Old wine into new wineskins? "Legacy data" in research on Roman Period East Germanic iron smelting.

ABSTRACT: This paper discusses the use of "legacy data" in research on Roman Period iron smelting in the territory of the Przeworsk Culture in Magna Germania. The dataset includes results of 240 analyses of smelting slag and iron ores chemistry. A majority of these analyses were conducted in the 1950s-1980s. The quality of these data is far below present-day standards. Only major elements were reported, analytical methods were often not specified (although optical emission spectroscopy and wet chemical analyses can be assumed in such cases) and information on detection limits, precision and accuracy of the results is missing. In spite of this, a Principal Component Analysis-Agglomerative Hierarchical Clustering treatment successfully isolated observations from the three main iron smelting regions of

SUBMITTER: Zabinski G 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10586651 | biostudies-literature | 2023

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature