 So, it's my pleasure to introduce Jesse Olbert, who's a graduate student in ancient history and Mediterranean archaeology. And I had the experience of working with him on this project in the Hearst Museum recently, where we're going to hear about how we analyze the ancient public. And it's an interesting challenge with these additive materials like metals and ceramics to use XRF to decipher a little bit about the recipes that were used in these materials, which is pretty different from what I'm experienced with using it on lithics, which is, of course, a track that we don't have the issue of mixing different types of sources. So I'm interested to hear what you found in our work. Thanks for joining us. All right. This is my first time wearing a wire, so that's going to be a little wonky. But thank you, everyone. I'm fighting a cold right now, so bear with me if I need to take sips of water and things like that. All right. This summer I was lucky to study an ancient Greek bronze helmet at the Hearst Museum. The primary members of the team were myself, Jared Delaney, and Nico Trivsevich. Using a portable X-ray fluorescence or PXRF spectrometer, we measured the chemical composition of the helmet at the Hearst. The study produced several interesting conclusions about the helmet's production history and the metallurgical practices of ancient Greece. PXRF technology has been around for some time, and archaeologists have been using PXRF spectrometers and archaeological sites and archaeological material all over the world. As usual, classical archaeologists have been a little late to the draw, and as far as I'm aware, this is the first study to use a PXRF device on Greek armor from the Iron Age. So we approached this project with many questions and few expectations. In this presentation, I will introduce you to the object, briefly explain the science behind our study, present our results, and show how this changes our understanding of ancient Greek metalsmithing and military technology. So without further delay, here's the helmet, Object 8-45-97 at the Hearst Museum. It is 22 centimeters tall, 24.1 centimeters long, and 17.5 centimeters wide. The thickness of the metal is 1.5 millimeters, and that's kind of an average, because it's not consistent at all. Stylistically, it looks a lot like the Corinthian typology of Greek helmet, which is the most popular type of Greek helmet in the classical period, but it retains several unique and unexpected features. I use the term protocrinthian in my title, and I'll explain exactly what that means later in the presentation. Roughly equidistant holes run all along the bottom edges of the helmet, which you can see pretty well in this slide. Yeah, that works, okay. These must have been accommodations for an internal padding. The object was constructed in two pieces, which are held together with a series of rivets. Most of the rivets are now lost, but we still have a couple. There are long fractures running above the middle of the left and right eyes. Over the left eye are the partial remains of a rectangular patch riveted over the fracture with four rivets. Only half of the patch and two of the four rivets remain in situ. I guess you can't really see in this slide, but it's way up here. We'll get a better image of it later. On either side of the seam between the two halves, there are slightly circular-ish equidistant holes, which you can do those little white dots, and then there are remains of others. In conjunction with a small loop at the back of the helmet, these holes probably facilitated the attachment of a horsehair crest or some other decorative extension. It has a flattened neck around the backside of the helmet. It does not have ear holes, and it has squared cheek guards, which are not detachable. This last observation may seem self-evident, but it's actually a really important stylistic determiner. As you can see in this slide, the helmet is dented and damaged. On the right side of the helmet, there are two long horizontal dents and several circular dents. This is one of those circular dents, and then of course the big one. Caroline Weiss, who originally published this helmet in 1977, argued that the long dents were created by an axe and the circular dents were created by sling bullets. Other scholars have gone a step further and even suggested that these blows are what killed the original owner of the helmet. I remain unconvinced, of course, but our understanding of ancient Greek warfare has actually changed a lot since 1977. These objects were probably pretty expensive and only reserved for aristocratic minority. The material itself might not have actually provided much in the way of a physical defense, as all the weapons in this period were constructed from iron, significantly harder metal than bronze. So we might be better served thinking of this helmet as an object of display rather than a physical military tool. The PXRF spectrometer that we used in this study was a tracer 3SD, pictured here on the left and being used by Niko on the right. The spectrometer is just a handheld version of the much larger and immobile XRF machine. It is a non-destructive but less accurate method to measure the elemental composition of an archaeological object. The device emits a highly charged photon into the object. We determine the energy and size of this photon beforehand. The photons emitted by the PXRF spectrometer enter one of the atoms in the object and collide with one of its electrons, usually within the electron ring closest to the nucleus. You can see that here on the left. When an electron is knocked out of its ring, the magnetic field within the atom gets all wonky and an electron jumps from an outer layer down into the lower ring. Electrons in this lower ring require less energy than the outer electrons and the excess energy is released during this process in the form of a photon and the atom stabilizes, which you can see on this last image. The spectrometer then measures this released energy. It's measuring that little yellow line. Most atoms have three rings of electrons and these rings are called the K, L and M series, moving from the inside of the ring to the outside ring. When electrons from the next highest ring jump into the K series, they release what we call a K-alpha photon. When they jump from the outside ring, we call it a K-beta photon. On average, an atom will produce one K-beta photon for every six K-alpha photons. Sometimes we hit the electrons in the L series of an atom rather than the K series. Atoms behave a little bit more chaotically when we knock out one of the L series electrons, but this process is still predictable and trackable. Ideally, we'd like to fluoresce the electrons in the K series because they are the easiest to measure by far. In theory, the energies of every photon in this process is unique to each element in our sample. The frequency of a particular energy signature will therefore tell us the density of each element. Of course, nothing in nature is ever uniform, and there are thousands of variables that might throw this process out of whack. But in theory, this is supposed to be how it works. As I mentioned earlier, whenever you use one of these PXRF spectrometers, you have to pre-program the energy of the photon and aim it at a specific group of elements. Bronze is usually composed of nine parts copper and one part tin. Copper is Cu29, and tin is 50. So these elements were the primary targets of our study. We set the device to emit 40 kilovolts of energy at 12 microamps through Brooker's yellow filter. In other words, we limited ourselves to fluorescing elements between chromium and antimony in the K series. So chromium is here, 24, and antimony is there. So everything in between these for the K series. And anything heavier than Presidium, which is right there, 59, so everything heavier than that in the L series. Another way to think about this is that we could only read energies between 5 and 30. So you can't really see it on the slide because it's a little fuzzy, but 5 energy for the K series is right there, and 30 is right there. So we can only read things in that range. Sorry, it looks better on my computer. All right. Once we get the results, they come to us like this as a spectrum. We have to manually identify every element in our sample. The biggest peak in this slide represents the K alpha of copper, and the smaller peak is the K beta, which is unlabeled, though K betas are not labeled. Sorry, lost my place. As you notice, the labels for lead and arsenic, PB and AS, are overlapping right here. These are blown-up versions of the same test shown in the previous slide. Unfortunately, the K alpha of arsenic and the L alpha of lead are only different by 0.01 kilovolts. Luckily, the K beta peak of arsenic, which this blue line represents, shows us where it should be, this beta peak, does not overlap with any other element, so arsenic is still detectable and relatively distinguishable based on the K beta peak. This is just one example of the potential difficulties of this kind of study. Luckily, there were only trace quantities of arsenic in all of our samples, whereas there was always a substantial amount of lead. This spectrum was actually our first shot on the helmet. We shot a total of 30 points for a length of three minutes at each point. There are 11 points on each side of the helmet, three on the rivets holding the two halves together, three on the patch, and two on the patch's rivets. The resulting spectra were studied individually and as groups corresponding to their location on the helmet. The sampling process was conducted in a closed museum space over the course of a single day, and we used two methods to interpret the resulting spectra. The first method is, in my opinion, the least valuable because it is the most seaving. I was provided with an algorithm from Bruker, the manufacturer of the spectrometer, that calculates the chemical compositions of each spectrum. The algorithm addresses inter-elemental interaction, distinguishes overlapping elements, and compensates for numerous other variables that might skew the results. It is the most accurate methodology for measuring chemical composition, but only when you already know exactly which elements are in your sample. If the algorithm compensates for elemental interactions that do not actually exist in your sample, then your results will be skewed and inaccurate. This, of course, creates a paradox because you can't build an algorithm until you know how much of each element is in your sample, the algorithm that Bruker sent me was their general catch-all algorithm for archaeological bronze objects, and actually after doing some research, I think it was an algorithm that they invented for bronze cannons that they took out of the Caribbean. So the algorithm assumes that there was magnesium, iron, cobalt, nickel, copper, zinc, arsenic, lead, tin, and antimony, so those are all those up there. In reality, we did not detect any magnesium, cobalt, or antimony, and only trace amounts of nickel, zinc, and arsenic. We know for certain that the algorithm was not working properly because it produced negative percentages for some of the elements that were not actually present. Consequently, the results from the Bruker's algorithm needed to be treated qualitatively rather than quantitatively as a guideline rather than a conclusion. But luckily, as a guideline, they're actually really reassuring. The primary interpretive methodology that we used to understand our data was to calculate and compare total photon counts. Using the RTAX software, which is a more general XRF program, we identified each element in our 30-spectra. Based on the elements we identify, RTAX cancels out all the background noise and produces total photon counts for each element. On their own, these photon counts don't really tell us much. There's just way too many background variables. For example, this method can't accommodate inter-elemental interaction or overlapping elements. They cannot be used to calculate a percentage of each element in the sample. The value of a total photon count is that it allows us to create comparable ratios between two or more elements. The relationships between the elements in one part of the object can be compared to other parts of the object in order to learn a relative kelin composition of each of the object's parts. Like the good scientists that we are, we approached this experiment with several questions. Is the helmet authentic? Was it ever chemically treated? When was the patch added? How was the helmet constructed? And when was it constructed? The first and arguably most important question we had to tackle was whether Object 8-4597 was even an authentic archaeological artifact. It was purchased somewhere in France or Italy in 1900 by A. Emerson on behalf of Phoebe Hearst. It subsequently entered the Hearst collection without a known provenance. The absence of any metallic impurities and a relatively consistent makeup would have suggested that the object was constructed by a 19th century forge using industrially refined metal alloys. But the helmet actually had a relatively diverse range of chemical inclusions. The inconsistency of the metal suggests that the helmet was constructed using ancient metalsmithing techniques. Moreover, every spectrum contained some amount of iron, Fe, which you can see with all these little different blips of different sizes. Iron is a naturally occurring element in most European soils, and it tends to bleed into archaeological artifacts that have been sitting in the earth for an extended period of time. Although the true provenance of the helmet is lost, we can say with a measured degree of certainty that it was constructed using pre-industrial techniques and it was buried in the earth for an extended period of time. These initial observations also help answer our second question about the object. Normally, archaeological bronzes are covered in a light green patina, which is a copper carbonate. Underneath this copper carbonate, you can see the cuprite, which is a brownish, sort of reddish, and the copper carbonate is the light green, which everyone probably recognizes. It's all over the Statue of Liberty. Object 8-4597 was obviously cleaned at some point, and we can now see the clean bronze over much of the object. A hundred years ago, some conservationists would cover freshly cleaned copper objects with a zinc-based chemical or lacquer to keep it from corroding after it was cleaned. It is clear from our study that Object 8-4597 was not chemically treated. We never detected more than just a trace amount of zinc and there were no wildly unexpected elements. The cleaning actually turned out to be a huge benefit to our study because it allows us to get a more accurate measurement directly onto that shiny bronze surface. Alright. To understand the production process of the helmet and all of its pieces, we determined relative chemical compositions for each of the helmet's parts, the right half, the left half, the patch, the rivets on the patch, and the rivets in the scene. The copper and tin contents of our results are presented in this graph. I have intentionally removed obvious outliers except for those two blue points in the lower right down here. These two are from the right side of the helmet. And actually I should also explain that the X axis every tick is a 200,000 photons whereas the Y axis every tick is 50,000. Here and here is from here to here, I guess, is about from there to there. It's not between these two. Anyway, it's complicated. There's way more on the Y than you might be thinking there is. The right side is more damaged and less clean than the left side of the helmet so the low tin content and relatively high copper content in these blue points down here suggests that we unintentionally measured one of the cuprite or patina patches on the left side. Without these two outliers the right and left halves of the helmet have remarkably similar alloy typologies. Chemically, the only difference between the alloys of the two halves is that the right half had slightly more iron, less tin and more copper. All of the elemental ingredients that we'd expect from a more corroded bronze object. Once the corrosive samples are identified and excluded from the comparison the copper tin and lead contents of the two halves are practically identical. This suggests that the two halves of the helmet were constructed at the same time from the same batch of metal. The relatively high levels of tin in the patch here in gray suggests that it was constructed separately from the other pieces of the helmet. This low tin reading, the lower one I actually think is the result of accidentally shooting cuprite corrosion which covers one half of the patch. The cuprite which is two parts copper and one part oxygen causes the spectrometer to have more copper at the expense of the other elements in the patch such as the tin. Knowing this, the height of this point speaks to the higher than average levels of tin in the patch. The rivets on the patch here in yellow had lower than average levels of tin than the body of the helmet. The rivets in the seam in green have higher than average levels of tin. It's clear that all the measurements from the rivets fall within the larger range of values for the two halves of the helmet. But I argue that these divergences are still significant. Most importantly, the segregation of the points above and below the body's average into two distinct clusters suggests that the rivets on the patch and the rivets in the seam were made at different times from different elemental recipes. Second, the rivets both on the patch and in the seam are less thoroughly cleaned than the body of the helmet itself. Actually, you can see the cuprite covering half of the patch there that I was talking about earlier. The original conservators took care to define the rivets but they did not remove much of the cuprite. We therefore should expect the device to read much higher levels of copper and lower levels of everything else. The photons from the PXRF spectrometer had to go through the entirety of the cuprite layer before they could fluoresce any of the tin atoms below. But in fact, the copper levels in the rivets in the patch were lower than many of the measurements from the left and right halves of the helmet. So even though they're lower than some of these. This suggests that the body of the helmet, the rivets in the seam, the rivets on the patch, and the patch were all forged at different times from different recipes. The lower levels of copper are the results of a higher secondary element in the original mixture. The secondary element was lead. As this graph shows, there was a notable amount of lead in every one of our measurements. On average, the rivets in the seam and on the patch had higher amounts of lead than the body of the helmet and the patches itself had really huge amounts of lead way, way up here. Again, these characteristics support the conclusion that the patch, the rivets, and the helmet body each had different production origins. But why lead and why is there so much of it? Why use different recipes for different parts of a single object? And is this event even intentional or is it just a consequence of pre-industrial metalsmithing techniques? I think it's fair to assume that ancient metalsmiths intentionally use different elemental recipes for different object typologies. I've already argued this point in several forthcoming publications for the ancient Greek Bronze Age and I don't think it's too much of a stretch to extend this assumption into the Iron Age. In fact, I think this study directly supports that conclusion. That being said, the Greeks themselves did not distinguish between copper and bronze. They referred to both with the Greek word of calcos. Practically speaking, this kind of makes sense because most of the copper ores from Greece that we think were being used in antiquity are what some archaeo-metallurgists have termed to be a dirty copper which just means that it's copper that has more than 1% arsenic. This is why we look for arsenic in our study, actually. Arsenic copper bronze actually behaves very similarly to tin copper bronze and where I work on Crete we actually have pure arsenic ingots so we know that they would extract the arsenic from the copper, use it for trade and add it to forging recipes when they wanted to specifically make an arsenic copper bronze. Tin is much easier to work and stronger than arsenic and by the Iron Age not all bronze objects were constructed in a tin copper bronze. Tin directly increases the hardness and tensile strength of the object and in this cool graph I found so this is like how much more tensile strength than regular copper these different levels of a tin bronze and the reduction levels are referring to how much they hit it after they made the object and so what I find really interesting is that the 75% so reducing it more causes it to have less tensile strength and if you worked it more after the fact if it's a more complicated object then it's likely to have less tensile strength. The slightly higher levels of tin would have made the rivets in the seam in the patch stronger than the body of the helmet. This is exactly what you would have wanted for these object typologies. The rivets needed to keep the helmet together and the patch needed to protect the break. Lead has a relatively low melting point and it is very heavy. On the microscopic level however lead crystals do not actually mix very well with copper and tin crystals and actually this is a close up of a copper alloy and all these little grey blobs are the lead that hasn't gone into the object really and just kind of just stay there. This means that lead makes metal much easier to pour and denser but much more brittle. This is probably added to the recipes of the rivets for its forging benefits and to the patch for its added density. The high amount of lead in the patch would have made it heavier and a duller grayish color than the rest of the helmet similar to some of these lead weights in color. It probably felt great having a heavier and colorfully distinguished patch over the break on your helmet but it was actually more susceptible to shattering from blunt force than the rest of the helmet because none of that lead really seeped from an archeological perspective the fact that each piece of the helmet had a different production history is actually rather remarkable it suggests that a lot more work went into the object than we might have expected if an ancient metalsmith knew he needed to rivet the two halves of his helmet together why not make the rivets at the same time as the body of the helmet? Similarly, if he knew that he was going to rivet a patch over a break, why didn't he make the rivets in the patch all at once from the same or a slightly altered recipe? The results suggest that the rivets were constructed much earlier in bulk to be used in any or all situations that they might be applicable Ancient Greek metalsmiths probably forged a whole bunch of generic rivets all at once and then kept them around the workshop for future projects I come from a family of mechanics and my father always had a box of screws a roll of duct tape and a rubber band ball close at hand whenever he worked in his workshop and I think that the ancient metalsmiths probably had the same sort of idea the dissimilarity of the rivets on the patch seemed to suggest that either the helmet was repaired in a different workshop from where it was constructed or that it was repaired much later after the metalsmith had exhausted and replenished his box of generic rivets Object 8-4597 was probably forged in five steps forged one half of the helmet then forged the other half of the helmet pick out the rivets that you need from a box of pre-made rivets rivet the two halves together and then finish the object they would have been pretty time-consuming and laborious but it didn't require a huge amount of metalworking skill on the part of the metalsmith later Corinthian helmets were always forged from a single piece of bronze without any rivets they were constructed in three steps forged the helmet, shaped it and finished it they required less time and less labor than their two-piece predecessors but much more skill I say predecessor but we don't actually have a hard date for Object 8-4597 and there is only one other two-piece Corinthian helmet from ancient Greece this helmet is pretty poorly preserved and it was discovered at the back of the museum's storeroom at ancient Olympia without a label and without a known fine spot the chronology of the Corinthian helmet is actually a huge problem for ancient scholars the oldest one-piece Corinthian helmet the helmet in this slide was discovered in a pit at Olympia lying next to it was this decorated amphorescos as you see on the left and in this much simpler helmet on the right the amphorescos probably dates to around 700 BCE the conical shaped helmet officially of the Kegelhelm typology is the oldest helmet type of the Greek Iron Age so altogether these three objects were dated to the end of the 8th century based on these relationships most Kegelhelm helmets like this one found in Argos probably date to the last quarter of the 8th century BCE its style and design is reminiscent of the late Bronze Age helmet and it fits neatly into the larger archaeometallurgical narrative for the Eastern Mediterranean the cap of the helmet was constructed from one piece of bronze and the cheek pieces and the neck guard were riveted onto the cap crests were always popular helmet additions in antiquity but they were usually constructed of wood or horse hair rather than metal as it is here in fact I think this is one of the few metal crests that we have at the same time that the Kegelhelm was popular on mainland Greece several artistic depictions of an emerging style of helmet appeared on the island of Crete in the south and so here's Crete down here and if you're totally lost this is mainland Greece and this is Turkey alright let's see yeah these images come from the bronze plate found in a late 8th century Cretan tomb at Kavusi actually Anthony Snagras who wrote the first and last major catalogue of ancient Greek helmets identifies the helmets worn by the archers and the man between the two women over here as vaguely early Corinthian style-ish helmets based on the style of the crest the curve of the helmet at the back of the head the shape of the neck and the cheek pieces he identifies the helmets worn by the men and the chariots as the Kegelhelm typology the line on these helmets between the cheek pieces and the cap might imply that the cheek pieces were riveted onto the cap the cap itself is conical and the crests are very similar to the metallic crest of the Argos Kegelhelm although these are the best images that I could find it seems clear to me that the artist was trying to create a distinction between the helmets worn by the archers and the helmets worn by the charioted figures the Kegelhelm was a open-faced helmet while these early Cretan helmets have a relatively enclosed face open and enclosed faced helmets were in constant competition for most of antiquity unfortunately there are no archaeological examples of this 8th century Cretan helmet that we see in these images what does emerge from Crete by the middle and the end of the 7th century BCE is a whole series of beautifully decorated helmets with repose and incision these helmets do not have complete nose guards many of them have fitted cheek pieces which conform to the shape of the mouth so this little right around where your mouth would be this design feature was way before its time in the 7th century and wouldn't be seen on the mainland until the beginning of the 5th century BCE about 100 years later these Cretan helmets like objects 8-45-97 were constructed from two pieces of bronze and riveted together vertically below the crest of the helmet and you can see the line where the rivets this is what I've met right there it goes underneath this is a visor that's attached it's impossible to know whether the earlier Cretan helmets were constructed from one or two pieces because they're only ever tested in art and these characters are only ever shown in profile I think it's fair to assume that they were two piece helmets because of the later traditions two piece helmets required more time money and labor than one piece helmets and if they had the technology for one piece helmets in the 8th century then they should have had it in the 7th but they clearly don't so it follows that the helmets in the 8th century images must have been two piece helmets this narrative gives the Cretan helmet typology a very logical progression from 8th century through to the end of the 7th century BCE as metalsmiths constructed constructed this helmet type again and again it took on a more sophisticated design and developed into an object for artistic expression and aristocratic display on the mainland the narrative is much more complicated the current narrative says that the open-face Kegelhelm developed into the Illyrian style the early Illyrian style of helmet started to appear at the very beginning of the 7th century BCE the eastern-esque cone was removed from the top of the helmet but the harsh vertical cheek pieces remained instead of riveting the cheek pieces onto the cap, Illyrian helmets borrowed from the Cretan style and were formed from two pieces of bronze riveted vertically along the crest and actually this image of an early Illyrian is only half of the helmet we lost the other half of the holes where the rivets would have gone although they borrowed metal smithing techniques Illyrian helmets remained open-faced like the Kegelhelm type later Illyrian helmets, like the later Corinthian helmets were constructed out of a single sheet of bronze for the Corinthian helmet this is the current narrative down here while the Kegelhelm was developing into the two-piece Illyrian helmet and eventually the one-piece version one-piece Corinthian helmet appeared just after the introduction of the Kegelhelm at the end of the 8th century more traditionalist scholars have liked to point to this archeometallurgical narrative to praise the brilliance of Greek craftsmen the complicated one-piece Corinthian helmet seemed to basically spawn from nothing this narrative doesn't really sit right with me you can probably imagine and it was constructed to accommodate this extremely early one-piece helmet found at Olympia several scholars including Anthony Snodgrass have voiced their concern over the date of this object these three objects were found in a pit at Olympia one of the most important religious centers of ancient Greece these objects are not related to any one architectural feature so the objects might not be in their original contexts and may not actually relate to one another chronologically a priest might have simply pushed these objects aside to make room for new dedications they were not particularly flashy or decorative and there is some debate as to whether the Amphiriskos and the Kegelhelm are even contemporary and I would probably argue that they're not in reality this deposit might represent three separate dedications made over a period of 100 years for these reasons I do not think that this iteration of the Corinthian helmet belongs at the end of the 8th century and instead we should place it towards the end of the 7th century around the time when the Greek when Greek metalsmiths started to experiment with the one piece Elyrian helmet design if we ignore this seemingly misplaced Corinthian helmet there remains an important gap in the development of the Corinthian style object 8-45-97 might be the missing link between the earliest styles of Greek helmets and the later Corinthian helmets if we accept this progression for the Cretan helmets from a rudimentary enclosed style to a complex style that addresses the specific needs of the wearer then maybe this is an alternative reconstruction for the development of the Corinthian helmet and object 8-45-97 is our missing link a proto-Cryntian helmet on the mainland the Kegelhelm was the dominant helmets typology of the 8th century BCE this helps to explain the images of men in Cretan helmets fighting men in Kegelhelm helmets because it means that these two helmet types were the only helmet typologies in the Greek world during the 8th century sometime around 700 BCE Greek metalsmiths began to tweak the Kegelhelm design borrowing from Cretan metalsmithing techniques one group of metalsmiths produced a new and improved open-faced typology which became the Illyrian style this has always been the narrative for the Illyrian style but what I'm suggesting is that another group of mainland metalsmiths adopted both Cretan metalsmithing techniques and the enclosed Cretan helmet in order to create the proto-Cryntian helmet this interpretation makes Object 8-45-97 a rough contemporary to the earliest Illyrian styles meaning that it was probably constructed in the first quarter of the 7th century BCE as ancient metalsmithing techniques became more sophisticated mainland metalsmiths figured out how to create their new Illyrian and Corinthian typologies from a single sheet of bronze unlike the Cretans mainland Greeks were able to work with the metallurgical traditions and memories of the Kegelhelm in a way the Corinthian helmet is a hybridization of mainland and Cretan metalsmithing ideas of the late 8th century it was the enclosed face alternative to the open-faced Illyrian helmet although Snoggrass did not know about Object 8-45-97 he did know about the two-piece Corinthian helmet from Olympia the one that was found in the back of the storeroom he suggested that it might actually have been one of the helmets depicted in Cretan bronzes if he's right it would make the Hearst helmet even older than what I proposed a contemporary of the Kegelhelm in the 8th century but again I don't think that's right first off the Cretan helmets don't have nose guards and it doesn't make sense to me that they would suddenly abandon these if they existed in earlier versions of the helmet it also brings back this proposal also brings back to the forefront the issues I took with the traditional narrative for Corinthian helmets it seems unlikely to me that this relatively complex design simply spawned out of nothing whereas the Kegelhelm has clear Near Eastern origins to sum up this study offers two important conclusions about ancient Greek metalsmithing and ancient Greek military technology first the chemical diversity of the helmet's body its rivets its patch and its patch suggest that every piece was forged at different times from different recipes this means that metalsmiths probably kept a large number of premade rivets around their workshops they could use in any of their projects this in turn speaks to the relative sophistication of the metalsmiths themselves and gives ancient rivets a sort of one size fits all quality rivets were used in many different objects of varying shapes and sizes from large vessels to small knives a metalsmith probably had to keep a range of rivets close at hand further PXRF work needs to be done with rivets specifically to better understand how this really worked the second conclusion rewrites the narrative of ancient Greek defensive technology the single piece Corinthian helmet did not miraculously spawn from nothing but instead represents the confluence of mainland and Cretan metallurgical traditions it achieved the cranial strength of the kegohelm of the facial protection of the Cretan helmet the proto-Crentian helmet was an important first step as early 7th century metalsmiths struggled to achieve this balance this historic interpretation fits neatly into the processionalist reading of Greek archaeology the one that Anthony Snodgrass came up with but it relies on a pretty shaky evidence admittedly I expect that our understanding of ancient military technology will continue to change as classical archaeologists publish new objects and use new technologies to challenge entrenched narratives we will never know for certain where or when object 8-45-97 was actually excavated but that doesn't preclude it from helping us understand ancient Greek military technology and ancient Greek metalsmithing thank you we have a few minutes for questions just straight yeah this is related to you were saying this was related to rivets well I was thinking that yeah well it's related to anything this is a study they did on just any tin copper bronze and the way that they did they measured it very scientifically the way they did reduction because they had little samples and then they basically measured and everything else so what do you think is going on when you have across one say a hemisphere of a helmet chemical of consistencies that may have had something to do with thermal regulation during the process what wars they were using what fuels they were firing because in a reduction atmosphere you're going to have to deal with fuels so what's your take on what was going on with those consistencies as opposed to somebody working with maybe more standardized range of rivets that come from you know particular type of technology this is generally my problem with all metallurgical right now because we use things like this all the time where we look at what people have done in a closed setting but it was way more chaotic one of the things that I it was completely random and it's really hard to know how they were doing it and actually I did a lot of work with ingots with bronze ingots and one of my favorite things about ingots is that you can always if you look at a microstructure on the inside the part that was touching the mold was completely different shaped than the part that was open to the air because just because the difference in temperature between the mold and would have completely changed how the metal formed so it's just chaos and a mess so I don't really know but I do think that the fact that the two halves are related suggests that they were under the same conditions when they were made and the fact that the other pieces are slightly different that they must not have been in similar conditions but there is the possibility that he could have just waited a day and then made the rivets or something like that so I'm knowing that down the road they can use different techniques to reform those little guys as opposed to the techniques needed to form the plates I'm very interested in the sequence of operations in which people might have organized their labor in their materials it's interesting to think about if somebody mentally mapping out how much tensors they can get if they don't overly reduce something that's interesting perhaps different hands in the process my general theory is that it was all done by color rather than anything else and I think that they cared more about the color than the actual properties that the metal provided on Crete we have a whole bunch of arsenic really heavy arsenic bronzes that would have, because arsenic starts to evaporate before the copper forms so it's all on the surface so if you would have touched these things for a really long amount of time you probably would have started to poison yourself but they really liked it for jewelry and my theory is because it looks very similar to silver and they were trying to copy the look of silver so I think that they cared more about what it looked like especially with these things which everyone always likes to look at helmets and say this is only about a millimeter thick and it's copper against iron it's not going to do much it might just be more important to think about how brittle they're making the metal and if you get a rotation for a helmet it cracks when it gets packed and they're on the way to trunk a few more people buy your helmets because their stuff is fragile and actually the later Corinthian helmet that I showed has the same break over the eye and so when I came into this I was wondering if maybe it was a manufacturing because everything is so random maybe they just had a whole bunch of pre-made patches too or something like that and they just made it and then did it but who knows yeah taking into account the Hearst helmet that you looked at and given the millimeter, millimeter and a half thickness and given the design it clearly limits the ability to see, hear and shout out why would one want to wear one of these in battle it doesn't seem you're getting much of any history could be psychological there's someone actually you mentioned the tin hats of World War 1 things like that that sort of like it feels good to have something metallic and shiny on your head if you're going into battle I think also I think that these things were not necessarily always worn in battle and that these sorts of helmets and things like this were the kind of things that you would put up on display or just wear around the city in order to show off that you're the soldier and everything else then again it could also be there's another theory that the guys who were wearing this were just kind of standing there not doing anything so they didn't really need they didn't need to communicate they didn't need to really do anything except stand there and take missile weapons in literature we do have statements made that they were worn I'm not sure if they're worn by everybody they're always worn in base painting right well that's I can understand why some people may not want to have worn them at all what I would like to do in the future is get a standard of these elemental types so that I could use an algorithm kind of the one that Brueger has in order to figure out the exact chemical composition then I can test it in the kind of ways that you would test a bicycle helmet and actually figure out if you know if the guy fell over even if it would cause brain damage or it would just that's what I'd like to do in the future but that requires more time and money Andy so no I haven't that's an interesting very interesting idea actually but no I haven't heard that one of the things I've been struggling with is the idea that they would carry swords at all because because they always carry them loosely and require two hands I don't know what they're doing maybe they're cupping it in there or something and they're all wearing enclosed faced helmets on that interesting they're working around it somewhere secondly of the tens of thousands of bronzes discovered of Olympia almost none of them are found in primary contexts they're almost all in the fields it's clear that they result from multiple clans into the Sanctuary and so in other words your point about the discovery of the Olympia helmet together with that early proto-Carinthian alabaster I couldn't figure out what it was it's labeled as an Amphirisco in fact there's no incision probably even 700 I'd say 725 700 that could be quite accidental in any pit or in any field Helena's tenement dates it but they didn't get to circle your argument what's the latest idea so I'm all alone with you messing around yeah was there anything else oh yeah so did you actually arrive at any conclusion about the dents and cracks and so on I mean did the guy really get a whack in the head I've been thinking about this yes I'm going to rock so when I was growing up I played the saxophone in school and everything else at one point I remember I was sitting and I dropped it onto my music stand and it completely folded in half just a really small distance and so I've been thinking about this as I've been going through this project and trying to come to an answer about these dents but I think at this point it could have just been the way the guy put it into a pit and it could have caused that dent the copper it can be surprisingly malleable I mean the thing about a helmet like that that's a 1-2mm thing is that it would be okay at repelling a cutting blow particularly if you had a thick leather or even wool that yeah that's the and we know that they did wear them because actually we have the gravestones where they should have had but it would be very bad at repelling a penetrating like a sphere so one does wonder in fact whether by the time that they have it reduced the thrusting sphere whether in fact that the bronze part of the helmet is essentially cosmetic I don't know if anyone's done any dating on the thrusting sphere tips and I'd be interested, I know that there was a recent book that got a lot of heat because it wasn't very scientific by Chris Matthews or Christopher Matthews we've got thousands of them so one of the things I've been thinking about on their shields which we know I mean their shields and they must have worked pretty well occasionally they have bronze decoration on the front yeah exactly so I'm wondering if it's the same thing for the helmets and the bronze is just more of like a covering less than a million to them the shield the shield faces are sort of thin like sheet paper yeah okay so these are a little bit thicker but not by much there's a helmet perhaps in New York that has a name on it how does that relate to the one of the first yeah well actually the one, the Creighton helmet is, that might be the one you're thinking of at the Met let's see it's signed it says like Nearcos Amy oh I did, uh oh anyway the Creighton helmet the one that's two rivets that's riveted together has an inscription on it and a lot of them do have inscriptions most of these objects were found in religious contexts so they were probably dedicated dedications that people made I mean to get into oh okay there it is so it actually says right here you can kind of make it out but it says I am I am of someone with a proper name so anyway a lot of these were probably inscribed after they were dedicated whereas they were probably not inscribed during production or anything else though actually they could have been I think about it but there's no nothing that we could say about that so few of them actually sit right out like I am a dedication for someone they mostly just say I am of someone or this belongs to someone or something like that any other questions I was wondering if anyone, any other studies have been done in these helmets perhaps using a destructive method like ICMS for more accurate I would love to do one of those exactly right yeah maybe a little that's really what's needed for more time yeah no absolutely we would need to do I would love to cut one of these open and look at the microstructures just at that because we would be able to tell we'd get a rough estimation of how many times the guy hit it while he was forging it that kind of thing because they didn't have squelching technology or anything like that but none of that stuff would ever happen I don't think just based on the legality of archeological objects specifically in Greece and Italy where I work on site you can't even really clean them sometimes I've had to do XRF studies on corrosion there's a ton of copper great but that's just the way the system works over there