 Hello everybody. We're going back to Romania and opposite your presentation about professional archaeologists. I present about a private collector that lived in the same period and we tried to trace the provenance of some object from the collection. So some words about the collector. George Severin was a radiologist and also an artifacts collector. He was the first director of the Bucharest Municipality Museum during 1931 and 1938 and charter member of the Romanian Museumatics Association and also the editor of the first journal edited by the Bucharest Municipality Museum. But short after his death the biggest part of the collection and the house were donated to the Bucharest Municipality Museum by his wife Maria Severiano and that's why the collection became public and the name of the collection was Maria and Dr. George Severiano's collection. And based on this collection George Severiano Museum was opened in their house in 1956. Some words about the collection. George Severiano is mainly known because of his coin collection impact of almost 9000 coins dating from antiquity until modern times and over 3000 archaeological artifacts. From this almost one third are prehistoric objects while the rest of them comprise various items from antiquity until medieval times. Egyptian, Prussian, Greek, Hellenistic, Indian, Roman, Byzantine various collections of archaeological items. And now we look to trace the provenance and according to Anne Egonette provenance examines where an object has moved in between two understood as a transfer or multiple transfers of property between two or more persons. And considering this, this exchange of goods can represent a social act. The provenance can be translated as a social life of an object in commercial network from its origin to its final destination. And tracing the provenance leads to creation of a history of both the objects and also the history of the social relation between the person between these objects have moved. And about the collection of George Severiano little is known unfortunately about the provenance of the objects because he managed to publish just a few of the archaeological items and for a small part of the archaeological objects information can be found in the inventory book from 1949. But this was written 10 years later from his death so it's not a very secure source. And there are no other written sources on the provenance of the items like journals, notebooks, letters or things like this. Maybe they were at the moment but they didn't reach us. So our research is to trace the provenance of artifacts from the Severiano archaeological collection and to understand both the collection information and the social life of the collector. And how we did this first documentation starting from the data recorded in the inventory book from 1949. And we'll present here a first case study about the history of the prehistory pottery from the collection. And second where any recorded data is missing we involve modern archaeological investigation. And the second case study will be about Egyptian artifacts. So let's start with the first case study the history of the prehistory pottery. So this is the prehistoric archaeological item from the collection and as you can see the pottery is almost 60% of the collection. But most of this pottery are in fact little shirts, decorated shirts from all the prehistoric cultures from Romania. And here are some examples. So by studying the prehistoric pottery it becomes obvious that the collector tried to gather little fragments of prehistory from all the Neolithic and Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures developed in the geographic area of the Romanian territory. And when we put on the map the site from where this pottery came from this become very obvious that almost of the prehistoric pottery came from Romanian historical province. Valachia, Moldavia, Transylvania and Banat. But we know that George Sivan was a collector at office he didn't go in the fields to collect things. People came to him and he had the money. And the conclusion is that the pottery reached its collection to intermediaries. So the big question is who were these intermediaries? And by searching the history of the sites from where pottery was gathered it was a surprise to find out that the digging campaigns in those sites in the period until the death of the collector are linked only to a few names. And that the recurrent ones were in fact archaeologists that were in close relation with the collector. So we have the first and the most obvious name here Dino Rossetti was an amateur archaeologist and a private collector. I saw a very good friend with George Severino between 1928 and 1939 and they together set up in fact the Bucharest municipality museum in 1931 and coordinated the museum archaeological campaigns. Also Yvon Andreshes, we all already heard about him, was one of the founding fathers of the professional archaeology school in Romania and researcher in the National Museum of Antiquities. Later it was also the director of this museum and professor at the University of Bucharest. I saw a good friend with Severino and he relayed a story about how they saved in 1960 a bronze sword from the Bronze Age. Andreshes knew that the sword was genuine and Severino had the money to buy it and now it's in its collection. And I saw Dmitri Berkut and Yvon Nestor that were propipious of Yvon Andreshes' school and then professor of prehistoric archaeology at the University of Bucharest. So the story of the prehistoric pottery is in fact a story about the friendship relations between the collector and the handful of contemporary archaeologists. And second case study about the Egyptian artifacts. There are a few Egyptian artifacts in the collection, what you can see this time was all of them. And as general remarks we know that more than ever a fascinating ancient Egypt was manifested in that period, the end of the 19th century, the beginning of the 20th century. And the objects were sold to intermediaries or both directly by collectors who were passing through Egypt. Traders who were typically locus, procured items from their resources often illicitly and therefore in most cases information on the archaeological top context is missing. So that's why we suppose that the Egyptian artifacts from the Severino collection must have had similar path, all of them having an unknown provenance. So considering the lack of any recorded data, modern archaeometric investigation were employed and our work is still in progress. First we try to find out the concentration of the chemical elements detected in the Egyptian client's glaze and were analyzed by a portable example since spectrometer. And the conclusion was that the glaze of the Egyptian artifacts from Severino collection was colored by using copper-based pigments, a widespread method using the ancient Egypt. Moreover, the variable percent of copper oxide suggests distant periods and origin sites of the Egyptian client's items from the collection. And further documentation was made to a psychological interpretation based on the concentration of copper oxide published in previous studies. But considering other attempts made by specialists in this domain, we stop to this point and we have planned new analyzes because as you can see there is very much variation in this percentage and it's a risky business to the psychological interpretation only on this data. Also a statistical analyzer analyzes on the chemical concentration used in multivariate PCA statistical method show that the measurements made on the same sample are well correlated and this demonstrates both the relevance of the measurements and the good homogeneity of the glaze. And the variable distribution of the items in this graph of chemical concentration indicates a distinct composition of the glaze that can be related both to different raw material sources and specific types of mixing the glaze ingredients. Also we can see in the left-up part there are three items with very close chemical composition and this can be a clue for common side production or for the same geological area for the raw material used. But we have to work more to trace a specific provenance. And another case study on the Egyptian artifact, this amazing left palm of Mami's hand, there is no information concerning its provenance. However, the presence of a blue finance amulet on which hieroglyphs are inscribed placed it during the dynastic period of Egypt. The only indication regarding its dating is given by the amulet partially preserved text with rich as the king's wife, most probably Tia, who lived between 1398 and 1338 B.C. A.B.C. Christ, who was in fact the wife of Amenhotep III in the 18th dynasties in the new kingdom. And thanks goes to Janet Picton from Petri Museum for this information and also about her interpretation as a festival gift to the deceased. But Mami's hand from that period in a private collection in Bucharest sounds too good to be true. So we were skeptical and wanted to check this information about performing carbon dating both on the dry human tissue and on the linen cloth. And the results were very confusing because the dry tissue sample was dated somewhere between the 800 and 400 calibrated for Christ. While the linen cloth sample was dated next 200 years. So there may be some explanation as the finance amulet could be replicated in the last period by using models from the new kingdom. There are some examples. Or the difference between the carbon dates can be related to a late rewrapping of the Mami or to a fresh water reservoir effect of the human tissue. But for the sake of science we have to remake this carbon dating to be sure about our dates. So as final remarks the beginning of the 20th century Romania was a period of transition from private collecting to professional archaeology and public collections established by the state. The history of the prehistoric pottery makes a major contribution to the understanding of the collection formation and the social relation between the collector and contemporary archaeologists. By conflicting his collection with pottery covering almost all the pottery prehistoric cultures from Romanian historical provinces, George Severano transmitted a powerful emotion conferred by the possession of objects that thousands of years ago belong to the people he considered to be his own ancestors. Such objects serve him as evidence of continuity and as means of a symbolic communication with a distant past. And about the Egyptian artifacts were very tangled as you may see. George Severano did not manifest a special curiosity towards Egyptian artifacts. However, probably in order to keep up with the times there was a trend to have these Egyptian artifacts in your collection. He managed to acquire a small number of objects which chronologically covered the great periods of ancient Egypt. The Archaeometric study of some of the items showed diversity among them and its indicative for the Tangled Provenance Network, specific for the Egyptian artifacts market developed in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century. Thank you and we invite you to discover this collection that was recently exhibited in the collector's house in Bucharest. Thank you.