Abstract
Some of the most common remains of ancient metallurgical processes are smelting and melting slags; yet the analysis of slags is uncommon relative to finished metal artifacts. A great wealth of information about furnace temperatures, redox conditions, ores, and fluxes used, desired products and unintentional by-products, and other aspects of early metallurgy is contained within slag. Through chemical and microscopic methods, these data can be extracted from slags and added to other complementary information to reconstruct the full chaîne opèratoire.
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Hauptmann, A. (2014). The Investigation of Archaeometallurgical Slag. In: Roberts, B., Thornton, C. (eds) Archaeometallurgy in Global Perspective. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-9017-3_5
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