Archaeometallurgy (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jimena Lobo Guerrero Arenas.

The encounter between the Americas and Europe has been extensively studied. In these studies, gold and silver, its looting, mining and trading are usually the focus of attention. However, the characteristics of metalwork after the conquest have inspired fewer investigations. In this paper I present the results of analyses of samples of metallic and ceramic artifacts, using portable X-ray Fluorescence Spectrometry (pXRF). These artifacts belong to past metallurgical activities, and were found in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joyce White. Elizabeth Hamilton.

Application of archaeometric techniques to metals and related evidence from prehistoric sites in Southeast Asia is in its infancy. One result is that sample sizes per site have in most cases been minute or even unspecified, although in rare instances, such as Ban Chiang, sample sizes for metallographic and elemental analyses have been more robust and representative. Small sample sizes obscure key evidence for intrasite and regional variability in technological and economic systems. Recent lead...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicolás C. Ciarlo.

During the 18th century, the maritime context occupied an outstanding place regarding the process of transformation and geographic expansion of the main maritime powers, which had worldwide impact on social, political, and economical relationships. Within this context, many technological changes took place, some of them related to British naval metallurgy.   This paper presents the research results carried on the metallic artifacts from the sloop-of-war HMS Swift,lost off Puerto Deseado...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nigel Chang.

Recent excavations have shown that mining for copper ore in upland Savannakhet Province, south-central Laos, began at least 2500 years ago. We suspect that it may have begun even earlier. This paper considers who might have been living in this area prior to the introduction of mining and smelting technology and how the relationship between these prior occupants and their environment might have changed with this new technology. The scale and nature of the impact would have differed, depending on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brett Kaufman.

Some cultures do not just adopt or develop innovative technologies, but actually define themselves based on their technological acumen. The Phoenicians were such a culture, whose economic reliance on metallurgical and maritime knowledge went further in defining their long-term communal cohesion than did other factors. Lacking historical texts written by Phoenicians, it is only through archaeology and archaeometric analyses that such a resource-based ideology can be reconstructed. Compositional...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Skylar Secord.

This is a poster submission presented at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Sparsely researched in the historical laboratory setting, clinker and slag as artifactual materials are abundant in the archaeological record. In the niche research and reports that mention these small things, definitions, descriptions, and categorizations vary. Together, these often-forgotten waste materials can offer a “ground-up” interpretation of the use of furnaces or metallurgical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steven G Harris. Douglas Armstrong.

This is a paper/report submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Trents Cave, Barbados is a site hidden between the previous enslaved laborer settlement (1650-1838) and the planter’s compound (1627-present) at Trents Plantation. Containing caches of various metal artifacts, Trents Cave is believed to be a site of special purpose, where selection and use of ferrous materials was conducted by people of African descent as a form of ritual and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sebastian Warmlander. Vanessa Muros. Ellen Pearlstein. Kym Faull. David Scott.

Twenty-three forowa metal vessels from Ghana, housed in the Fowler Museum at UCLA, were investigated with regard to manufacture and deterioration. Technical examination revealed that all vessels were manufactured from skillfully hammered brass sheets, and purpose-built for storing shea butter, a multi-purpose substance derived from shea nuts. Most vessels contain remnants of shea butter, which has become discolored: while shea butter extracted using native methods is off-white to yellow, the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jane Humphris. Michael Charlton.

Since 2012 archaeometallurgical investigations have been undertaken at the Royal City of Meroe, a capital of the Kingdom of Kush situated c. 250 km north of modern day Khartoum, Sudan. During the research, a chronological history of iron production at this site has been generated that spans at least one thousand years. Insights into various stages of the chaîne opératoire of iron production have also been revealed, including the location and techniques of iron ore extraction, the procurement of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Howland. Brady Liss. Craig Smitheram. Mohammad Najjar. Thomas E. Levy.

This paper presents preliminary results from the 2014 Edom Lowlands Regional Archaeology Project (ELRAP) excavation at Khirbat al-Jariya (KAJ), an Iron Age copper production site in southern Jordan’s copper ore-rich Faynan region. To complement earlier work on copper production activities at KAJ, industrial and administrative areas were sampled. Stratigraphic excavations in both these areas applied a cutting-edge cyber-archaeology workflow in order to ensure the best-possible spatial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mitch Hendrickson. Stéphanie Leroy. Enrique Vega. Kaseka Phon.

This is an abstract from the "The Current State of Archaeological Research across Southeast Asia" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Phnom Dek, or "Iron Mountain," in central Cambodia is the center of the largest iron production region in mainland Southeast Asia. Spanning over 1,400 years of metallurgical activity, the most intensive evidence of smelting across this vast region corresponds with the expansionary phases of the Angkorian Khmer Empire...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Isabel Medina-González. Manuel E. Espinosa-Pesqueira. Gregory Pereira.

Silver is fairly uncommon in Mesoamerican archaeology, if compared with copper and gold, both of them materials that have been widely studied particularly in relation to the development of Western Mexican Pre-columbian cultures. Henceforth, material and technological aspects regarded Mesoamerican silver metal-work are still widely unknown. This paper presents the initial results on a interdisciplinary research based on state of the art analytical techniques (XRD, SEM-EDX-XRF) on a couple of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth H. Paris. Elizabeth Baquedano. Carlos Peraza Lope.

The Postclassic period urban center of Mayapan housed numerous household craft production industries, including metallurgical production. The recovery of metal artifacts, production debris, and metallurgical ceramics from contexts throughout the city suggests a number of independent production sites. One of the most significant archaeological contexts associated with metallurgical production is the R-183 group, an elite residential group in the southeast mid-city sector. Salvage excavations in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Niklas Schulze.

Academic interest in "New World" metallurgy is more than a century old and has come a long way. New analytical technologies have allowed us to understand in ever greater detail the composition and structure of metal objects found in archaeological contexts. This makes it possible to identify raw materials, study production processes and life histories of artifacts. While our progress in questions of detail is indisputable, the opinions concerning the general development and diffusion of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Branden Rizzuto.

This poster highlights emerging results of the ongoing study that aims to further characterize the technological strategies, standardization practices, and social relations associated with the production of naipes during the Middle Sicán (900 – 1100 CE) period on the north coast of Peru. Initially conducted as part of MSc. research under the supervision of J. Merkel, archaeometric (pXRF, SEM-EDXS) and metallographic (chemical etching, optical microscopy, microhardness) analyses were carried out...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Branden Rizzuto.

This paper highlights the preliminary results of an ongoing study that aims to further characterize the origins and subsequent development of arsenic bronze technologies on the north coast of Peru. While the production of arsenic bronze on the north coast has been studied in detail over the last several decades, the spatial and temporal origins for the use/production of these alloys – and how they spread throughout the region during the Middle Horizon (600 – 1000 CE) period – are not yet fully...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Vincent Pigott.

In the context of prehistoric archaeology in Thailand, metallurgy has been accorded significant attention in the literature, ranging from the origins debate to smelting technology as well as the socioeconomic contexts of copper production. An important complementary component of these discussions is seeking an improved understanding of associated human occupations. In the Khao Wong Prachan Valley (KWPV) of central Thailand, a major regional copper production center, the Thailand...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brady Liss. Thomas Levy.

Recent excavations by the Edom Lowlands Regional Archaeology Project at Khirbat al-Jariya (KAJ), an Iron Age (ca. 1200-586 BCE) copper smelting center in Jordan’s Faynan region, aimed to explore the site’s rich metallurgical history. KAJ is characterized by architectural features and large slag (smelting waste byproduct) mounds visible on the surface, attesting to its significance as a copper production site. These renewed excavations investigated the abundant metallurgical remains by probing...