An Armour from a finery?—a late medieval couter from Ogrodzieniec Castle in the Kraków-Częstochowa Jura

Abstract

The paper deals with a couter of a late fourteenth to early fifteenth century date which was found in Ogrodzieniec Castle, Zawiercie District, Poland (now in the collection of the Upper Silesian Museum in Bytom, MG 7755). The find survived in a vestigial condition, but it was still possible to propose some typological analogies to it. Metallographic examinations demonstrated that the artefact had been manufactured from almost carbon-free iron with a high content of phosphorus. An analysis of slag inclusions in the find suggests that the couter may have been made from refined blast furnace iron. It may thus be an early example of the application of indirect process iron in the manufacture of plate armour.

War and commercial exchanges in the late medieval Aegean: Investigating the metal provenance of the Chalcis Hoard

“…Although archaeometric investigations have been performed on European armor for several decades (Bérard, 2019;Bérard et al, 2020;Böhne, 1961;Brewer, 1981;Imiołczyk et al, 2020;Kraner et al, 2019;Leever, 2005;Williams, 2011Williams, , 2003Williams et al, 2012;Williams and De Reuck, 1995), few were made on medieval ones. Hence, the hundreds of armor discovered at Chalcis (Ffoulkes and Traquair, 1911;Kontogiannis, 2012) constitute valuable evidence to document the eastern Mediterranean network exchanges and the history of armor making.…”

Old wine into new wineskins? “Legacy data” in research on Roman Period East Germanic iron smelting

“…M. Charlton and colleagues developed a new identification model of smelting-related slag inclusions in artefacts [ 38 ], which was modified by A. Disser and co-authors [ 39 , see also 40 , 41 ]. M. Charlton and colleagues also proposed a major oxide multivariate method of artefact provenancing with the use of PCA, Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) and Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) [ 38 , 42 ].…”