Non-ferrous metal of the Tagar culture: the history of studies of the composition of copper-based alloys in the 1860s - 1950s

The paper focuses on the history of the studies of the chemical composition of bronze and copper products of the Tagar archaeological culture in the period from the 1860s to the 1950s. G.V. Struve was one of those who received the first results and published the information about the composition of the knives from the Minusinsk hollow. Materials for chemical analysis were provided to him by V.V. Radlov, the initiator of that analysis. Chemical analyses of archaeological metal, a part of which was later attributed by archaeologists to the Tagar culture, were also conducted in the XIX century by the chemists F.F. Beilstein, E.F. von Bibr, D.A. Porzhezinski, P.A. Grigoriev, A.A. Kartsev, D.A. Sabaneyev and F.K. Kruger. They were mainly professors of chemistry at universities of Moscow, St. Petersburg and Tomsk. The attempts to organize planning of analytical work on metal study on the territory of Russia in general and Siberia in particular testify to the appearance of the first theoretical basis of application data on the elemental composition of bronzes in historical constructions of the XIX century. The first organizations of this kind were Chemical-technical commission of the Anthropological exhibition Committee, established in 1877, and the Commission on conduction of chemical-technical analyses of ancient bronzes of the Imperial archaeological society, founded in 1881. Chemical analyses of ancient metal during the mentioned period were carried out by the "wet" method, successive chemical decomposition. Significant difficulties in the ancient metal study in Russia occurred in the first quarter of the XX century. The crisis phenomena, associated with the methodological gap between the world and Russian sciences and coincided with the beginning of the source base growth represented by a large number of archaeological finds, were overcome by G.P. Sosnovski and due to the discovery of the Tagar culture. A significant proportion of implements of this culture were made from bronze and copper. The final approach to the study of the elemental composition of ancient bronzes by chemical analysis appeared in the 1950s. Analytical work by the chemists L.P. Kashtanov and A.V. Korolev were the last examples of general Siberian metal research. The 1960s are marked by the introduction of mass-spectrum analyses and the appearance of a separate subject study of archaeology dealing with the elemental composition of non-ferrous metals of the Tagar culture.

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