TITLE:
Archaeometallurgical Analysis of Bronze Artifacts: A Magnetometer Approach
AUTHORS:
Lucas Braddock Chen
KEYWORDS:
Archaeometallurgy, Metallurgy, Bronze, Ancient, Magnetism, Magnetometer
JOURNAL NAME:
Archaeological Discovery,
Vol.8 No.3,
May
15,
2020
ABSTRACT: Bronze has been utilized by human civilization for the past five millennia, and societies across the globe have mined, extracted, and purified copper and tin to create bronze alloys. Due to the different mineral composition of ores and the varying techniques involved with metal smelting, bronze artifacts from around the world often have very different chemical compositions. The determination of chemical composition is often invasive and expensive, and is usually conducted in laboratories. We previously developed an inexpensive and mobile test to identify metal alloys based on their magnetic signatures. We demonstrated that metals of different compositions would exhibit different electrical conductivity, and thus different magnetic field strengths when evoked by different levels of electric current. In this manuscript, we now detail the experiment protocol to produce evoked dynamic electromagnetic signals from bronze alloys, and the capture of signals with the smartphone magnetometer.