Provenancing bronze: exclusion, inclusion, uniqueness, and Occam's razor

Villa, Igor Maria (2016). Provenancing bronze: exclusion, inclusion, uniqueness, and Occam's razor. In: Grupe, Gisela; McGlynn, George C. (eds.) Isotopic landscapes in Bioarcheology (pp. 141-154). Heidelberg: Springer 10.1007/978-3-662-48339-8_8

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The task of identifying the provenance of archeological objects is often called "fingerprinting". Amongst the evidence currently used are chemical and isotopic compositions. In contrast to human fingerprints, which according to present forensic knowledge are unique, archeometric fingerprinting is not yet able to identify with certainty the source(s). Exclusion is more decisive than inclusion: according to archeometric arguments an artifact can be certainly incompatible with a number of sources, but can be possibly compatible with a number of others. A judicious combination of several chemical and isotopic indicators can vastly reduce the number of ambiguous assignments and may ultimately lead to a very successful archeological tool.

Item Type:

Book Section (Book Chapter)

Division/Institute:

08 Faculty of Science > Institute of Geological Sciences

UniBE Contributor:

Villa, Igor Maria

Subjects:

500 Science > 550 Earth sciences & geology
900 History > 930 History of ancient world (to ca. 499)

ISBN:

978-3-662-48338-1

Publisher:

Springer

Language:

English

Submitter:

Igor Maria Villa-Toscani

Date Deposited:

06 Jun 2018 16:19

Last Modified:

05 Dec 2022 15:13

Publisher DOI:

10.1007/978-3-662-48339-8_8

URI:

https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/116179

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