Orfebrería castreña en el Museo Arqueológico de Asturias (Oviedo): aproximación a su caracterización arqueométrica y problemas de estudio

Abstract

<jats:p>Se presentan los resultados de la revisión de un grupo de piezas de orfebrería castreña de la II Edad del Hierro conservadas en el Museo Arqueológico de Asturias, que en su mayor parte permanecían insuficientemente estudiadas desde el punto de vista documental y arqueométrico. Este trabajo, centrado principalmente en el análisis no destructivo y la revisión topográfica de los objetos, aporta nuevos datos sobre su tecnología de elaboración. Destaca la identificación de nuevos ejemplos de aplicación de dorado por amalgama de mercurio. La labor realizada supone también un buen ejemplo de las dificultades existentes para el estudio de este tipo de materiales.</jats:p>

Prehistoric and Early Roman Period Goldwork from Northwestern Iberia: An Analytical Study of Artefacts from the Archaeological and Historical Museum of A Coruña

“…Handheld-XRF is one of the most used techniques, since it combines the good penetration capacity of XRF (8-60 µm), superior to that of other techniques such as SEM-EDS or µPIXE, with the possibility of obtaining extensive analytical series in museums [17,[56][57][58]. In our case, the use of this technique has the additional advantage of allowing direct comparisons with much of the analytical information available to date for northwestern Iberian goldwork, obtained with similar equipment and work protocols [6][7][8][25][26][27][28][29][30]51]. On the other hand, although a superficial analysis with XRF presents limitations in some studies that require greater quantitative accuracy and precision, it is valid for the objectives of this paper, which is focused on determining the trends seen in the major elements, identifying the use of nuclei in less noble metals or obtaining a preliminary characterisation of surface gilding techniques.…”

“…33. 133, 137, 138) [30] (p. 102). The piece from the Elviña hillfort we study in this article (Figure 8) can also be included in this list.…”

“…This technique is based on the propensity of mercury to amalgamate with gold, forming a paste that is applied to the surface of the metal to be gilded and subsequently heated to a moderate temperature (around 250-350º), causing the partial evaporation of mercury; the resulting porous surface is finished by burnishing [70,77,[83][84][85]. It went unnoticed for years in studies on Castro-culture goldwork, but in recent years it has been increasingly documented, both in torcs [77] and in hair adornments [78] or ornamental overlays [30]. There is still a debate about the origin of this technique in the goldsmithing of northwest Iberia, whose adoption and development were surely favoured by the presence of cinnabar (HgS) in several areas of the Iberian Peninsula, including the north of the province of León, very near the study area at hand [86,87].…”

“…The archaeometric characterisation of the ancient goldwork has seen a remarkable boost in recent years, to which the progressive increase in the use of non-destructive analytical techniques and portable instrumentation has contributed significantly [18][19][20][21][22][23]. In particular, in the northwestern Iberian Peninsula, following Hartmann's [24] pioneering work, in the last 15 years, a significant dataset has been generated by means of XRF through the analysis of collections such as those of the Provincial Museum of Lugo [6,7], Castro de Viladonga Museum [25], National Archaeological Museum-Madrid [26,27], Mariñas Museum-Betanzos [28], National Archaeological Museum-Lisbon [29], Pilgrimage Museum-Santiago [11,12] and Asturias Archaeological Museum-Oviedo [30]. Although this task is far from finished, given the extensive repertoire of materials preserved in the museums of Spain and Portugal, these contributions have made it possible to study in greater depth the raw materials and technology of these productions, which, since the end of the 1990s, has provided an alternative to the typological approaches predominant until then.…”

Analytical Study of Overlooked Bronze Age and Iron Age Goldwork from Northwest Portugal

“…Indeed, although Hartmann (1982) analysed quite a large number of Iberian objects, the elemental composition of several significant pieces from North Portugal and NW Spain remained unknown until recently (e.g. Martinón-Torres and Ladra, 2018;García-Vuelta, Montero Ruiz and Villa Valdés, 2020;Guerra and Tissot, 2021;Armada and García-Vuelta, 2021) and the composition of many others remains to be studied. We investigated four hitherto overlooked gold objects and an incompletely analysed hoard from NW Portugal.…”