bronze

Bronze cauldrons from the late Middle Ages, and the 16th and 17th century are hardly ever discovered during archaeological excavations but are usually unearthed by detectorists having discovered the find of their life. Many of these vessels happen to be damaged. Sometimes one or two legs are lost, or a piece of the rim is missing, more often they exhibit one or more dents. We know that in prehistory the ritual...

This paper provides the details of a Roman minting experiment, which used a bronze mould to cast debased silver blanks typical of the third century A.D. The investigation follows the paper ''Experiments reproducing Roman debased alloys" (George, 2020) which studied the manufacturing methods used in the production of Roman silver coinage. The purpose of those experiments was to both...

This work aims to show the reconstruction of a medieval era knife that was found in Flixborough, Lincolnshire (UK). Flixborough’s Anglo-Saxon cemetery has returned a total of 11 knives that can be dated between the 8th and the 10th century AD. The specimen discussed here is known as Knife 2165 and was found in context 3417 of the site. This knife is the smallest of the inlaid knives found in Flixborough...

The Third Annual Vounous Symposium was held 1-16 September 2019 and located near Çatalköy in Northern Cyprus. In addition to ceramics and bronze casting, experiments were also conducted on smelting local copper ore, carving moulds from local limestone, and making faience.

The third annual Bronze Casting Festival at the Bronzezeithof in Uelsen continued its theme of metalworking and experimental archaeology in a Bronze Age setting. The event drew participants from around Europe and the US to combine their knowledge and share experiences...

The present work is a reconstruction which was made with two objectives in mind. Thee first was to experiment with heat-treating of amber, a technique already hypothesised by Von Eles (1995), in order to verify possible resin alteration due to heating. Although already tried in the past (Fiorentini, 2018b) after having conducted some cold-working experiments (Fiorentini, 2018a)...

This article is dedicated to the reconstruction I’ve done in 2017 of a Picenian cloack clasp which is a pretty unique find. It has been found in a prince’s grave dating back to the early 7th Century b.C. and is considered a rare find because only a few similar items have been found in Central Italy, and because of the rare use of amber decorations and bronze plates, that makes this find a true masterpiece...

It is accepted knowledge that when re-melting alloys, some of the metal with a lower melting temperature is lost through oxidation, and more metal must be added in order to maintain the desired alloy proportions. In order to understand the changes in alloy content when recycling using Bronze Age technology, experiments were undertaken by the author and others...

The first Bronze Casting Festival was held in May 2017 at the Bronzezeithof in Uelsen, Germany. The event was organised by Martijn van Es, who has an active interest in bronze casting and experimental archaeology. A call was put forward to skilled metal workers to come to Uelsen to conduct experiments and...