TY - JOUR
T1 - Osmium isotope analysis as an innovative tool for provenancing ancient iron
T2 - A systematic approach
AU - Brauns, Michael
AU - Yahalom-Mack, Naama
AU - Stepanov, Ivan
AU - Sauder, Lee
AU - Keen, Jake
AU - Eliyahu-Behar, Adi
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Brauns et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
PY - 2020
Y1 - 2020
N2 - The innovation of iron production is often considered one of the greatest technological advances in human history. A reliable provenancing method for iron is instrumental for the reconstruction of economic, social and geo-political aspects of iron production and use in antiquity. Although the potential of osmium isotopes analysis for this purpose has been previously suggested, here we present for the first time the results of osmium isotope analysis of ores, bloom and metal obtained from a set of systematic, bloomery iron-smelting experiments, utilizing selected ores from the Southern Levant. The results show that the 187Os/188Os ratio is preserved from ore to metal, with no isotopic fractionation. In addition, enrichment/depletion of osmium content was observed in the transition from ore to metal and from ore to slag. This observation has potential significance for our ability to differentiate between the various processes and sheds light on the suitability of various production remains for this method, which emerges as a robust and promising tool for the provenancing of archaeological ferrous metals.
AB - The innovation of iron production is often considered one of the greatest technological advances in human history. A reliable provenancing method for iron is instrumental for the reconstruction of economic, social and geo-political aspects of iron production and use in antiquity. Although the potential of osmium isotopes analysis for this purpose has been previously suggested, here we present for the first time the results of osmium isotope analysis of ores, bloom and metal obtained from a set of systematic, bloomery iron-smelting experiments, utilizing selected ores from the Southern Levant. The results show that the 187Os/188Os ratio is preserved from ore to metal, with no isotopic fractionation. In addition, enrichment/depletion of osmium content was observed in the transition from ore to metal and from ore to slag. This observation has potential significance for our ability to differentiate between the various processes and sheds light on the suitability of various production remains for this method, which emerges as a robust and promising tool for the provenancing of archaeological ferrous metals.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85081895833&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1371/journal.pone.0229623
DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0229623
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C2 - 32187196
AN - SCOPUS:85081895833
SN - 1932-6203
VL - 15
JO - PLoS ONE
JF - PLoS ONE
IS - 3
M1 - e0229623
ER -