The Contribution of Mineralogy to Cultural Heritage

The chapters contributed to the volume recognize the important and diverse contributions of mineralogy to the valorization, characterization, interpretation and conservation of cultural heritage. The book focuses on examples of materials and methodological issues rather than technical/analytical details. We have attempted to deal with the cultural heritage materials in chronological order of their technological developments, to relate them to past human activities, and to highlight unresolved problems in need of investigation.
Mineralogy of slags: A key approach for our understanding of ancient copper smelting processes
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Published:January 01, 2019
Copper was the first metal to have been smelted (extracted from its ore) some seven thousands year ago in the ancient Near East. For most pre-industrial periods, the documentation of copper smelting chaine operatoire relies mainly on investigations by archaeometallurgists of the metallurgical waste recovered during archaeological excavations, namely the copper slags. Copper slags are mostly an assemblage of crystals of oxides (iron, manganese, etc.), olivine (fayalite, etc.) and/or pyroxenes embedded in a polymetallic more-or-less glassy matrix. The mineralogy of the slags is directly related to the initial charge and the working conditions prevailing in the pyrometallurgical reactor. This chapter aims to give an overview of how copper slag mineralogy is investigated and the type of information it yields in order to help our understanding of past metallurgies and societies.
- alloys
- archaeological sites
- archaeology
- Bronze Age
- Cenozoic
- chain silicates
- chemical reactions
- copper ores
- historical documents
- history
- Holocene
- Iron Age
- metal ores
- metallurgy
- mineral composition
- nesosilicates
- olivine
- olivine group
- orthosilicates
- oxides
- polished sections
- pyrometallurgy
- pyroxene group
- Quaternary
- Roman period
- silicates
- slag
- smelting
- sulfides
- synthetic materials
- technology
- upper Holocene
- X-ray diffraction data