TY - JOUR A1 - Margreiter, R. A1 - Baumann, J. A1 - Mantouvalou, I. A1 - Radtke, Martin A1 - Reinholz, Uwe A1 - Strub, E. T1 - Investigations on fire-gilding N2 - Fire-gilding is a historic technique for the application of golden layers on a number of different base materials utilizing a gold amalgam. This technique leaves a significant amount of Hg in the golden layer, giving archeometrists a reliable indicator to identify firegildings. Recent findings on presumably fire-gilded objects have shown in several cases significantly lower Hg content than previously studied objects. This prompted a synchrotron-based X-ray fluorescence investigation into the Hg distribution along the material–gilding interface, as well as a series of measurements regarding the Hg content development in fire-gilded samples during artificial aging. This work presents findings on laboratory-prepared fire-gildings, indicating an Hg enrichment at the interface of firegilded silver samples. Notably, such an enrichment is missing in fire-gilded copper samples. Further, it is confirmed that fire-gilded layers typically do not undercut an Hg bulk content of 5%. In this light, it seems improbable that ancient samples that contain <5% Hg are fire-gilded. The results presented in this study might lead to a non-destructive method to identify the Hg enrichment at the interface. This might be obtained by a combination of different non-destructive measurements and might also work unambiguously in samples in which the gold top layer is altered. KW - BAMline KW - X-Ray Fluorescence KW - Gilding KW - Depth profile KW - Archaeometry PY - 2022 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:b43-552885 SN - 0003-813X SP - 1 EP - 14 PB - Wiley online library AN - OPUS4-55288 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER -