Searching for Necho's Armour in Didyma: An Archaeological and Archaeometallurgical Study on the Archaic Armour Scales
Abstract
The dedication of arms and armour at a sanctuary was a common practice in ancient Greece, even in the case that this act was carried out by a foreigner. Accordingly, the identification of non-Greek weapons has been of particular interest to scholars for a long time, as these were deemed to have been linked to historical events.
However, the identification of these objects and the subsequent reconstruction of interaction between Greeks and non-Greeks is subject to all kinds of methodological difficulties, which has been addressed by different approaches in the past decades. Our contribution tests new research avenues that have the potential to shed a clearer light on (foreign) objects and, at the same time, reconstructions of social interaction that took place in sanctuaries as meeting points of individuals and groups from inside and outside the ancient Greek world.
We will demonstrate our approach on fragmented metal armour scales from the Archaic deposits at the sanctuary of Apollo at Didyma (Ionia). Instead of looking solely at the exterior appearance, which is often altered by corrosion, we seek to move inside these objects to determine their material properties and performance characteristics.
Analytical techniques allow us to reverse-engineer the characteristic technical steps in the production processes as well as the object biographies to a very high degree of resolution, thus complementing the readily available archaeological methods. By these means we can propose a more informed reconstruction of the appearance and purpose, and understand the implication of the practical or symbolic function of weapon finds within the sacred context in ancient Greece.