I don't quote Ronald Reagan often, but brace yourselves because I'm going to quote him now:
"There you go again."
Reagan delivered that line in an exchange with Jimmy Carter in a presidential debate in 1980. He said it following a laundry list of claims by Carter about Reagan's stance on healthcare issues, famously dismissing what he regarded as a bunch of inaccurate nonsense.
Most of the latest temper tantrum of inaccurate nonsense delivered to the world by demonstrated liar, accomplished plagiarist, and former Facebook user J. Hutton Pulitzer can be just as easily waved off as foot stomping that is not relevant to the "evidence" that he has put forward to support his claim of an ancient Roman visit to Nova Scotia. There is one point I wanted to discuss, however, that relates directly to misinformation about the Nova Scotia sword.
In her analysis of the sword, Christa Brosseau found the copper alloy used to make the sword to be 35% zinc. The high level of zinc (indicating a modern brass) was one of several observations that led Brosseau to conclude that the sword was probably manufactured sometime after 1880. Brosseau wrote that "a brass that is being put forward as ancient which contains a zinc content greater that 28% is suspicious."
In his post, Pulitzer seems to be claiming that ancient Roman artifacts commonly had levels of zinc in the 35% range. He writes:
"There you go again."
Reagan delivered that line in an exchange with Jimmy Carter in a presidential debate in 1980. He said it following a laundry list of claims by Carter about Reagan's stance on healthcare issues, famously dismissing what he regarded as a bunch of inaccurate nonsense.
Most of the latest temper tantrum of inaccurate nonsense delivered to the world by demonstrated liar, accomplished plagiarist, and former Facebook user J. Hutton Pulitzer can be just as easily waved off as foot stomping that is not relevant to the "evidence" that he has put forward to support his claim of an ancient Roman visit to Nova Scotia. There is one point I wanted to discuss, however, that relates directly to misinformation about the Nova Scotia sword.
In her analysis of the sword, Christa Brosseau found the copper alloy used to make the sword to be 35% zinc. The high level of zinc (indicating a modern brass) was one of several observations that led Brosseau to conclude that the sword was probably manufactured sometime after 1880. Brosseau wrote that "a brass that is being put forward as ancient which contains a zinc content greater that 28% is suspicious."
In his post, Pulitzer seems to be claiming that ancient Roman artifacts commonly had levels of zinc in the 35% range. He writes:
"With the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility — Office of Science Education specifically citing that a zinc level of 28% falls almost exactly in the middle of the range PROVEN to be both Roman and up to 2,500 years old, who does one trust?"
When dealing with Pulitzer, the safe answer to the "who does one trust" question is always the same: not Pulitzer.
The webpage he links to does indeed say that copper alloys classified as brass contain between 5% and 45% zinc. It says the Romans made brass, but it does not say that the Romans made high zinc brass. They did not. I'll back up my statement with a couple of quoted references (thanks to my readers for pointing these out), and then finish off my discussion of Pulitzer's characterization of Roman brass with a helpful meme.
Here is quote from "A Roman Late-Republican Gladius from the River Ljubljanica," a 2000 paper by Janka Istenic:
The webpage he links to does indeed say that copper alloys classified as brass contain between 5% and 45% zinc. It says the Romans made brass, but it does not say that the Romans made high zinc brass. They did not. I'll back up my statement with a couple of quoted references (thanks to my readers for pointing these out), and then finish off my discussion of Pulitzer's characterization of Roman brass with a helpful meme.
Here is quote from "A Roman Late-Republican Gladius from the River Ljubljanica," a 2000 paper by Janka Istenic:
"The majority of Roman fresh cementation brasses, unadulterated with scrap bronze, seem to contain about 20% of zinc, little lead, and a small amount of tin (cf. Jackson, Craddock 1995, 93; Craddock, Lambert 1985, 164)."
Here is what is says about Roman brass on Wikipedia, which one would think would be an easy enough source to consult:
"Brass made during the early Roman period seems to have varied between 20% to 28% wt zinc.[71] The high content of zinc in coinage and brass objects declined after the first century AD and it has been suggested that this reflects zinc loss during recycling and thus an interruption in the production of new brass.[72]"
Finally, there is a 2006 paper ("Neutron Activation and X-Ray Fluorescence Analyses of Early Roman Age Bohemian Artifacts") that I saw bandied around Facebook with some excitement because those reading it thought it indicated that some Roman brass contained up to 85% zinc. They were referring to Table 2, apparently, which they were reading wrong: the table shows only one entry for an artifact with a zinc level above 26%. The "85.7" in the Zn column under "Drinking Horns" is saying that 85.7 percent of the drinking horns in the sample have 0-2 percent zinc.
There is no evidence of which I'm aware of Roman brass with a zinc content greater than 30%. That means there is no evidence that the metals in the Nova Scotia sword could have been made in ancient Rome.
It's interesting to note that Pulitzer's attempts to discredit the testing of the sword have now moved from claiming a conspiracy to fake the results of the test (by swapping swords) to claiming that Brosseau's results are in line with what we expect of ancient Roman brass. This is not an insignificant shift, as he is basically admitting that his XRF results (which he still has not described in detail) are garbage compared to what Brosseau produced. I have a feeling he looked at Brosseau's summary of her analyses and realized there was no longer a path for him to claim that his alleged testing was somehow "superior" to hers. So now's he's left having to argue that the Romans could have indeed made that metal. Good luck with that argument - it's not a winner.
Roman brass with 35% zinc? There you go again . . .
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