DOI 10.1393/ncc/i2006-10041-y IL NUOVO CIMENTO Vol. 30 C, N. 1 Gennaio-Febbraio 2007 Non-destructive characterisation of a Villanovan sword using time-of-flight neutron diffraction( ∗ ) L. Bartoli( 1 ), S. Siano( 1 )( ∗∗ ), W. Kockelmann( 2 ), J. Santisteban( 2 ), M. Miccio( 3 ) and G. De Marinis( 4 ) ( 1 ) IFAC-CNR - via Madonna del Piano, I-50019 Sesto Fiorentino, Italy ( 2 ) Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, ISIS Facility - Chilton, OX11 0QX, UK ( 3 ) Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici della Toscana - Largo il Boschetto 3 50100, Firenze, Italy ( 4 ) Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici delle Marche - via Birarelli 18 60121, Ancona, Italy (ricevuto il 31 Ottobre 2006; pubblicato online il 9 Febbraio 2007) Summary. — In the present work we report an example application of time-of- flight neutron diffraction for the non-destructive characterisation of ancient bronzes. A Villanovan sword tightly joined to its scabbard by corrosion has been investigated. Data on alloy composition of the different parts and information about the manu- facturing techniques have been successfully achieved. The present study is part of an extensive non-destructive investigation program concerning bronze productions of Central Italy during the Iron Age. PACS 61.12.-q – Neutron diffraction and scattering. PACS 81.05.Bx – Metals, semimetals, and alloys. PACS 81.70.-q – Methods of materials testing and analysis. 1. – Introduction In the last years time-of-flight neutron diffraction (TOF-ND) has been proposed for non-destructive characterisation of archaeological materials such as ceramics [1,2], met- als [3-8] and marbles [9]. These experiments have clearly demonstrated the potential of the approach associated with the high signal-to-noise ratio and with a reliable statistics of the acquired diffraction patterns. On the other hand, the low spatial and analyti- cal resolution due to the low fluxes and the low scattering coefficients makes neutron diffraction unsuitable for stratigraphic and traces analyses. TOF-ND has been proven ( * ) Paper presented at the Workshop “RICH—Research Infrastructures for Cultural Heritage”, Trieste, December 12-13, 2005. ( ** ) E-mail: s.siano@ifac.cnr.it c  Societ` a Italiana di Fisica 21 brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by Scientific Open-access Literature Archive and Repository