{"id":28302,"date":"2014-10-17T13:56:51","date_gmt":"2014-10-17T17:56:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=28302"},"modified":"2014-10-17T13:56:51","modified_gmt":"2014-10-17T17:56:51","slug":"interesting-discovery-about-the-recent-anglo-saxon-gold-find","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/10\/17\/interesting-discovery-about-the-recent-anglo-saxon-gold-find\/","title":{"rendered":"Interesting discovery about the recent Anglo-Saxon gold find"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As far back as the seventh century, they had <a href=\"http:\/\/www.independent.co.uk\/news\/science\/archaeology\/news\/britains-greatest-treasure-hoard-reveals-how-goldsmiths-cheated-their-saxon-clients-9799977.html\" target=\"_blank\">metallurgical tricks<\/a> to make poor quality gold jewellery look far better:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Scientists, examining Britain\u2019s greatest Anglo-Saxon gold treasure collection, have discovered that it isn\u2019t quite as golden as they thought.<\/p>\n<p>Tests on the famous Staffordshire Anglo-Saxon treasure, a vast gold and silver hoard found by a metal detectorist five years ago, have now revealed that the 7th century Anglo-Saxon goldsmiths used sophisticated techniques to make 12-18 karat gold look like 21-23 karat material.<\/p>\n<p>Scientific research, carried out over the past two years on behalf of Birmingham City and Stoke-on-Trent City councils, which jointly own the hoard, has revealed that the Anglo-Saxon goldsmiths had discovered an ingenious way of, metallurgically, dressing mutton up as a lamb. It appears that they deliberately used a weak acid solution \u2013 almost certainly ferric chloride \u2013 to remove silver and other non-gold impurities from the top few microns of the surfaces of gold artefacts, thus increasing the surfaces\u2019 percentage gold content and therefore improving its appearance. This piece of Anglo-Saxon high tech deception turned the surfaces of relatively low karat, slightly greenish pale yellow gold\/silver alloys into high karat, rich deep yellow, apparently high purity gold.<\/p>\n<p>Archaeologists had never previously realised that Anglo-Saxon goldsmiths had developed such technology.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe had no idea they were doing it,\u201d said Dr Eleanor Blakelock, a leading British archaeometalurgist who carried out the tests on the Staffordshire hoard gold.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>H\/T to David Stamper for the link.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As far back as the seventh century, they had metallurgical tricks to make poor quality gold jewellery look far better: Scientists, examining Britain\u2019s greatest Anglo-Saxon gold treasure collection, have discovered that it isn\u2019t quite as golden as they thought. Tests on the famous Staffordshire Anglo-Saxon treasure, a vast gold and silver hoard found by a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,7,15],"tags":[288,872,570],"class_list":["post-28302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-history","category-technology","tag-archaeology","tag-chemistry","tag-england"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7mu","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28302","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28302"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28302\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28303,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28302\/revisions\/28303"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}