The Alchemist's Tale

Long regarded as a charlatan’s game, alchemy is now taking its proper place in the history of science.

- Andrew Curry

In a light-filled room in a building behind the State Museum of Prehistory in Halle, Germany, a row of tables is lined with oddly shaped glass vessels. When Christian-Heinrich Wunderlich saw them for the first time three years ago, they were in thousands of pieces, enough to fill six crates. Archaeologists had discovered the fragments during a rescue excavation in nearby Wittenberg in a niche underneath what had been a fifteenth-century monastery’s basement stairway.

When the crates had first been brought to his lab, Wunderlich, who is the head of the Saxony-Anhalt State Office for Heritage Management and Archaeology’s restoration facility, assumed they contained centuries-old ordinary household garbage, likely broken drinking glasses and clay cookware, that had been swept up and forgotten. “At first we thought it was just a lot of glass,” Wunderlich recalls. “We noticed the weird shapes, and just shook our heads.”

A few of the most misshapen shards landed on Wunderlich’s desk. He noted that some were discolored and melted, as though they had been subjected to extreme heat. At least half were coated with curious residues—silvery crystals, for example, or thick, crusty red or brown layers. As Wunderlich pondered them, he began to wonder if there was something else to the story. He decided to pursue a hunch, scraping tiny bits of residue off one of the shards for chemical analysis. The results included the presence of copious antimony and antimony ore. “That’s when we understood that these were the tools of an alchemist,” he says.