Tuscany represents one of the most important ancient mining districts of Italy. Metallurgical activities have been developed since ancient times and several mining centres have been active in the region since the Etruscan period. Among these places, the Elba island and the towns of Populonia and Massa Marittima can be mentioned. In order to reconstruct the past metallurgical techniques, a multi-disciplinary approach is indeed very useful, involving both an archaeological study and an archaeometric–scientific analysis of the site of interest. One of the most complex problems to solve is represented by establishing the chronological history of metallurgical exploitation in ancient sites: archaeological remains can be sometimes incomplete; the stratigraphic succession of different archaeological horizons might have been deeply altered. Thus, dating metallurgical slags and other relicts by radiocarbon measurements can represent a very useful method. By radiocarbon AMS, we dated some charcoal samples from different stratigraphic layers in a recent excavation in Populonia in order to reconstruct the chronological evolution of ancient metallurgical production; the obtained results are well consistent with archaeological observations.
See more of Poster Session I
See more of The 10th International Conference on Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (September 5-10, 2005)