Archaeometric perspective on the emergence of brass north of the Alps around the turn of the Era

Jitka Míková,Petr Pajdla,Daniel Bursák,Tomáš Magna,Zuzana Rodovská,Alžběta Danielisová,Jakub Trubač,Ladislav Strnad

doi:10.1038/s41598-021-04044-7

Abstract

Ancient brass (aurichalcum) was a valued commodity in the Antiquity, notably because of its gold-like appearance. After mastering brass fabrication using the cementation procedure in the first century BC in the Mediterranean, this material became widely used by the Romans for coins, jewellery and other artefacts. Because of its visual qualities, it is believed that since this period, brass played an important role in diplomatic and economic contacts with indigenous communities, notably Celtic and Germanic tribes north of Danube and west of Rhine. To test this hypothesis, we performed for the first time the advanced statistical multivariate analysis based on chemical composition and lead isotope systematics, coupled with informed typo-chronological categorisation, of a suite of late Iron Age and Early Roman period (first century BC – first century AD) brass and other copper-alloy artefacts from the territory of Bohemia. In order to to discuss their provenance, the results were compared to known contemporary sources of material. The new results for brass artefacts from this early phase of the massive occurrence of Roman aurichalcum in the Barbarian territories point to the ore deposits in the western Mediterranean or the Massif Central area in Gaul, consistent with historical events. These new findings underscore the great economic and political importance of the new and rich mineral resources in the Transalpine Gaul acquired due to Caesar's military campaigns.

Highlights

Brass is undoubtedly one of the most valued materials in Antiquity
Using modern analytical tools of chemical composition (XRF, EPMA, AAS, PIXE, inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer (ICP-MS)), there has been some progress in identifying brass manufacture in the broader area of Europe among the artefacts dated already to the early 60s BC; the geological provenance of used ores remained mostly unrevealed[2,9,10,11,12]
The earliest brass artefacts in Bohemia are represented by a brass fourrée stater from the oppidum of S tradonice[31], brass Almgren 65 brooch from the oppidum of Závist, and several imported brass rings from the other oppida (Figs. 1, 2, Tables 2, 3, 4), all dated around the middle of the first century BC and, except for the coin, supposedly the products of Roman workshops imported to the North as exclusive jewellery pieces[12]

Summary

Introduction

Brass is undoubtedly one of the most valued materials in Antiquity. Its high appreciation in the contemporaneous society is underscored by the written sources, in Pliny the Elder’s and Cicero’s works[1,2]. The beginning and the course of the Julio-Claudian dynasty with a distinct intensification of the Romano–’Barbarian’ contacts is the primary time frame for the majority of samples presented in this study[23,24,25,26,27] In this period, jewellery from the Germanic graves in Bohemia was identified to be made of high-quality brass, approaching the chemical composition of the original aurichalcum[4,28,29]. Those were, in particular, the costume parts (brooches, belts, pins and other personal artefacts), imported luxury items such as bronze drinking vessels, tableware, and other artefacts All these observations make Bohemia an exceptionally well-suited territory for studying brass production and circulation patterns compared to other ’Barbarian’ territories north of the Alps and east of the Rhine River (Fig. 1). The selection of samples for further investigations was driven by identifying those artefacts among the cultural groups most likely fabricated from brass

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Results

Discussion

Conclusion