Under the surface: silvering in Adrian Athenaeum

Abstract

The recovery of a metal workshop dated to the sixth century AD, superimposed to the Hadrian's Athenaeum in Piazza Madonna di Loreto, Rome, provided the opportunity to identify a series of metallurgical processes linked to the two chaînes opératoires related to copper, bronze, silver and lead productions. Some analysed fragments presented superficial treatment identified as silvering, the focus of this paper. The main aim is to investigate the signs of the surface treatment on the artefacts and discuss what methods would be best employed to analyse and interpret them in order to identify the process to which they relate. Different analytical techniques were used to obtain information on the superficial layer, and their pros and cons are presented so as to discuss how analytical limits can affect the interpretation of a process and the identification of an object. The conclusions reached here are necessarily limited because of the scarce number of samples analysed and the techniques used.