Abstract
During the Central European Iron Age, more specifically between 600 and 100 BC, red precious corals (Corallium rubrum) became very popular in many regions, often associated with the so-called (early) Celts. Red corals are ideally suited to investigate several key questions of Iron Age research, like trade patterns or social and economic structures. While it is fairly easy to distinguish modern C. rubrum from bone, ivory or shells, archaeologists are confronted with ancient, hence altered, artifacts. Due to ageing processes, archaeological corals lose their intensive red color and shiny surface and can easily be confused with these other light colored materials. We propose a non-destructive multi-stage approach to identify archaeological corals amongst other biominerals used as ornament during the central European Iron Age with emphasis on optical examination and mobile Raman spectroscopy. Our investigations suggest that the noticeably high amount of misidentifications or at least uncertain material declarations existing in museums or even in the literature (around 15%) could be overcome by the proposed approach. Furthermore, the range of different materials is higher than previously expected in archaeological research. This finding has implications for contemporary concepts of social structures and distribution networks during the Iron Age.
Highlights
Since Neolithic [1,2,3] and maybe even in Paleolithic times, 30,000 years ago [4,5], the skeletons of red precious corals (Corallium rubrum (C. rubrum)) were used as jewelry and ornaments
A living specimen of C. rubrum consists of three major components: the coral polyps are embedded in a living integument called the coenenchyme, sarcosome or coenosarc, which covers an axial skeleton [1,4,10,11,12,13]
Archaeological biominerals are subjected to diagenetic alterations, which can hamper the identification of red coral on archaeological artifacts
Summary
Since Neolithic [1,2,3] and maybe even in Paleolithic times, 30,000 years ago [4,5], the skeletons of red precious corals (Corallium rubrum (C. rubrum)) were used as jewelry and ornaments. Because of their shiny red color and their dense and hard structure, it is the most demanded coral species in the jewelry industry, which led to an intensive commercial harvesting during the 19th and early 20th century and, in the aftermath, to a decline of its stocks (e.g., [6,7]). Unpolished Corallium branches show very characteristic longitudinally-oriented grooves on their surface, as discussed in Section 3.1, deriving from large canals in the coenosarc, which connect the polyps with each other in order to transmit nutrition and information [1,4,14]
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