Treasure hunt begins in England

Chapter 505 Smelting Workshop
After finding someone stalking, Liang En quickly paid attention to the current situation, and found that the stalker behind him should not be very good at this job, as long as he pays a little attention, he can spot the existence of the stalker.

"That's right, there are indeed stalkers." After Liang En informed the policeman of the situation, the policeman came to the same conclusion after observing for a few minutes.

"The distance is a bit far, we can't see what the driver is like." The policeman said to Liang En after the observation, "but basically we can be sure that the other party should have malicious intentions."

This point can be seen without the police telling everyone. After all, in this situation, someone following someone is definitely not for the purpose of saying hello, so it can be regarded as a safety hazard.

"Then what should we do next?" Professor Harry was a little nervous at this time, because he brought three students here this time, and if he really encountered any problems, it would definitely be a lot of trouble.

"Don't worry, our police will handle this matter." The policeman said with a smile. "It seems to me that they are going to follow to the town. So next I will call my colleagues and find a way to investigate what is going on."

However, when everyone's car approached the city, the situation changed. The car that was following closely before quickly turned the steering wheel and left the main road.

It seems that although the opponent is full of mistakes that novices will make when tracking, they still understand that it is best to stop when the tracking target is about to reach the location.

Although there are stalkers following them, for Liang En and the others, the archaeological work is naturally impossible to stop because of these people's stalking, so they still went to the site with the recruited workers as planned the next day. dig.

It's just that during the excavation, Liang En and Fan Meng devoted a little attention to observing the surrounding environment, because they felt that the group of stalkers could not just follow their vehicles.

At this time, Liang En missed his raven a little bit. Although the Eye of Daedalus card was very effective in short-distance detection, this kind of large-scale detection of raven was still indispensable.

It's a pity that Liang En didn't bring the three fat birds with him because it was the reason for everyone to come here for archaeology this time. However, when he really needed to use them, he realized that they were indeed indispensable.

Fortunately, this defect is not completely irreparable. By observing the surrounding situation as a reason, they released the drone and began to detect the surrounding situation.

However, unlike what they had imagined, during the investigation, the drone's screen did not find anything suspicious, that is to say, those stalkers did not pay attention to Liang En's excavation site.

This is obviously not commensurate with the previous situation, because Liang En has always felt that the group of people who were following before may have something to do with the underwater ruins. If that is the case, they should not let go of the ruins they are excavating now.

Liang En felt a little uneasy about not being able to find the stalker, because he thought it represented some kind of threat to make money and hide and was ready to deliver a fatal blow at any time, but his attention was soon diverted from this matter opened.

Because after more than two days of excavation, they finally cleared away the accumulation left over from the long time on the surface, and saw the ruins below.

What appeared in front of Liang En was a crude stove. There were obvious traces of being burned inside the stove. It seemed to be a stove in normal use.

"Obviously, this is a metal smelting furnace, although it looks very different from the future furnace." Liang En explained to Joan while carefully cleaning the furnace.

"The temperature that this kind of furnace can form is not high, which means that it can't smelt any iron-based alloys, but can only smelt copper, copper alloys, or similar metals with low melting points."

"Then what are these?" Joan of Arc said of another pile of broken pottery containers, "It looks like these things have been burnt on fire. Could it be a matching crucible, but why are they all broken!"

"That's right, this should be the crucible." Looking at the pile of burnt debris, Liang En nodded.

If these fragments are restored, you will find that the volume of the crucible is not too large. If it is used to hold those metals in a liquid state, it can hold about 1kg at most.

In early crucible metallurgy, the amount of metal that could be smelted at one time was not large, because it was difficult to manufacture a crucible with a large enough volume with refractory materials with the technology of humans at that time.

The crucible that Liang En found now is smaller than the ones he found before, and it seems that it can hold at most one or two hundred grams of molten metal.

Of course, this cannot be a technical problem.At least according to the information they got before, the people here have been able to cast some large-scale copper wares.

Therefore, if considering that this relic is located in the core area of ​​an ancient town in the past, and should represent the most sophisticated technology of that era, Liang En thinks that this place is likely to be a place where some kind of special or precious metal was smelted.

Fortunately, these crucibles had a lot of smelting residues from the sea, so after returning that night, they quickly used simple laboratory equipment to extract the residues from the inside of these crucible fragments and carried out assays.

The test results proved Liang En's conjecture. At least from the perspective of residues, these dry pots were also made of gold, silver, bronze and a very small amount of brass.

According to a scholar from the National Museum of Ireland, it can be seen from these residues that the other party was very experienced in smelting gold, silver, silver and bronze, and the overall technology seems to be relatively mature.

But the casting of brass obviously has a lot of problems, and the proportion of various impurities in the residue is a bit high. At least they found that all the crucibles related to brass smelting contained some failed products.

At the same time, the metal ratio of these alloys is also very confusing, giving people the impression that these people did not have any knowledge related to brass casting.

Judging from the traces at the excavation site, people in this place can indeed produce brass, but this kind of production is not as stable as gold, silver or bronze, and it is purely a black box reaction.

"Perhaps in their time, brass would be more expensive than gold." After Liang En and his companions met and told what they had just discovered during the test, Joan of Arc made an opinion.

"I remember that when the metal aluminum was first extracted by humans, it was more expensive than gold. Napoleon III also specially made a set of aluminum tableware to show off his wealth. I guess these brass products are probably the same."

"It is indeed very possible, because sometimes the added value of technology may be much higher than the value of raw materials." Liang En nodded, and then turned to Fan Meng. "By the way, have you observed the guy who was following you in the past two days?"

"I only observed it once, when we were excavating at the previous ruins." Fan Meng took out his mobile phone and showed it to Liang En. "It's just that the other party just looked at us from a distance and left."

(End of this chapter)