Maxime L’Héritier Florian Téreygeol

Abstract

The liquation and drying process is used to separate low amounts of silver from coppers, which spread in Europe at least from the 15th century onwards. Agricola was the first to describe extensively this new process in Book 11 of his De re metallica. A few metallurgical treatises from modern times evoke it as well, yet owing to the lack of archaeological data very little is known about this process and its products. Hence, several experiments reproducing the whole liquation and drying sequence were conducted on the experimental platform at Melle (France). Products and by-products were analysed by several methods (XRF, LA-ICP-MS, LIBS) so as to create a first reference corpus. This paper aims to present these experimental results and Tto compare them with analyses of copper-lead alloys coming from French archaeological sites, providing a new perspective on this process at the end of the Middle Ages.

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References
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How to Cite
From copper to silver: Understanding the saigerprozess through experimental liquation and drying. (2021). Historical Metallurgy, 44(2), 136-152. https://hmsjournal.org/index.php/home/article/view/154
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