squatted next to the big pit under construction, and he was able to see a rough picture of the pit.

The geological conditions of the cemetery can be observed from the excavated stratum section at the construction site.

The construction unit excavated a total of five layers of strata, from the top cultivated soil layer, dark brown soil layer, reddish brown soil layer, sandstone sand layer, to red sandstone layer.

The two excavated tombs were excavated in the red sandstone layer.

The shapes are all classic shaft tombs.

It's just that the tomb has been destroyed a bit seriously during the construction.

The filling of the M1 tomb has basically been dug out, and there is not much left in the tomb, only a thin layer of filling remains.

Next to Chen Han is the excavated fill pile, which is mainly red and yellow five-flower soil, but there are also a small amount of green paste mud and charcoal particles.

As early as the Eastern and Western Zhou dynasties, the ancients knew that the sealing effect of green paste mud and charcoal particles was very good. One can isolate oxygen and the other can absorb moisture.

In fact, when the Chinese were in ancient times, their research on physical chemistry was quite deep, which was no worse than that of the Greek culture in the same period.

It was a pity that the path went astray later.

"Xiao Chen, are you here?"

Kong Jianwen, who had been to the scene early to direct the work, saw Chen Han, walked over and said worriedly: "The situation of tomb M1 is not optimistic."

"The on-site construction has severely damaged the tomb."

"Everything in the tomb has been roughly dug out by the excavator as sand, and now it's all piled up in the open air."

Kong Jianwen pointed to a large mound not far away, and some archaeologists were already cleaning up the large mound.

"This sand mound is the fill excavated from the location of tomb No. M1. It is full of various burial relics and needs to be cleaned up urgently."

"Xiao Chen, you can help too!"

(End of this chapter)