archaeometallurgy

Aquamanile in the form of a griffin. The original is from a 15th century Nuremberg Rotschmied workshop. The pictured aquamanile was modelled by Ragna Asmus and cast by Bastian Asmus.

A griffin aquamanile made some 600 years later

I realise that I have been somewhat negligent over the past three to four months when it comes to writing. I was immersed in the most fascinating and satisfying work in the past four months, however and simply did not have time to write. Within the next few weeks I will post about the 12th to 15th century bronze and brass objects I was commissioned to reconstruct. Let us begin with my favorite piece today: The griffin aquamanile that is now housed in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

This bronze aquamanile in the form of a griffin was cast in early 2015 and can be viewed from 30 May 2015, the newly established European Hanseatic League Museum. The Griffin was modelled by Ragna Asmus after a griffin aquamanile that was made in Nurmeberg between 1425 and 1450. It is significantly younger than the lion aquamanile I have made two years previously. In the 15th century Nuremberg was a leading centre of the brass and brass-ware production and had surpassed the importance Dinant  held in the 12th and 13th centuries. From the 14th century the production of “Dinanderie” shifted from Dinant and the Meuse region to Nuremberg. After Dinant’s destruction in 1466 the metal trades in Nuremberg  became an even more important one than Dinant ever was . The numerous professions in  the Rotschmiedehandwerk  may be seen as an evidence of this upsurge in productivity.

This aquamanile was completely remodelled  in bee’s wax and cast in the lost wax process.

Aquamanile in the form of a griffin.

Literature

..for any  microscope you might happen to work with. During your microscopy sessions, did you ever wish for less of the dull work, such as noting meta data, contrast method, sample id, photo no or image width? Well – I did.

I did wish for a long time to have a way that my microscope and my camera would speak to each other whenever I change objectives. I am working with Zeiss Universal microscope, mostly with reflected polarising light, i.e. there is no objective revolver. I have to change the objectives individually, which of course, all has to do with the ability to centre the objective for certain steps in polarising microscopy.

To make a long story short: the old days where I have to sit there with a notepad and have to write down all these dull informations are over! From now on my camera, or rather my computer registers any change of my microscope objective and adds this information to my micrographs automatically.

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Wouldn’t it be great if you could add  meta data to your image  files while doing the actual photographing instead of having to do this afterwards in post processing? In this two part article I present how using QR codes and tethered shooting, can achieve this goal when documenting objects. It saves a lot of time, for example, during archaeological find processing and documentation. The first part deals with the manual creation of QR codes, the second part with a script-based solution, that automates the process of adding meta data to image files. Continue reading