Chemical Analysis on Roman Maile Rings

[Jozef W]

This might be a long shot, but does anyone have any information on a chemical analysis performed on hamata rings? I know they were made of wrought iron, but it would be great to see what the actual carbon content of the rings were, as well as the amount of siliceous slag present.

[Marcus Mummius]

Salve Jozef,

This pdf article has some info on the carbon content of several Roman era mailshirts:
http://home.armourarchive.org/members/a ... %e4rvi.pdf

Vale,
Jef

[Jozef W]

Here is another link to some more analysis from the Oldsaksamlingen in Oslo. It is quite comprehensive, and even includes some spectrographics, but I'd really like to see a straight chem analysis showing all main and traces elements if it has been publised.

http://www.vikingsna.org/translations/ringweave.pdf

[Erik D. Schmid]

Jozef,

What you are looking for is very rare. The reason being is that it is quite expensive. Add to that the fact that in order to get a decent estimate, you have to have a large sample. I know of no Roman era links that have been researched in this fashion unfortunately.

On a side note, I never thought that when I put those articles into PDF formate that they would ever see such wide distribution. :lol:

[Pop Alexandra]

Thanks for sharing this chemical analysis. Really useful as a baseline for my own projects. Is the analyzer you used reliable?