Renewed shall be blade that was broken: Archaeometallurgical study and conservation of swords and seaxes from Merovingian Alsace

This poster focuses on the results of the Acies Ferri PhD, specifically the convergence of the archaeometallurgical study with the conservation of the studied weapons. The weapons are studied on three distinct levels: macroscopic (Fischbach et al., 2025), microsopic and chemical (Heal et al., 2024). To enable the microscopic and chemical study, pertinant weapons are identified, based on their level of preservation and representivity within the corpus of each site. These weapons are sampled with two distinct samples at different heights, allowing for an overview of the cross section of the blade without cutting it in half. The spaces left by sampling are backfilled with bi-component epoxy resin to restore the visual appearance of the weapon. The goal of this poster is to show that this form of sampling not only obtains a great deal more data on the weapons than can be obained with other methods, but also to underscore that such methods are not the end of life for an object.