00:00.00 archpodnet Welcome back to episode 94 the archaeo tech podcast and we are talking about 3 news articles and we are talking about 3 news articles that all have to do with archeological metallurgy and that is a mouthful of words to say for sure now. This one is from sciencedirect which is you know an outlet for lots of things one of which is the journal of archaeological science and so we have the 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 Ah Polio Chi Polyochny I don't know how to say that and related finds polyony I think it's polyachny. 00:50.60 Paul No I don't know um art the authors of this one are morits Numeric christofph Schval Nicole Lockoff Costas Nicholenzos Eleini Constantini Oh this is a tough one constantinidy. 01:07.68 Paul Very d sorry elei I really apologize for butcheerring your name there massimoultrato barbara joriers and Ernst Periska um 01:11.52 archpodnet Yeah, yeah. 01:20.16 Paul And I'm just interjecting here quickly. The other two articles. Well one was just a news piece. The other one was an open source article or not open source a yeah 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. 01:30.72 archpodnet Ah. 01:38.59 Paul If you want to see the entirety of it. 01:41.46 archpodnet Well I will tell you though if you um, 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 9 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. 01:47.53 Paul Um, yes. 01:59.43 archpodnet Ah, email them directly and say hey um I was really interested in this article article. Can you email me a copy I've heard 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? That's paywalled for us. Not for them that this money goes straight to elsevier. 02:08.75 Paul M. 02:14.19 Paul Right? yeah. 02:19.21 archpodnet And the the journal articles are not paid for Otherwise you'd have ah 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. 02:31.74 Paul Know 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. 02:41.17 archpodnet Ah. 02:49.44 Paul Even if I couldn't even have added an article that somebody wanted to read. Um, but you know I would be thrilled to know that somebody heard about it. It was interested in learning more. So so definitely try that if this floats your boat now this article to me was a little interesting and that it it felt to me like. 02:51.29 archpodnet Yeah. 02:57.67 archpodnet Yeah, for sure. 03:06.89 Paul Two separate articles. The ah the first was about this technique that they're using which is way cool and then the second was results of the ah 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. 03:08.64 archpodnet Right. 03:25.41 Paul Between the first half and the second half of this article felt starker to me. 03:30.30 archpodnet Um, yeah I agree I agree with that. Um a little bit of background. This is so a little bit of background so in 73 Heinrich Schlielman found a horde of gold silver and copper artifacts that he called King Priam's treasure and you might recognize that name um is named for the king of Troy who ruled around the thirteenth century Bce it turns out though that this collection is actually from an early bronze age culture that existed from between twenty five hundred and two Thousand Bce so much earlier than. Originally? Well then when he found it. You know he made an assumption. He didn't do any testing on it of course so and 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 ablations a fancy word for melted. 04:03.45 Paul M. 04:18.16 Paul Yeah, scraping off of um I 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 like portable laser ablation machines for various cosmetic uses. Um. 04:18.51 archpodnet Yeah. 04:33.70 archpodnet Yeah. 04:35.36 Paul Like ah you know, go to a plastic surgeon kind of cosmetic uses not something you do at home and also I came across one site that that had a laser ablation machine that they used for well in the examples they had on their. 04:40.70 archpodnet Um, right. 04:55.80 Paul Video on their website was removing rust from metal surfaces and this oh my goodness this was frightening. It was about a inch but you know they don't have a scale in there. But I'm guessing It's about an inch wide beam and it just. 05:00.46 archpodnet Ah, yeah. 05:11.74 Paul Burns the rust off of the yeah the ah the metal as they're going over and they're passing over with it. Um, but that's not what we're talking about in this guy we're we're somewhere in between I think or maybe actually down less than the um than the cosmetic use because. 05:19.41 archpodnet She's. 05:30.28 Paul What they're doing is a minimally invasive-vasive technique. You know I mentioned in the last segment about um, the possibility that was the the fact that you have to take a sample from the metals in order to to run your chemical tests on them. Um. 05:40.13 archpodnet Right. 05:47.55 Paul This year they are still taking a sample but the sample that they take with laser so tiny So Littley bitty that they could do it on these gold artifacts that had previously been off limits. 06:02.17 archpodnet Yeah, and it's crazy because it says right in the article. It's ah it makes a 120 micro meter 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 2 of your hairs and I like just you know we need to do a whole somebody needs to do a whole study on on. Ah. 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 a hundred feet maybe a hundred yards then it's talked about in football fields I don't know what other countries do. 06:33.30 Paul Move. 06:36.96 archpodnet 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. 06:40.75 Paul And and how big was hail before people invented golf. 06:48.36 archpodnet Rights yeah, it's I don't know something sized hail I can we just don't have a word for it. Geez that's pretty funny. Ah so they they sampled 26 artifacts and like Paul said they were. Ah, locked away at the ah 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 ah the national museum in Athens and ah basically ah, use them to you know. Ah, do the little micro meter cones in the laser ablation and I wonder you know since it's since it's a device right? there I wonder you you looked up the laser ablation tools themselves. Do you know if this is maybe giving like instantaneous results or is it something that has to be analyzed. 07:32.51 Paul No, it's not giving instantaneous results What they're doing is they're taking this machine so people have used laser abblation before for the same technique. What what? the the novelty of this one What they write about is that they have a portable one. 07:47.28 archpodnet Yeah, yeah. 07:48.67 Paul 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 limitmits for a variety of reasons. Um, one of the big ones and I know this because my wife is often tasked with ah with escorting objects from her museum The met. 07:56.54 archpodnet Yeah. 08:07.30 archpodnet Now. Yeah. 08:08.43 Paul To ah to other museums around the world when they're on loan. Um, there is a lot of paperwork and a lot of insurance and a lot of hassle. It's a very expensive process this especially I would think if you're trying to send something gold. 08:15.52 archpodnet So. 08:21.50 archpodnet Right? Brett. 08:23.88 Paul 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 It's a it's a tedious process then the other big problem that they mentioned in the article is that you're limited by the size of the object that is that 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 ah to sample it. But what they did instead is they have this this portable machine that they took to the object and that's why they were allowed to finally do these samples. That end like you said the yeah the how tiny the sample is that it's basically invisible. Um, 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. 09:04.70 archpodnet Yeah. 09:16.38 archpodnet Ah. 09:20.80 Paul And that's what goes back to the lab then for the ah for the mass spectrometry. So it's not all a unified all happens at once with this gizmo that they're bringing you know to the museum to check with it. 09:23.86 archpodnet Right? right? Okay, that makes sense. 09:36.72 archpodnet Um. 09:37.79 Paul The hard part. Well maybe not the hard part but the bulk of the analysis or the the bulk of the technique that's applied to the sample happens sometime later in some place later. 09:50.66 archpodnet We just need Handheld mass spectrometry. That's really what we need here. So you know shouldn't be too hard. That's really I thought they were massive machines. 09:55.40 Paul Um, well that exists that exists. But I um I could have sworn that there are some handheld ones nowadays now I'm going to have to look that up. 10:08.34 archpodnet You might be thinking, you might be thinking of Portable X-ray fluorescence. Yes, ah right right? Well so when they when they finally did there. 10:14.82 Paul Ah I may well be Um, so yeah, don't believe a word I say. 10:25.63 archpodnet Mass spectroomemetry on either a hand size device or a room size device. We're not sure, but when they did it. They found high could high concentrations of Tin Palladium and platinum in in the samples and I guess for people who know things about gold this indicates which I also thought was super interesting but this indicates that the gold was found. essentially washed river samples in the form of gold dust so this was panned for essentially I mean don't think they panned for it. But you know you can imagine somebody doing whatever their equivalent of panning for gold was and they found this gold and then you know had to ah. 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 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 way easier than mining right? I mean back back in the day you could probably find gold veins peeking out of the surface. But I imagine those all been found in the world. You know. 11:20.53 Paul E. 11:36.89 archpodnet I mean as erosion happens. Maybe more could be found but I would imagine a lot of the visible precious metal veins have probably been you know mined out by previous cultures since we've been mining those types of things for I mean well 8000 years or more. So anyway, they did this to try to figure out also not like. The origin of the goal but like where it came from and they actually matched some of these samples to the royal tombs in ur in message mesopotamia which you were just knocking at the door of a few months ago. Yeah, exactly you went to the ur coffee shop didn't you yeah there you go. 12:06.45 Paul Yeah, just hanging out at as one does. 12:15.56 archpodnet Ah, nice. Nice. 12:16.98 Paul Yeah, no, so they yeah they look at it and um and there are some like forms of beads these kind of like flat discs. Um, they have a particular term I can't think of it off top my head right now. But. 12:31.71 archpodnet Yeah I can. 12:33.29 Paul It's mentioned in the article that they um 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 um, is 4 spirals kind of not necessarily interlocked. But if you can imagine like the spiral on. 12:52.68 Paul Oh if you can imagine a spiral this is great podcasting right here a how 4 interlock spirals. It's a common motif or not totally uncommon motif in jewelry across the region so they look at these because the assumption has been where you have these things that are so formally similar. 13:05.89 archpodnet Um. 13:12.55 Paul That they represent you know at least a 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. 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 sit fingerprint where the the materials came from which is not something that they're actually trying to do in this one? Um, but we can say that you know. 13:29.20 archpodnet Um. 13:46.73 Paul Site a and site b have gold that came from the same place. So these objects that are very similar in these two sites were produced at the same place. We don't know if it's you know site a and transnship to site b or vice versa or some third place that's not in there. But it's ah it's still you know. Interesting to know that that this is a possibility now and another way of analyzing these things instead of just a strictly art historical sort of formal analysis. 14:15.20 archpodnet Yeah I mean they do mention in the article just briefly I don't think they really get into it that the gold from ah from Troy ah polio poliotiny and ur for that matter. Um, all likely came from Georgia as the original source of that gold so that some of it. 14:30.46 Paul Some of it They they they have a a number of different sources or possible sources all of which are you know to be further explored. Um, but yeah, it's it's kind of cool what they do but again like I said this? ah this article then becomes two separate articles in my mind it becomes the first one. 14:32.45 archpodnet Yeah. 14:41.10 archpodnet Yeah. 14:47.41 Paul Ah, 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 2 entirely distinct discussions maybe because the first one was very technical um in terms of the machinery being used. 14:50.66 archpodnet Yeah. 15:01.32 archpodnet Um, yeah. 15:07.30 Paul And the second one was technical more in the stats being applied to results. 15:10.39 archpodnet Well I do kind of appreciate that though because we we have discussed a lot of articles on this show that are just they're 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 it's not even really mentioning results right? It's talking about hey we tried this new thing. And it either worked or didn't work for archeology right? And that's what it is but I 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 archeology because all archeology is digital. You know they need to mention the the techniques that they used in this. 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 abblations. 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. 16:01.40 Paul Evil. 16:07.93 archpodnet Well, any other thoughts on this research. 16:11.32 Paul No I mean it's interesting and 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 you would pick them out. No seriously, it's it's you know it's like I said at the start it's ah it's a topic that I find. 16:19.45 archpodnet Right. 16:28.20 Paul Interesting it exists but not interesting enough for me to dig in on and so I had to dig in a little bit here and and what I learned was just of the the variety of ways that other researchers doing stuff that is different than I would do. We're thinking about the materials and the results and um and analyzing and theorizing in ways that wouldn't be native to the way I think and so it's It's always kind of fun to to see these things and and think a little bit outside of your own head. 16:58.91 archpodnet Well, yeah, and that is obviously one of the one of the primary reasons I would say behind this podcast is to for any archeologist to happen to me 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 did 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 a tech podcast or I'm going to try it 1 more time last time of the show. So you're playing a drinking game. This is it. The archeological metallurgy. Ah, archeological metallurgical techniques if you're ah if you're an archeological metallurgist. How about that one then you know contact me Chris at archaeologypodcastsnetwork.com where you can find more of our contact info on our show notes and then yeah, but we'll bring you on to. Talk a little more specifically about it. It makes me think of Tristan the cofounder of the apn his original education was in archaeology and chemistry so archeochemistry and doing different things with that which obviously is different but not all that different. So it's a. 18:05.83 Paul Much more related. Maybe it would even better to have him on today. Ah. 18:10.33 archpodnet Rights rights 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. 18:21.50 Paul Thanks Chris have fun and are we going to so talk to each other before the new year 18:26.63 archpodnet Okay, so this will we'll redo that because this releases on January fifth 18:32.00 Paul Um, okay. 18:37.96 Paul All right? So I'm just going to end it with a here. We go all right crystal. Thanks! This has been fun I think I learned something new. Nice. 18:48.56 archpodnet It's a great way to start off the new year thanks Paul