Archaeometallurgy: Evidence of a Paradigm Shift?
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ARCHAEOMETALLURGY:
EVIDENCE OF A PARADIGM SHIFT?
MARTHA GOODWAY Conservation Analytical Laboratory, Washington DC 20560 USA
Smithsonian Institution,
ABTRACT Practitioners of archaeological and historical metallurgy have begun to identify their discipline by a new term: "archaeometallurgy." Tracing the roots of this discipline shows that up to about 1980 the focus of study was on the technical examination of metal objects and determining site plans of metallurgical installations. Essentially it was a study of ancient metals of interest to historians of art or of technology. The focus then shifted to other materials and their archaeological contexts, processing byproducts such as slag, matte, furnace linings and furnace bottoms, crucibles, molds, cupels and tuyeres which are often more abundant on sites than metal. Thus the field of study has been enlarged beyond metallurgy to an interdisciplinary undertaking of materials science, archaeology, and material culture. Simultaneously with this shift in focus came the application of newly-developed instrumentation which supported a parallel shift in methodology from one emphasizing chemical analysis and microstructure to one of materials charactexrization, emphasising properties and performance.
Within the last decade historical and archaeological metallurgists began to refer to their discipline by a new term: 'archaeometallurgy.' The term seems to have been coined in 1973 by Beno Rothenberg when he established the Institute of Archaeo-Metallurgical Studies (IAMS), which now has its headquarters at the Institute of Archaeology in London University. It began appearing regularly in print in 1980 when IAMS started issuing monographs. The word is still too arcane to have found its way into the most recent edition of the Oxford English Dictionery. Though 'archaeometallurgy' as a term to refer to the application of science to the history, and prehistory, of metals is new, the scientific study of ancient metal objects has a literature that reaches back into the 18th century. Chemical analyses were presented by Klaproth in Berlin in 1795 [1] and Pearson in London in 1796 [2]. Thomson published analyses of silver coins in Paris in 1809 [3]. The analyses were chiefly of bronzes, coins, and corrosion products and were intended to answer questions of authenticity. The first scientific appendix of any sort in an excavation report was published in 1853 by the distinguished English metallurgist Dr. John Percy in Layard's Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon. In 1878 Dr. Percy (he was a medical doctor) contributed a further metallurgical appendix to an excavation report, Schliemann's Mycenae. The most extensive programmes of analyses of ancient metals to be published in the nineteenth century were those of von
Mat. Res. Soc. Symp. Proc. Vol. 185. 1991 Materials Research Society
706
Bibra, who published on bronze (Die Bronzen und Kupferlegierungen der alten und altesten Volker mit Rucksichtnamezuf Jene der Neugeit) in 1869 and on iron and silver (Ueber alte Eisen- und
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