出版社:Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas
摘要:In the late nineties, excavations in La Rochelle (France) have discovered the remains of a royal mint of the sixteenth century. This discovery enabled the collection of artefacts directly related to the manufacture of coins. The exceptional corpus gathered is the subject of a study of the chaîne opératoire of coining in the medieval time. Special attention is paid to an operation which takes place before the strike: the blanching of blanks. Well documented in ancient times, the samples from La Rochelle offer the opportunity to study this process during the medieval period and in a royal mint. In addition, thanks to reconstitution experiments, it is possible to define a reaction mechanism that helps to understand our historical observations.