A07_P01

Dating the Egyptian mummies curated at the University of Tartu Art Museum collections

Oras E¹,  Tõrv M¹, Rannamäe E¹, Anderson J²

¹University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia, ²University of Tartu Museum, Tartu, Estonia

Two ancient child mummies accompanied by a bird and a dog mummy are exhibited at the University of Tartu Art Museum, Estonia. According to museum records the mummies were brought to Estonia from Egypt by a young Baltic-German scholar and voyager Otto Friedrich von Richter in the early 19th century. Yet, their exact provenance and date was unknown. An interdisciplinary team of experts was summoned to study these unique heritage objects using modern analytical methods, including radiocarbon dating. To establish the age of these objects and their temporal relation to each other, the total of eight samples were AMS dated: four from human and four from animal mummies. The AMS dates and further modelling allowed identifying the chronological sequence of the two boy mummies showing that they were not contemporaneous. The animal mummies displayed as accompanying burial goods at the exhibition turned out to be earlier than the human specimens. Hence, we could conclude that there is no contemporaneous connection between the animal and human mummies. Furthermore, our multiple sampling approach enabled us to detect some considerable dating discrepancies between different sample types from the same object. Our study highlights the fruitfulness of combining thorough scientific expertise and multi-analytical research methods when it comes to disentangling curated heritage objects with intricate secondary history. We also exemplify the relevance of multi-proxy and multi-sample approaches for analysing complex heritage items, allowing to display a more truthful picture of the past for the research communities as well as the wider public. 

A07_P02

Radiocarbon dating of the Church of St. Margaret of Antioch in Kopčany (Slovakia): International consortium results

Povinec P¹,  Kontuľ I¹, Cherkinsky A², Hajdas I³, Gu Y^3,4, Jull A^5,6,7, Lupták T⁸, Mihály M⁶, Steier P⁹, Svetlik I¹⁰

¹Comenius University, Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Informatics , Bratislava, Slovakia, ²University of Georgia, Center for Applied Isotope Studies, Athens, USA, ³ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland, ⁴Nanjing University, School of Geography and Ocean Science, Nanjing, China, ⁵University of Arizona, Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Laboratory, Tucson, USA, ⁶Institute for Nuclear Research, INTERACT Centre, Debrecen,  Hungary, ⁷University of Arizona, Department of Geosciences,  Tucson, USA, ⁸Restauro, s.r.o., Bratislava, Slovakia, ⁹University of Vienna, VERA Laboratory, Vienna, Austria, ¹⁰Czech Academy of Sciences, Nuclear Physics Institute, Prague, Czech Republic

An international consortium of radiocarbon laboratories was established to date the origin of the Church of St. Margaret of Antioch in Kopčany (Slovakia), because its age was not well established in previous investigations. Altogether, 19 samples of wood, charcoal, mortar and plaster were analyzed. The ¹⁴C results obtained from the different laboratories as well as between the different sample types were in reasonably agreement, resulting in a ¹⁴C calibrated age of 780–870 AD (94% probability) for the Church. Although the ¹⁴C results have very good precision, the specific plateau-shape of the calibration curve in this period caused the wide range of the calibrated age. The probability distribution from OxCal calibration shows, however, that about 80% of the probability distribution lies in the period before 863 AD, implying that the Church could have been constructed before the arrival of Constantine (St. Cyril) and St. Methodius to Great Moravia. The Church thus represents, together with the St. Georges’s Rotunda in Nitrianska Blatnica, probably the oldest standing purpose-built Christian church in the eastern part of Central Europe.