The faerie smith meets the bronze industry: Magic versus science in the interpretation of prehistoric metal‐making

Original copies: seriality, similarity and the simulacrum in the Early Bronze Age

“…These activities seem to have been centred on workshop environments, and a variety of modes of production have been suggested in the archaeological literature (Levy 1991, Budd and Taylor 1995, Harding 2000, Kristiansen and Larsson 2005, Goldhahn and Østigård 2008, Kuijpers 2012), yet empirical evidence for places of production is extremely limited, especially for period I (see Jantzen 2008). Identifying actual workshops or specifying individuals producing metal artefacts is, however, not the aim of this article, which instead focuses on the conceptual framework circumscribing the particular qualities of metal production.…”

The Age of Plastic: Ingenuity and Responsibility, Proceeding of the 2012 MCI Symposium

“…Transmutation of ores was a major accomplishment that at times seemed magical. To the untrained eye, the ores from which we extract metals are just rocks, and turning these into metal was not easily explained until a conceptual framework of redox chemistry was described in the eighteenth century (van der Merwe and Avery, 1986;Budd and Taylor, 1995;Blakely, 2006). Indeed, the Smithsonian Institution was conceived as "an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge" by the eighteenth-century mineralogist and chemist James Smithson, whose broad curiosity about the material world included traveling the globe to collect and study mineral samples, in particular zinc ore, and describe the mining and manufacturing practices he encountered (Rhees, 1881;Ewing, 2007).…”

Copper Metallurgy in the Jordan Valley from the Third to the First Millennia BC: Chemical, Metallographic and Lead Isotope Analyses of Artefacts from Pella

“…From this standpoint, the growing body of archaeometallurgical data has not always been assessed in ways which are consistent with the im'estigation of tbos~issues of greatest interest to archaeologists. For example, Budd and Taylor 1995) have argued mal scholars working on ancient metallurgy shouJd move away from assumptions of teclmological deter:minism and inv~tigations of pro\'enance, towards 3 greater stress upon underStanding anciem metalworking wilhin irs socionomic COntext. Obviously, technical studies are cquently of considerable interest in themsdves; sci.…”