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Archaeologial Metallurgy in the News - Ep 193
858 Plays2 years ago
It's a news episode! We found three articles that all happen to deal with archaeological metallurgy. From sourcing to melting with a laser, there's a lot you can tell about an object based on what it's metals are either composed of or are sourced from.
Transcripts
For rough transcripts of this episode go to https://www.archpodnet.com/archaeotech/193
Links
- Mass spectrometry identifies ancient battlefield
- Tin from Uluburun shipwreck shows small-scale commodity exchange fueled continental tin supply across Late Bronze Age Eurasia
- Portable laser ablation sheds light on Early Bronze Age gold treasures in the old world: New insights from Troy, Poliochni, and related finds
- GCP Model for Photogrammetry
Contact
- Chris Webster
Twitter: @archeowebby
Email: chris@archaeologypodcastnetwork.com - Paul Zimmerman
Twitter: @lugal
Email: paul@lugal.com
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Transcript
Introduction to Episode 193
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Hello and welcome to the Archaeotech Podcast, Episode 193.
Overview of Archaeological Metallurgy News
00:00:12
Speaker
I'm your host, Chris Webster, with my co-host, Paul Zimmerman. Today we discuss three news articles related to archaeological metallurgy. Let's get to it.
00:00:22
Speaker
Welcome to the show, everybody. Paul, how's it going?
Personal Updates and Projects
00:00:25
Speaker
Pretty good. I'm back from Lagash, as you know, and trying to wrap up everything that I didn't take care of because I spent half the last year running around all over the Middle East.
00:00:40
Speaker
you know, getting stuff done around the house. I've been on kind of a creative kick lately. So I just like half an hour ago posted a 3d model for a GCPs for photogrammetry. If those are useful. Yeah, that'd be really cool. And I've been, you know, doing some programming and other things. How have you been Chris?
00:00:59
Speaker
Not too bad, not too bad. As you're listening to this, we should be moving our way across the country from Charlotte, North Carolina, where we spent December and the last part of November. Actually, we're having an ongoing issue with our RV. I won't bore you guys with it, but it's a diesel leak in one of our systems. And they've torn this thing apart like four or five times because we've been back to the factory in Alabama because it was on the way here. And that's where you can get some really good factory maintenance from the pros and the people that put it together.
00:01:29
Speaker
It's just crazy. It's a high pressure fuel thing. And they just can't find where this fuel is leaking out of. And then when it does leak, we smell diesel up in the living room area. And it's just a crazy situation. Luckily, we don't need it right now. We've got three other sources of heat inside here, even though in Charlotte, weirdly, it's going to be 13 degrees tomorrow. I don't think it's ever been that cold here. I feel like we're in some sort of B-movie disaster scenario.
Sourcing and Critiquing Archaeological News
00:02:00
Speaker
We're the National Weather Service guys, like, I told you this was going to happen. So anyway, we got lots of different sources of heat. That one's only really useful if we're off grid, then we actually need it. And we're going to be off grid for, well, the last half of January and the entire month of February, and then much of March. So we got to get that heated up. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
00:02:27
Speaker
I mean, we'll be in some warmer areas like in, in February, we're going to be in Mexico, like Northern Mexico. So it'll be in like the sixties. So we probably won't need it there, but we're still off grid and we can't use our fireplace. We can't use our heated floors. We can use the electric side of our furnace, which runs on 12 volt.
00:02:43
Speaker
But still, you know, that pulls our batteries down pretty significantly. So anyway, speaking of, you know, well, I guess batteries kind of is a good segue because batteries are, well, modern batteries, at least the ones we have, are filled with lithium. Lithium is a metal, technically. And I was looking for some articles. There's a little bit of a backstory here.
00:03:04
Speaker
Rachel, who has been on this, and she's my wife, and she, her and I do TAS, the archaeology show, and kind of the bread and butter of the archaeology show is we look for three news articles that are current in the news right now, you know, popular news articles that you may find just browsing the internet, looking at your Apple newsfeed or looking at your Google newsfeed, whatever the case may be.
00:03:25
Speaker
And it might just come across. You might not even be searching for it. Those kinds of things. And we want to see what are people seeing when they see these articles and how are they either
Theme Introduction: Metallurgy in Archaeology
00:03:34
Speaker
being told good information or being misled by the reporter that interpreted this either journal article or I find a lot of times that they're even citing other news outlets, right? They're not even doing their own research. They're like, according to the Guardian. What do you mean according to the Guardian? The Guardian didn't write this research.
00:03:51
Speaker
I noticed that a lot. That really drives me crazy. Isn't that insane? And they get away with it because nobody cares. Nobody reads that part. Right. So, but anyway, I was, I was looking for articles that her and I were going to do a fill in episode over here. We ended up not needing it, but we still had the research. So Paul and I decided to record this and it just so happened. I found one article talking about doing studies on, on metal sourcing and figuring out some things with metals. And then I found another one and then I had to find the third one to kind of make it a theme. So the, the theme of this.
00:04:20
Speaker
episode is going to be current news articles about archaeology relating to something to do with metals, whether it be sourcing or something else, and we'll talk about that.
00:04:31
Speaker
Yeah, no, I was looking at this when you sent me these three articles. I'm like, well, wait a sec. These are all archaeo-metallurgy or metallurgy. Did I just mispronunciate that? Metallurgy,
Mass Spectrometry in Archaeology
00:04:41
Speaker
yes. You put the emphasis on the wrong syllable. Oh, rats. I was looking at this, and I was going to say, obviously, I don't know a whole lot about metallurgy, but I think I just made that abundantly clear. And I was wondering if you have any background in it at all from your schooling.
00:05:01
Speaker
I have actually no background at all. I don't remember it even being discussed, to be honest with you, in my master's degree or my undergrad. It was just something that...
00:05:11
Speaker
I don't know if it wasn't being applied as much, you know, 20 plus years ago, or if it wasn't, or maybe there just weren't a lot of discoveries or maybe it wasn't being written about enough. I don't really know. I mean, I know that science has had the ability to do a lot of the things that we're going to talk about for a while, but I don't know if they were being applied to archeology. So, or at least maybe we just weren't aware of it. I don't know. Cause cause you, you don't know a lot about it either, as you said. Yeah.
00:05:34
Speaker
Well, I know nothing about it, really, but I was very well aware of its existence because back in the day as a grad student, I worked at Masca, the Museum of Applied Science Center for Archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania Museum. And down the hall from us were a few people who made archaeo metallurgy their thing, a couple of different metallurgy labs. So the terminologies that came up all the time, mass spectrometry in particular, were around me daily.
00:06:04
Speaker
didn't have any particular interest, so I didn't bother learning about it. No, I didn't find it interesting. One of these articles is actually one of the co-authors was on my MA committee because he was one of those researchers down the hall for me. Nice. That's an interesting coincidence. Yeah, though I still know nothing about it.
00:06:25
Speaker
Well, that actually brings something up I wanted to mention in case this person is listening. We got some feedback from one of the episodes we recently did about food. There was a research article where it was from Shenandoah Cave in Iran? Iraq? Iraq, I think. Is that where Shenandoah is? I can't remember. Iran, yes, one of those two.
00:06:47
Speaker
There was some research done there and basically burnt food remains and they were able to sort of walk back what these food remains are. And it was like prepared food. And that was really cool. And then the research, the journalists who actually reported on that, including the researchers, they did this too, but it wasn't talked about in the article. So the journalists that wrote the original article based on the research also wrote another article where she actually sourced
00:07:11
Speaker
equivalent materials as much as she could and, you know, ground them in a stone like mortar and pestle situation and then cook them on a like rock slab over a fire. She made her backyard. So they were like these, they were like these grain paddy sort of things. Well, we got an email from one of the original study authors and this person, you know, said, Hey, I just want to say, you know, thanks for covering this, but
00:07:35
Speaker
it would have been great to cite the original article or talk to me about it because we're never cited, names never mentioned, stuff like that. And I just wanted to first, I already emailed her back, but I wanted to say, first apologize for that because I don't want to mislead anybody. But to be honest with TAS, that's not really what we do. We do that on shows like Archiotech. In some of these cases, we do have the original article and we will post those here. But TAS is more for
00:08:00
Speaker
I guess just talking about the news articles really, and really the focus is the journalist and what they did. So, you know, along those lines, we'll do a little better in archaeotech and we'll post as many sources as we can, because that's the kind of audience we have for archaeotech.
00:08:15
Speaker
Along those lines, let's talk about the first article that we
Roman Legion Artifacts and Metallurgy
00:08:18
Speaker
have here. And the article title is Mass Spectrometry Identifies Ancient Battlefield. And this is actually from, I don't know, it's from some news thing I never even heard of. I use Apple News and I do have a filter for archaeology where I can, you know, I can see that stuff. And this is from C2W International. No idea what that is. Yeah, I've never heard of them before.
00:08:38
Speaker
Yeah, but the URL is sciencelink.net. So I don't know what's going on. The logo at the top is C2W International, and the URL is sciencelink.net. Of course, we'll have links to all this in the show notes. The author is, I'm going to get the name wrong, Arjun Diggraph. I don't know. You'll see it in the thing. OK, so this one is actually kind of cool, though. So some of the nuts and bolts of this here. They found some Roman artifacts near the village of Kalkris in northern Germany.
00:09:07
Speaker
They used trace element analysis in these metal objects, reveal that they belong to soldiers in the 19th Legion. That's exactly what we're talking about here. That's kind of the bread and butter. But how did they do that? How did they know it's the 19th Legion?
00:09:21
Speaker
Well, this article, let's just caveat this since you just mentioned citing articles and such, this is a news release based off of a press release. It's already gone through a couple of cycles. It's not an actual article per se, but they do hit the highlights of what they did. Basically, the fundamental idea is that the Roman legions would reuse the same metal.
00:09:45
Speaker
They would make their weapons and other tools and such. When things got too damaged, they would melt them down and reuse that same stock of metal. What happens is that the individual legions have a chemical fingerprint of each of their metals, which is interesting. I have a lot of questions around that that are not even remotely tackled in this article. Again, I don't know a whole lot about Roman archaeology.
00:10:15
Speaker
My questions are very naive, but I am curious how durable that fingerprint is. Does it stay that way for years, decades? Does it slowly bleed in or out from local populations? Does the disappearance of one legion
00:10:35
Speaker
which is what this article is about. Does another legion take over some of their medals? Do they scavenge the battlefields? Is that even possible? Or if you've lost it, you're not able to get there again. So I'm really curious about the durability of these metallurgical fingerprints, these chemical fingerprints. But
00:10:55
Speaker
That's the basic premise of the article is that they've got these metallurgical fingerprints and they use it to try to identify the presence or weigh in actually on an argument that looks like it's been ongoing about the location of a particular battlefield.
00:11:09
Speaker
Yeah. I find it much like obsidian sourcing, right? That we do a lot in the West and you know, people are trying to find obsidian sources. They do chemical, essentially a fingerprint chemical analysis of that obsidian source. Then when you find an obsidian artifact and you can do some, uh, you can take a little piece of it and do that same analysis.
00:11:28
Speaker
you can say with pretty high certainty exactly where that came from because every volcano or volcanic activity that produces that obsidian is different.
Roman Military History and Metallurgy
00:11:38
Speaker
It just has different elements in the ground that produce that. Along those same lines, the metals that they're using, because one thing you didn't mention was the implication is not only do they reuse the metals that they have, but they have to source their own metal, which is something that was just glossed over in this. They stand up a legion
00:11:56
Speaker
What do they have to source their own food, source their own metal? Does the state provide anything? Or is it just, are they given stuff in Rome when they're first stood up? And then as they're conquering the world, they don't go back to Rome for maybe years and they have to obviously keep up their stuff. So they have to source food, they have to source clothing, they have to source metal. So I would wonder about that fingerprint, to be honest with you, because you would think that they're
00:12:21
Speaker
they're having to actually do a little bit of mining throughout if they're gone from home for too long, I would think. But again, I don't really know much about that either. Well, it makes sense to me that they would have to source their own stuff because everything can't be supplied from Rome all the time.
00:12:37
Speaker
So the knowledge to wear with all some money to do things I would expect would come from Rome, but then the rest, the actual doing of it has to be done much more locally, certainly with things like food and clothing. But I'd never thought about it with metals, but in a way it makes sense to me. It does get back into that same question I had about how distinctive those metal fingerprints are.
00:12:57
Speaker
But the actual meat of this article then is that they're looking at the Varus battle where the Romans suffered a real crushing defeat in 980 that decimated. That's the word that they've got in the article. I don't know if decimated is the right term here because that's something very specific for Romans.
00:13:22
Speaker
destroyed, let's say, the 17th, 18th, and 19th legions. So there's a question, there's one site that's thought to be the location, but there's another site, this Kalkrese, that is also thought to be. So they have the metal fingerprints from this Kalkrese site that match the 19th legion camp from a different location.
00:13:46
Speaker
And so they're saying that this Calgary site is definitely from that battle. And the debate is whether it's from that battle or if it's from a retaliatory strike some years later that the Romans did. And the crux of their argument is that it can't be from that retaliatory strike because the medals there belong to the 19th Legion and the 19th Legion at that point did not exist anymore.
00:14:09
Speaker
because it got defeated some years previous. Again, way too much in the weeds at that point for anything that I would be able to weigh in on, but I did think it was an interesting application of looking at metal fingerprints. When we go to break here, the next two articles are about something that we've thought about more and what you were discussing with the obsidian.
00:14:30
Speaker
which is trying to find out where the metals are from. This is kind of where the metals are from, but it's more like to whom they belong, which is, to me, a novel, different way of looking at this same question using a similar set of tools. Exactly. And that's what I liked about it too. I didn't even know if they can really tell where it's from necessarily, like where the original metals were recorded. They were testing, just to give you a little more details here, they were using mass spectrometry.
00:14:58
Speaker
And they sampled and analyzed about 550 different, well, they say samples. I don't know if they mean artifacts or samples of like multiple samples of one artifact, who knows, but from seven known Roman Legion sites and in order to, I guess, put together this database, right? So they did that and it was on the brass and the bronze, by the way, the brass and bronze that they had, those artifacts.
00:15:21
Speaker
And yeah, that's what led them to determine what we've already mentioned. And I guess just a little bit of historical facts, it marked the end of the Roman presence in Germany, this battle did. They're like, you guys are done, get out. And screwy. Yeah, pretty much. So yeah, after that battle and after this area, the metal fingerprints so far discovered,
00:15:43
Speaker
leading back to the 19th Legion ceased to exist because presumably once they created this database of Legion metallurgical fingerprints, they've tested everything as much as they could get their hands on probably. And after that, you don't have no more presence of the 19th Legion, which is pretty definitive, I would say, assuming they've got all these facts right. All right. Well, that's about it for that one. Paul, you got any more thoughts on this one?
00:16:10
Speaker
No, let's go to break and then come back and talk about things that are a little more traditional and I'll still have nothing important to say about them. Welcome back to The Architect Podcast, episode 193. Today, Chris and I are discussing three different articles about
00:16:29
Speaker
Archaeometallurgy.
Uluburun Shipwreck and Bronze Age Metallurgy
00:16:30
Speaker
Did I get it right this time? Yeah, I hope so. I think so. The second of these articles is published in Science Advances, and the authors of it are Wayne Powell, Michael Fricketti, Jamal Poluk, H. Arthur Bancoff, Gojko Bayamovich, Michael Johnson, Ryan Mather, Vince Pigott. That's the one who was down the hall for me. Michael Price. Oh, and I didn't even notice this the first time, too. Aslahan Yener. I actually worked on one of her projects.
00:16:56
Speaker
in 98 or 99 in Turkey. The title of the paper is Tin from the Uluburun shipwreck shows small-scale commodity exchange fueled continental tin supply across late Bronze Age Eurasia, which is a big mouthful, but it also hits a lot of
00:17:14
Speaker
a lot of interesting points that extend beyond just metals here and have a lot to do with craft production, trade networks, state control, and so on. It's a very interesting article. It also gets into the weeds into certain things, chemical properties or chemical compositions of metals.
00:17:37
Speaker
that I have no real way of assessing and statistical analyses that I have no real way of assessing. But again, it is interesting just the overall arc that the article takes and some of the conclusions that they draw because they sound to me entirely plausible. Now, that might be because I've got a couple of people who I respect that are authors on this article, but I also think that's because they're right. Do you know anything about the Olibaroon shipwreck? It's a very famous site.
00:18:05
Speaker
Honestly, I don't. This is the first I'd heard of it, so I'm glad you've heard of it. It's middle of the second millennium BCE, so 14th century shipwreck found off the southern coast of Turkey in, I think, 1982 by a sponge diver. Basically, it's the entire cargo of a ship that went down there
00:18:29
Speaker
And it's filled with all sorts of various commodities, including some luxury raw materials. And this time period is noted for the interrelation between the various kingdoms, between the Hittites, the Assyrians, Babylonians, and Egyptians, primarily. I'm not sure if the Mitanni were part of it. The Mycenaeans probably were. Anyhow, they're like the Amarnal letters in Egypt, which are in cuneiform.
00:18:58
Speaker
There are letters going back and forth between the royal families in, is that Assyria or Babylon? I should know that off the top of my head because this is something that's not too far removed from stuff I do and I've forgotten at the moment. It doesn't matter anyhow. And the Egyptian royal families. And they're referring to each other as siblings. Now, they're not technically siblings, but it would be like calling somebody, you know, an old friend, my brother.
00:19:20
Speaker
And so this ship is showing the transshipment. The shipwreck has in its cargo goods that are from all around the eastern Mediterranean. And it kind of reflects that same sort of relationship that's happening between these great houses that control these huge territories across North Africa and the modern Middle East.
00:19:44
Speaker
you know, where they were not just people and relationships, but also various commodities and in many ways controlled by the big states. And it's that control of the big states of these commodities that is a little bit undermined by this article, but in an interesting way. It doesn't mean that it's wrong, but what it shows looking at the sources of the tin in particular that was found here. Now, there's
00:20:10
Speaker
a huge, I think like 10 metric tons of ingots that are found. Not all tin, there's tin, copper ingots, but... Yeah, they said that the amount of tin ingots on there would have produced about 11 metric tons of high quality bronze, which is just great. And bronze is made out of tin and copper, tin being the less abundant element of the two.
00:20:34
Speaker
So very valuable. Absolutely. And it's because of that lesser abundance of it. There are copper sources spread out through the Zagros and the Taurus and Cyprus and other locations across the region, but there are fewer tin sources. And the tin sources that they have basically are in Anatolia and also ones out in Central Asia.
00:21:00
Speaker
And they find the fingerprints of these tin sources in the ingots in this one single shipwreck. So it's from the same snapshot in time. It's from the same cargo on this boat. Obviously, they would have picked these up. Well, not obviously, but they presumably would have picked or possibly would have picked them up in various locations as it's doing its route.
00:21:24
Speaker
or maybe through whatever various means, wherever they stopped to pick up the metal, the raw materials for the metals, some of it came from Central Asia and some of it came from Anatolia. But they're looking basically at the chemical compositions to find, like I said before, to find the sources of these, and they find these two sources.
00:21:46
Speaker
I'm wondering, again, you know a lot more about this shipwreck than I do, because I'd only heard of it just with this, but do you know if they know why the ship went down by any chance? Because I'm wondering if it was just too heavy, like had some rough seas or something and broke apart. It sounds like it was really heavy. I know they could carry a lot. They were capable of putting a lot of weight in these ships, but even so, man.
00:22:09
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know off the top of my head if they have a strong idea of why it went down. They do know that it did go down and it went down on the slope underwater and spread out. If you look at the maps from the project, from the recovery, it's fascinating. You can see
00:22:27
Speaker
where things were in the hold. Because you've got to distribute them obviously on a boat, you've got to distribute them so that you have balance. But then there's also the tendency to collect with like with like. So I don't think you would have all your metal ingots on one side of the boat and capsize instantly.
00:22:45
Speaker
But they do have these great maps that you can see how things were laid out, but it all is very deep underwater and it's on a steep slope. So actually recovering that was a major feat, a major archaeological feat in and of itself. And now that they're doing these analyses of the materials, because we've got the capability of doing these chemical analyses now, this article
00:23:15
Speaker
gives us a lot, not just about the sourcing, but then like I said, what makes it interesting to me is it starts talking about the societal structure then. And in a nutshell, a lot of the trade that was happening in the Eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamia is controlled by these great houses, by the great kingdoms. But as you get out toward Central Asia, you don't have that same kind of centralized government.
00:23:40
Speaker
It's being done on a different scale. It's being organized, and yet it can still try and ship these materials thousands of miles to get them to where the people want it, to where the wealth is, to purchase this tin. That in and of itself is interesting. Then the other one is that the other source that they find is actually fairly close. It's in Southern Anatolia.
00:24:01
Speaker
But these are places where the major mines had already been depleted. And so what they're finding is that these are kind of secondary sources, river washes. They're basically scraping the bottom of the barrel for the tin that they're getting from those areas. So 3,500 years ago, some relatively advanced modern civilizations for the time already realized they were having a natural resource problem and we still haven't figured out how to overcome it.
Ancient Civilizations and Resource Challenges
00:24:32
Speaker
There are ones that would argue that natural resource problems are basically an underlying... Yeah, problem.
00:24:42
Speaker
Another line of problem of all human existence. Whether it's something simple, not necessarily simple to solve, but simple to understand like water, or if it's something more complex because you need the tin in order to make the bronze because the copper itself isn't a great material, but suddenly becomes much better once you add that tin, it becomes bronze.
00:25:03
Speaker
or if it's like other things that were found on the shipwreck, ostrich shells. That's not a primary material for anything that you're using day to day, but that's part of what's going back and forth amongst these elites that are trading with each other.
00:25:19
Speaker
They're glass ingots there. Glass at that time would have been a fairly elite material. It wasn't just a commodity like we have nowadays, but they're glass ingots on that ship. There are all sorts of other different raw materials or partially processed materials that were being trans-shipped on that boat.
00:25:38
Speaker
And so again, it serves as a little snapshot in time of that. But now this article has expanded it out in a direction that I wouldn't have expected when I started reading it. I wouldn't have expected to go in that direction. You know, I've never worked in that area. I've only I've worked in, you know, Olduvai Gorge in Africa and the United States. Right. That's pretty much it. But in neither locations did I ever find anything like glass ingots and that actually reading about that.
00:26:06
Speaker
really had me thinking because I never really thought about transporting raw glass. It's just not something that was really done here in the United States. The glass manufacturers would source it and create their glass and create their bottles that they would need pretty much on site. And if they were doing any sort of transporting of a glass ingot, then it was really short distances, short enough that I've never heard of any evidence of something like that being found in transit, so to speak.
00:26:36
Speaker
So I'm wondering with your work in those areas, was that a relatively common thing about that time to create these glass ingots and then sell those rather than just process them into the glass objects that they need to be on site? Or do you think this was more of a luxury item and it's like a one in a million you'd find on a shipwreck?
00:26:55
Speaker
I'm guessing here, but I believe that it's not entirely uncommon because I think I've seen these same kinds of ink at various other excavations, various other sites across the Middle East. But, you know, earlier things, we find raw materials being transported, you know, lapis and carnelian and such being transported from Central Asia to Mesopotamia where it gets worked into its final product.
00:27:21
Speaker
we don't very often have the finished good. Now, we may have some things like some various serpentine or soapstone bowls that may have been made in the Zagros that then got transported as finished objects into Mesopotamia. But for the most part, I believe, oh, carnelian beads. There are certain kinds of carnelian beads that were probably from the Indus Valley and processed
00:27:46
Speaker
incompletion there and then trans-shipped across to tepesitamia. But that's a small thing. It's certainly going to be a mix, whether you send the finished product or you send the raw materials. But I wonder if the size and scale of the work that has to be done, because when we talk about the copper and the tin for smelting, we talk about the glass for glassmaking, those are things that
00:28:14
Speaker
have to be done at a particular scale and with a particular technological know-how to have the kilns, to have the furnaces to do those things. So maybe under certain conditions, it's just more efficient to sell your raw materials to somebody down the road because they're the one that knows how to do it rather than you having to do it yourself and then send the finished product. I don't know. Yeah, that doesn't make sense. I'm just wildly speculating here.
00:28:43
Speaker
Well, just to get into the science of it just a little bit here and pull something from the article, the researchers used lead isotope, trace element, and tin isotope analysis to determine where these ores
Laser Ablation Techniques in Archaeology
00:28:55
Speaker
were from. And we've mentioned that. And that was, I don't know if we mentioned the ratios there, but I guess one third of the tin ingots were found at Uluburun. How do you say that? Uluburun? Uluburun? Yeah, Uluburun.
00:29:09
Speaker
Uluburun, right. I got to get that right. Uluburun, which is the place near where the wreck was found. And then the remaining two-thirds were the Taurus Mountains of Turkey. And I guess it was the largest and most securely dated collection ever to found. It sounds like it was largest because it was the largest
00:29:25
Speaker
shipwreck ever found with this amount in it. Oh yeah. No, that's why it's such a famous site is because it is, it is the mostest of the mostest in terms of, uh, of a shipwreck site like this.
00:29:38
Speaker
Yeah, and I'm wondering why now, right? If this was discovered in the early 80s, what are they just getting around to doing this kind of analysis now? Do you think it's the inaccessibility of it? They just haven't maybe brought up enough in order to be able to do this kind of analysis, I wonder? I honestly don't know. I do see a couple Turks on this paper, a couple authors from Turkish.
00:30:02
Speaker
And so maybe getting the right know-how in Turkey, because Turkey has been very defensive of making sure that Turks are on archaeological projects or leading them and making it different for people who aren't Turkish to get on these projects or lead them in particular.
00:30:19
Speaker
So, maybe their presence that opened this up, it may be that something changed administratively because these, as we'll get into in the next article, the chemical analyses are somewhat destructive of the objects. You have to take a sample out of it. So, it may be that the laws changed and that they couldn't 10 years ago drill into the back of one of these ingots, but they decided that what we've got enough of them, let's do this in the name of science.
00:30:49
Speaker
I honestly, again, I'm just speculating wildly. I have no idea why it would take this long. I don't know how long any of these studies actually take. I do know that for years, there'd be people working on the same project, on the same sets of materials down that hall from me in Masca. It wasn't because they were slacking off or it wasn't because they didn't have access to the materials. It was because it just took that long to get the work done.
00:31:15
Speaker
Hmm, right. Well, we definitely have those kinds of constraints over here in the United States as well when we are working on artifacts that are originally belonging to a certain tribe. And if that tribe has a good presence, and a lot of them do, especially in the West Coast of the United States and in the Northeast a little bit, if that tribe has a
00:31:38
Speaker
a good hold on the archaeological resources in the area, they have a good tribal government, they're very well formed, and they have their own laws and regulations, then we see this a lot again in the American West where you're not allowed to do samples on, say, obsidian, as we mentioned earlier. The artifacts are going to be documented and then if they were collected at all,
00:32:01
Speaker
were turned back to the tribe for repatriation or whatever they choose to do with it. That's pretty common, I would say. I could see the same thing happening in other parts of the world, for sure, where maybe the sentiment towards the site or something like that changes, or new people come into power. Things change.
00:32:22
Speaker
All right, well, let's go from there and find out what you can do with a portable laser because it sounds real Star Trek. And I'm really hoping for that, but it's not back in a minute. Welcome back to episode 193, the archaeo tech podcast. And we're talking about three news articles that all have to do with archaeological metallurgy. And that is a mouthful of words to say for sure. Now.
00:32:45
Speaker
This one is from science direct, which is, you know, an outlet for lots of things. One of which is the journal of archeological science. We have the link to the actual journal article that we'll put in the show notes. And the article is portable laser ablation sheds light on early bronze age gold treasures in the old world. New insights from Troy Polio, Poliochny. I don't know how to say that. And related finds Poliochny. I think it's Poliochny.
00:33:12
Speaker
No, I don't know. The authors of this one are Moritz Numerich, Christoph Schwall, Nicole Lockhoff, Costas Nicholasos, Eleni Konstantinidis. Oh, this is a tough one. Konstantinidis.
00:33:29
Speaker
Sivridi. Sorry, Eleni, I really apologize for butchering your name there. Massimo Petrato, Barbara Hories, and Ernst Perniska. And I'm just interjecting here quickly the other two articles. Well, one was just a news piece. The other one was an open access article. And this one here is an Elsevier journal. So you're going to need to get access through whatever means you normally get access if you want to see the entirety of it.
00:33:57
Speaker
Well, I will tell you though, if you click on the article, you can see the abstract. You can see a lot of stuff without looking at it. And you can see the authors and there's a little email symbol next to that. And nine times out of 10, if you just email the author directly or you see their name and you just look them up online, they can't be that hard to find, email them directly and say, Hey, I was really interested in this article. Can you email me a copy? I've heard
00:34:22
Speaker
so many people who regularly write journal articles say, just email me and I'll send you a copy and they will absolutely do that. So, I mean, they make no money on this, right? It's paywall for us, not for them. That this money goes straight to Elsevier and the journal articles are not paid for. Otherwise you'd have a, you know, some, some biased research potentially if they were paying articles, paying authors to write these things. So, so don't feel like you're, you're doing them a disservice by just asking them directly for it. Please do.
00:34:49
Speaker
No, and they may be interested, excited to know that you've heard about it and that you're interested in it. I know that I certainly would be if somebody emailed me directly, say, hey, how come I can't get access to your paywalled article? Can you send me a copy? Even if I couldn't even have had an article that somebody wanted to read.
00:35:07
Speaker
But no, I would be thrilled to know that somebody heard about it and was interested in learning more. So definitely try that if this floats your board. Now, this article to me was a little interesting and that it felt to me like two separate articles. The first was about this technique that they're using, which is way cool. And then the second was the results of the
00:35:30
Speaker
they interpolate from the technique, not unlike what we saw in the previous one, in the previous article that we discussed, but somehow the disjuncture between the first half and the second half of this article felt starker to me. Yeah, I agree. I agree with that. A little bit of background. In 1873, Heinrich Schlielemann found a hoard of gold, silver, and copper artifacts that he called King Priam's Treasure. You might recognize that name. It was named for
00:35:55
Speaker
the King of Troy, who ruled around the 13th century BCE. It turns out though, that this collection is actually from an early Bronze Age culture that existed from between 2500 and 2000 BCE. So much earlier than originally, well, then when he found it, you know, he'd made an assumption. He didn't do any testing on it, of course. And how did they figure all that out? Well, they melted it with a laser, which I think is really cool. And that's what ablation means, that the laser ablation, they basically ablation is a fancy word for melted.
00:36:23
Speaker
Yeah, scraping off of. Actually, I was looking at laser ablation after seeing that in the title going, does that mean what I think it means? And found a whole bunch of portable laser ablation machines for various cosmetic uses, like go to a plastic surgeon kind of cosmetic uses, not something you know.
00:36:45
Speaker
And also, I came across one site that had a laser ablation machine that they used for, well, in the examples they had on their video on their website, was removing rust
00:37:01
Speaker
from metal surfaces. And this, oh my goodness, this was frightening. It was about an inch, you know, they don't have a scale in there, but I'm guessing it's about an inch wide beam and it just burns the rust off of the metal as they're going over it, as they're passing over with it. But that's not what we're talking about in this guy. We're somewhere in between, I think. Or maybe actually down less than the
00:37:29
Speaker
than the cosmetic use because what they're doing is a minimally invasive technique. I mentioned in the last segment about the possibility that it was the fact that you have to take a sample from the metals in order to run your chemical tests on them.
00:37:47
Speaker
This year, they are still taking a sample, but the sample that they take with the laser is so tiny, so little that they could do it on these gold artifacts that had previously been off limits.
00:38:01
Speaker
Yeah. And it's crazy because it says right in the article, it's a, it makes a 120 micrometer cone. And if you don't know what that is, just like I couldn't visualize it. They say it's about the width of two of your hairs. And I like just, you know, we need to do a whole, somebody needs to do a whole study on, on equative measurements, because if it's smaller than a hair or around the size of a hair, then it's talked about in terms of the width of your hair, right? Lots of things are, if it's anything over like,
00:38:29
Speaker
a hundred feet, maybe a hundred yards than it's talked about in football fields. I don't know what other countries do, but like American football fields, like everything. Oh, it's about 15 football fields wide or some ridiculous number. Like how can I visualize that? But anyway. And how big was hail before people invented golf?
00:38:47
Speaker
It's I don't know something sized. Hey, I like it. We just don't have a word for it. Jeez That's pretty funny so they they sampled 26 artifacts and like Paul said they were Locked away at the National Museum in Athens. They were considered too precious to move They didn't want to take them to a lab or something like that so they took this portable laser ablation tool and took it to the National Museum in Athens and
00:39:13
Speaker
basically use them to, you know, do the little micrometer cones in the laser ablation. And I wonder, you know, since it's, since it's a device right there, I wonder, you looked up the laser ablation tools themselves. Do you know if this is maybe giving like instantaneous results or something that has to be analyzed?
00:39:30
Speaker
No, it's not giving instantaneous results. What they're doing is they're taking this machine. So people have used laser oblation before for the same technique. The novelty of this one, what they write about is that they have a portable one. So before what we would have to do is you would have to send the object to the lab that could do this. And that's off limits for a variety of reasons.
00:39:52
Speaker
One of the big ones, and I know this because my wife is often tasked with escorting objects from her museum, The Met, to other museums around the world when they're on loan.
00:40:04
Speaker
Oh yeah. There is a lot of paperwork and a lot of insurance and a lot of hassle. It's a very expensive process, especially I would think if you're trying to send something gold to get them from country A to country B or even within a country to move them from the museum to wherever the lab is. It's a tedious process.
00:40:26
Speaker
The other big problem that they mentioned in the article is that you're limited by the size of the object. Beyond a certain size, you can't easily move it so that you can send it to the lab to use the laser ablation to sample it. But what they did instead is they have this portable machine
00:40:50
Speaker
that they took to the object. And that's why they were allowed to finally do these samples. Well, that and like you said, the how tiny the sample is that it's basically visible.
00:41:01
Speaker
So they take that and they vaporize a little bit of the metal and they suck that up into a tube and a filter of some kind. And that's what goes back to the lab then for the mass spectrometry. Right, right. OK, that makes sense. So it's not all a unified. It all happens at once with this gizmo that they're bringing to the museum to check with.
00:41:29
Speaker
The hard part, maybe not the hard part, but the bulk of the analysis or the bulk of the technique that's applied to the sample happens sometime later and someplace later.
Challenges in Ancient Resource Trade
00:41:43
Speaker
We just need handheld mass spectrometry. That's really what we need here. So shouldn't be too hard. Really? I thought they were massive machines. Um, I could have sworn that there are some handheld ones nowadays. You might be thinking, you might be thinking of portable X-ray fluorescence. I may well be. Yeah. Don't believe a word I say.
00:42:10
Speaker
Well, so when they finally did their mass spectrometry on either a hand-sized device or a room-sized device, we're not sure, but when they did it, they found high concentrations of tin, palladium, and platinum in the samples. And I guess for people who know things about gold,
00:42:29
Speaker
This indicates, which I also thought was super interesting, but this indicates that the gold was found in essentially washed river samples in the form of gold dust. So this was panned for, essentially. I mean, I don't think they panned for it, but you can imagine somebody doing whatever their equivalent of panning for gold was. And they found this gold and then had to refine it in some way to make actual objects out of it, which means it would have been an incredible amount of work to actually source all this stuff. So you can kind of think about the
00:42:59
Speaker
the, I guess the cultural effort behind that, I mean, cultural in the form of just like people, the actual effort behind collecting, you know, gold dust in order to make actual gold objects and not just like a couple of them, a lot of them. So, you know, this is probably a relatively common practice.
00:43:15
Speaker
way easier than mining. Back in the day, you could probably find gold veins peeking out of the surface, but I imagine those have all been found in the world. As erosion happens, maybe more could be found, but I would imagine a lot of the visible precious metal veins have probably been mined out by previous cultures since we've been mining those types of things for 3,000, 5,000 years or more.
00:43:42
Speaker
Anyway, they did this to try to figure out also not like the origin of the gold, but like where it came from. And they actually matched some of these samples to the royal tombs in Ur in Mesopotamia, which you were just knocking at the door of a few months ago. Yeah, just hanging out at, as one does. Yeah, exactly. Went to the Ur coffee shop, didn't you? Yeah, there you go. Nice, nice. Yeah, so they look at it and,
00:44:09
Speaker
And there are some forms of beads, these kind of flat discs. They have a particular term. I can't think of it off the top of my head right now, but it's mentioned in the article that are found in various locations across the Middle East and across Anatolia. And so they're looking at those. They also look at there's a particular design that is
00:44:32
Speaker
is four spirals, not necessarily interlocked, but if you can imagine the spiral on, oh. If you can imagine a spiral, this is great podcasting right here. Four interlocked spirals, it's a common motif or not totally uncommon motif in jewelry across the region. They look at these because the assumption has been where you have these things that are so formally similar
00:44:59
Speaker
that they represent at least the transmission of an idea, if not the actual objects between these areas, but with the ability to actually sample the material that they're made out of. And back to that first article, the fingerprint of those materials.
00:45:14
Speaker
You can then make the argument that they are in fact related. They did come from the same place. We might not necessarily know where that place is unless we can successfully fingerprint where the materials came from, which is not something that they're actually trying to do in this one. But we can say that site A and site B have gold that came from the same place. So these objects that are very similar
00:45:38
Speaker
in these two sites were produced at the same place. We don't know if it's site A and transship to site B or vice versa or some third place that's not in there, but it's still interesting to know that this is a possibility now and another way of analyzing these things instead of just a strictly art historical sort of formal analysis.
00:46:00
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, they do mention in the article just briefly, I don't think they really get into it, that the gold from Troy, Polyachny, and Ur, for that matter, all likely came from Georgia as the original source of that gold. Some of it. They have a number of different sources, possible sources, all of which are to be further explored.
00:46:22
Speaker
But yeah, it's kind of cool what they do. But again, like I said, this article then becomes two separate articles in my mind. It becomes the first one of this cool new technique that they can do. And then the second article is what they do with it. Obviously, the second flows from the first. But again, somehow reading it, they just felt like it was two entirely distinct discussions. Maybe because the first one was very technical.
00:46:45
Speaker
Yeah. In terms of the machinery being used. And the second one was technical more in the stats being applied to results. Well, I do kind of appreciate that though, because we have discussed a lot of articles on this show that are just, they're really a subset of a larger body of research, but the article we're talking about literally is talking about the technique. It's not even really mentioning results, right? It's talking about, hey, we tried this new thing,
00:47:10
Speaker
And it either worked or didn't work for archaeology, right? And that's what it is. But I somewhat appreciate as we're moving away from, you know, as you mentioned with Marco in the last episode, and we mentioned a lot of times, we're moving away from the term digital archaeology because all archaeology is digital. You know, they need to mention the techniques that they used in this
00:47:30
Speaker
in this research, but also they're going to get into it, right? They're like, this isn't just about the technique we used because, you know, laser ablation is really nothing new. It's just, this is what we did. This is what we used. And then here's what we learned from it. So I guess I kind of appreciate that. Yeah. All right. Well, any other thoughts on this research?
00:47:49
Speaker
No, I mean, it's interesting and it's always fun. That's one of the things I enjoy about podcasting with you is that I would not have picked up any of these articles myself to read, but I would pick them up. No, seriously, it's like I said at the start, it's a topic that I find interesting that it exists, but not interesting enough for me to dig in on. And so I had to dig in a little bit here.
00:48:13
Speaker
What I learned was just the variety of ways that other researchers doing stuff that is different than I would do were thinking about the materials and the results and analyzing and theorizing in ways that wouldn't be native to the way I think. And so it's always kind of fun to see these things and think a little bit outside of your own head.
00:48:36
Speaker
Well, yeah. And that is obviously one of the, one of the primary reasons I would say behind this podcast is to, for any archeologists that happen to be listening or other researchers for that matter, to take a look at your own collections and the own, your own projects that you're working on and see if maybe there's something you can learn from this that you either didn't know existed or hadn't really thought of in this way and that you can apply to your own research. If you've done that for this topic or anything else we've talked about on the architect podcast or
00:49:03
Speaker
I'm going to try it one more time. Last time of the show, if you're playing a drinking game, this is it. The archaeological metallurgy, archaeological metallurgical techniques. If you're an archaeological metallurgist, how about that one? Then contact me, Chris, at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com, where you can find more of our contact info on our show notes. And then we'll bring you on to talk a little more specifically about it. It makes me think of Tristan, the co-founder of the APN, his original.
00:49:31
Speaker
education was in archaeology and chemistry. So archaeochemistry and doing different things with that, which obviously is different, but not all that different. Much more related. Maybe it would have been better to have him on today. Right. Right. Indeed. All right. Well, thanks a lot, Paul. As usual, the links to all these articles and a little bit extra will be in the show notes and we will see you in two weeks with more fun stuff. All right, Chris. Well, thanks. This has been fun. I think I learned something new.
00:50:01
Speaker
It's a great way to start off the new year. Thanks, Paul.
00:50:09
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Archaeotech Podcast. Links to items mentioned on the show are in the show notes at www.archpodnet.com slash archaeotech. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com and paul at lugall.com. Support the show by becoming a member at archpodnet.com slash members. The music is a song called Off Road and is licensed free from Apple. Thanks for listening.
00:50:35
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Culturo Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.