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Morphological reconstruction of Roman styli from Iulia Concordia—Italy

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Abstract

Iulia Concordia is an important Roman settlement known for the production of iron objects and weapons during the Roman Empire. A huge number of well-preserved styli were found in the bed of the main channel of the city. In order to shed light on the production processes used by Roman for stylus manufacturing and the conservation state of the finds, a neutron tomography analysis was performed on NEUTRA beamline in Switzerland. SEM-EDS analyses were performed on few selected objects in order to identify the composition of metal decorations. Here, we present results from our investigation conducted on 91 styli, disclosing, in a non-invasive way, the morphological characterization related to the ancient Roman working techniques.

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Notes

  1. The technology of iron smelting was mutated from the production of copper and was well developed in the early first millennium BCE. At the height of the Roman Empire, large-scale production is evident at sites such as Noricum, modern central Austria. As also mentioned by Pliny’s Naturalis Historia, the famous ferrum Noricum was extensively extracted and traded from this ancient province of the Empire (Craddock and Oleson 2010).

  2. Corrosion products are typically characterized by the presence of −OH which turns into a high attenuation coefficient. Since decorative materials such as Au and Ag feature a grade of interaction with neutrons similar to hydrates components, it is not possible to virtually isolate their contributions by applying a threshold-based segmentation method which consists in partitioning pixels depending on their intensity value (Russ and Neal 2015; Salvemini et al. 2014a). According to this reason, alteration and decorative components are rendered with the same colour.

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Acknowledgments

This project has received funding from the European Union’s 7th Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under the NMI3-II Grant number 283883.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Istituto dei Sistemi Complessi, FI, Sesto Fiorentino, Italy

    Filomena Salvemini, Francesco Grazzi & Marco Zoppi

  2. Australian Centre for Neutron Scattering (ACNS), ANSTO, Lucas Height, NSW, Australia

    Filomena Salvemini

  3. Dipartimento di Geoscienze, Università degli Studi di Padova, Padova, Italy

    Ivana Angelini & Gilberto Artioli

  4. Paul Scherrer Institut, SINQ Neutron Source, Villigen, Switzerland

    Peter Vontobel

  5. Dedalo s.n.c., Vicolo dei Conti 6, I-35122, Padova, Italy

    Alberto Vigoni

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  1. Filomena Salvemini
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  2. Francesco Grazzi
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  3. Ivana Angelini
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  4. Peter Vontobel
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  5. Alberto Vigoni
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  6. Gilberto Artioli
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  7. Marco Zoppi
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Correspondence to Filomena Salvemini.

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Salvemini, F., Grazzi, F., Angelini, I. et al. Morphological reconstruction of Roman styli from Iulia Concordia—Italy. Archaeol Anthropol Sci 10, 781–794 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-016-0390-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-016-0390-4

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