Archaeometric Analysis of Copper Coins from the Golden Horde Period from a Bulgarian Settlement as an Instrument of Artificial Intelligence
Main Article Content
Abstract
The work is a pioneer in studying of the chemical composition at the micro-impurity level of archaeological copper coins as an information basis for identifying the features of monetary circulation in the medieval state.
An interdisciplinary study of the numismatic material from the Bulgarian settlement of 98 copper coins, represented by 91 Golden Horde, 6 foreign coins of the same period and one coin of the pre-Mongol period of the Zengid dynasty, was conducted. The article contains attribution with images of the obverse and reverse of coins and data of archaeometric chemical composition study of monetary artifacts using two independent methods – X-ray fluorescence and emission spectral.
This is the first interdisciplinary study in our country at present time, covering a representative collection of copper coins of various rulers and mints from archaeological materials of the Bulgarian settlement. As a result of studying the chemical composition of the coins, the ratios of impurities in copper alloys were determined, which divide the collection into ten main groups, including coins of various minted courts and rulers of a certain date. The determination of the impurity composition allows not only to classify coins into groups, but also to put forward reasonable hypotheses about the geographical location of copper deposits used for minting.
The database, compiled from the research results and combining numismatic attribution, coin images, and chemical composition data, is published as an open dataset in the Zenodo repository and is intended for the application of machine learning and artificial intelligence methods in the tasks of automatic identification and provenance analysis of medieval coins.
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References
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