East Germanic Ironmaking in the Roman Period: Archaeometry of Slag and Ore Finds in the Przeworsk Culture

(Hardback)

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Making a study of East Germanic iron smelting in the Roman Period, this book gives an in-depth account of the development of metallurgy in the Przeworsk Culture. Its two main ironmaking centres the Holy Cross Mountains and Masovia were among the largest iron production regions beyond the borders of the Roman Empire. Apart from serving local demand where it was used for artefacts of many kinds, which are abundantly found in grave furnishings a considerable part of Przeworsk Culture iron is likely to have been exported to other territories.

Despite more than 60 years of research and scholarship on Przeworsk Culture iron metallurgy, this is the first book to carry out smelting slag and ore analyses using the most up-to-date methods available in archaeological science. More specifically, this study also applies a variety of statistical methods to the results of the elemental analyses of nearly 270 smelting slag and ore samples from its territory. Offering an overview of statistical approaches used in iron provenance studies and a detailed step-by-step research methodology, this book paves the way for future studies, including artefact provenance analyses using of the latest archaeometric methods.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Research reported in this book was funded by the National Science Centre Poland. Open access was funded by Grzegorz Zabinski.

Reviews

This book is not only an up-to-date overview of archaeological and chemical data about the most impressive iron production areas across Barbaricum, but also a handbook for any archaeometallurgist interested in the provenance of ferrous objects. -- Alexandre Disser, Researcher in Archaeology, French National Centre for Scientific Research, France

Author Bio

Grzegorz Zabinski is Associate Professor of Medieval Archaeology at Jan Dlugosz University, Poland. He is the author of Technology of Sword Blades from the La Tne Period to the Early Modern Age (2014).

Marcin Wozniak is Head of Department of Archaeology of Mazovia at the Museum of Ancient Masovian Metallurgy, Poland.

Jaroslaw Gramacki is Vice-Rector for Science and International Cooperation at the University of Zielona Gra, Poland.

Artur Gramacki is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Zielona Gra, Poland.