Disparities in Court Sentencing: a Tasmanian perspective

An analysis of the allocation of court penalties for alcohol-related driving offences shows marked disparities between the three magisterial areas of Tasmania Benches differ significantly in the usage of types, combinations and quantities of different sanctions.     

The production of speiss (iron arsenide) during the Early Bronze Age in Iran

In this paper, analyses of some unusual slag samples from the prehistoric site of Tepe Hissar in northeastern Iran are presented. These slags are the remains of a five-thousand-year-old pyrotechnological process that produced speiss, a quasi-metallic material usually formed as an accidental by-product of copper or lead smelting. We argue that the “speiss slags” from Tepe Hissar suggest the intentional production of iron–arsenic alloy (“speiss”) in prehistory. Why the Tepe Hissar metalworkers produced speiss is a question that requires further investigation, but our preliminary assessment suggests that it was to provide arsenic as an alloying component for arsenical copper, the preferred copper alloy during much of the Early Bronze Age in Iran, and widely used across the ancient world. This recognition significantly advances our understanding of the early stages of metallurgy in the Old World.     

Establishing the Prehistoric Cultural Sequence for the Lopburi Region, Central Thailand

This study comprises the first archaeologically-defined chronological and cultural sequence for central Thailand. Based on collaborative research between the Thai–Italian Lopburi Regional Archaeological Project and the Thai–American Thailand Archaeometallurgy Project, the results of excavations at seven pre- and protohistoric sites that witnessed three millennia of local cultural development, from the early second millennium BC onward, are synthesized herein. This study fills a significant gap in Thailand’s prehistory, also identifying important cultural interactions ranging into southern China and Vietnam that led to the formation during the second millennium BC of a ‘Southeast Asian Interaction Sphere’. This interaction sphere, at the close of the second millennium BC, facilitated the transmission of the knowledge of copper-base metallurgy from southern China into Thailand, where it reached the communities of the Lopburi Region who took advantage of their ore-rich environment. At the end of the first millennium BC, strong South Asian contacts emerge in Southeast Asia. Among this study’s salient contributions is the characterization of these critical prehistoric antecedents, which culminated in a process of localization of exogenous elements, usually termed ‘Indianization’. The impact of this dynamic process was initially felt in central Thailand in the late first millennium BC, leading over time to the rise there, by the mid first millennium AD, of one of Southeast Asia’s first ‘state-like’ entities.     

5,000 years old Egyptian iron beads made from hammered meteoritic iron

The earliest known iron artefacts are nine small beads securely dated to circa 3200 BC, from two burials in Gerzeh, northern Egypt. We show that these beads were made from meteoritic iron, and shaped by careful hammering the metal into thin sheets before rolling them into tubes. The study demonstrates the ability of neutron and X-ray methods to determine the nature of the material even after complete corrosion of the iron metal. The iron beads were strung into a necklace together with other exotic minerals such as lapis lazuli, gold and carnelian, revealing the status of meteoritic iron as a special material on a par with precious metal and gem stones. The results confirm that already in the fourth millennium BC metalworkers had mastered the smithing of meteoritic iron, an iron–nickel alloy much harder and more brittle than the more commonly worked copper. This is of wider significance as it demonstrates that metalworkers had already nearly two millennia of experience to hot-work meteoritic iron when iron smelting was introduced. This knowledge was essential for the development of iron smelting, which produced metal in a solid state process and hence depended on this ability in order to replace copper and bronze as the main utilitarian metals.     

天一阁藏书保护经验谈

天一阁经历了430余年的风雨考验,至今藏书丰富,但破损严重。调查结果证实,书虫确是直接危害害古籍的最大杀手,在现有条件下,手工除虫和日常养护结合是一种切实可行的保护措施。     

Prehistoric copper production and technological reproduction in the Khao Wong Prachan Valley of Central Thailand

This paper concerns the identification and explanation of change in prehistoric extractive metallurgical behaviour in the Iron Age Khao Wong Prachan Valley of central Thailand. This metallurgical complex is amongst the largest in Eurasia and constitutes Southeast Asia's only documented pre-modern copper-smelting evidence. The two Iron Age smelting sites investigated, Non Pa Wai (NPW) and Nil Kham Haeng (NKH), provide a sequence of metallurgical consumption and production evidence from c. 500 BCE to c. 500 CE. The enormous quantity of industrial waste at these sites suggests they were probably major copper supply nodes within ancient Southeast Asian metal exchange networks. Seventy-six excavated samples of mineral, technical ceramic and slag from NPW and NKH were analysed in hand specimen, microstructurally by reflected-light microscopy and scanning electron microscopy and chemically by polarising energy-dispersive X-ray fluorescence spectrometry and scanning electron microscopy with energy-dispersive X-ray fluorescence spectrometry. The analytical data were used to generate detailed technological reconstructions of copper-smelting behaviour at the two sites, which were refined by a programme of field experimentation. Results indicate an approximately 1,000-year trend of Valley copper smelters' improving technical proficiency from what may be an experimental phase of production in the mid-first millennium BCE. This amelioration in production was accompanied by a substantial increase in the human effort of copper extraction. This shift in local ‘metallurgical ethos’ is interpreted as a response to rising regional demand for copper in late prehistory.