Mark Pollard

Abstract

This paper focusses attention on what is currently believed to be the earliest published chemical analysis of archaeological bronze artefacts, attributable to Johann Christian Wiegleb in 1777. Not only is this publication 13 years earlier than the previously-identified ‘earliest’ publication, it is extremely early in the history of gravimetric analysis (wet chemistry, or ‘analysis by the humid method’) and is therefore significant in the history of analytical chemistry. As well as pushing the history of analytical chemistry applied to archaeological materials back to the beginning of quantitative analytical chemistry itself, the opportunity is taken to update the list of such publications between 1790 to 1869 (Pollard 2015a) from 118 to 305, and the number from which data have been digitized from 30 to 49, thereby reporting 2825 analyses from this period. Both the list of publications and the digitized data are available at http://flame.arch.ox.ac.uk/public-resources/.

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References
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How to Cite
Johann Christian Wiegleb and the first published chemical analyses of archaeological bronzes. (2021). Historical Metallurgy, 52(1), 48-54. https://hmsjournal.org/index.php/home/article/view/34
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