ABSTRACT

During the interdisciplinary project “ROXIANA,” funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR) and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), more than 1,000 metal artifacts and other metallurgical remains from Central Asian sites dating from the Chalcolithic to the Early Iron Age have been studied. This chapter focuses on the studies on metal artifacts related to the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC). The primary aim of the investigations was the identification of the alloys used in the different artifacts to detect a possible relation between specific alloys and typological groups (i.e., on a possible choice of materials). In addition to the determination of the chemical composition, lead isotope analyses on selected metal objects were conducted in order to discuss the origin of the raw material.