Rings or daggers, axes or fibulae have a different composition? A multivariate study on Central Italy bronzes from eneolithic to early iron age

BACKGROUND: One of the main concerns for archaeo-metallurgists and archaeologists is to determine to what extent ancient craftsmen understood the effect of metal alloy composition and were able to control it in order to produce objects with the most suitable features. This problem can be investigated by combining compositional analyses of a high number of ancient artefacts with correlation analyses of the objects’ age, production site, destination of usage etc. – and thus chemometric data treatment is carried out. In this study, multivariate analyses were performed on a matrix composed of elemental compositional data from 134 archaeological bronze objects, obtained by XRF analyses. Analysed objects have been dated back from the Eneolithic Period to the end of the Bronze Age including the early Iron Age and were excavated in Central Italy (mainly Abruzzo Region). RESULTS: Chemometric analysis was performed attempting to visualise clouds of objects through PCA. In parallel and independently, object grouping was attempted using several different approaches, based on object characteristics (e.g. shape, weight, type of use – cutting or hitting and age) following indications given by archaeologists (or derived from the archaeological context). Furthermore, case-tailored data pretreatment (logratio-centred scaling) was used, but no homogeneous groups could be identified. CONCLUSIONS: By using chemometric data analysis, homogeneous groups of objects could not be detected, meaning that compositional data of alloys is not correlated with the considered objects’ characteristics. This favours the conclusion that – without discussing the ascertained ability of ancient foundry-men - they had also already discovered the convenience of recycling broken objects thus producing a more or less similar bronze alloy each time, depending on materials’ availability; necessary mechanical characteristics could then be obtained by post processing. [Figure: see text] ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13065-015-0090-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.