Sanxingdui—
Shen Le had visited Sanxingdui Museum once and chatted with the professors there.
All in all, counting the museum, the Shu Region Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, and staff from universities, there was probably a professional team of around thirty people.
This professional team was said to have completed the cleaning and preservation of roughly four thousand artifacts over five years. But it depended on what kind of preservation they meant. Estimating the ratio of personnel to artifacts, Shen Le figured that, in all likelihood, most artifacts had merely been weighed, photographed, scanned, cataloged, given preliminary cleaning, and then stored under suitable conditions.
Temperature control where needed, humidity control where needed, light shielding where needed; where oxygen had to be removed, the air was replaced with nitrogen—basically, the goal was to keep the artifacts from deteriorating further.
As for carrying out systematic restoration, or assembling artifact fragments into a complete large piece and restoring it to an exhibition-ready state?
Sorry, but archaeological information extraction, scientific testing, proposal verification, restoration work, and all the other stages could not possibly be completed in just one or two months.
The most crushing part was that the artifacts from Sanxingdui, especially the bronzes, had basically all been smashed into fragments. They had to be pieced together one shard at a time.
And being smashed was not even the worst of it. Fragments belonging to the same artifact might have been thrown into different pits!
They crossed pits!
Imagine having seventeen thousand artifact fragments excavated from six sacrificial pits and trying to play a matching game with them, picking out the fragments belonging to the same bronze and fitting them together. Oh, and those fragments had all been twisted and deformed; some parts might be missing; you did not know what the complete