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<p>[QUOTE="Rob Woodside, post: 5481108, member: 96187"]Balancing one object with another on a lever arm is a very accurate way of determining relative weights. String and a branch for such a scale were available long before the bronze age. So I find it odd that psycophysics is required. The authors are probably right that you can only feel equal weights to within ~10%, but a suspended balance is far more accurate by at least a factor of ten. The article says,"The most striking discovery the team made when comparing the weights of these various items was that 70.3 percent of bronze rings — which total more than 2,600 items — all fell within a weight range of <b>176 to 217 grams</b>. Using the Webster fraction, the team writes that these items are then <b>indistinguishable from 195.5 grams</b>." </p><p><br /></p><p>So between 5.6 troy ounces and 7 troy ounces one finds the indistinguishable 6.3 Troy ounce unit of weight. I can imagine paleolithithic hunter gatherers hefting a couple of nuggets to find the heaviest, but not bronze age metalurgists. They would need to know how much tin to add to the copper to get a good alloy. So it is no accident that that the earliest balance scales date from 2000 BC and were found in the bronze age civilization of the Indus Valley. The fact that many objects were near in weight to their 6.3 Troy ounce standard probably has more to do with smelting procedure than a hopelessly inaccurate standard wieght. Their idea of looking for a common weight standard is a good one, but pschophysics doesn't answer the question of how big the furnaces were and the size or weight of the charges used.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>
[QUOTE="Rob Woodside, post: 5481108, member: 96187"]Balancing one object with another on a lever arm is a very accurate way of determining relative weights. String and a branch for such a scale were available long before the bronze age. So I find it odd that psycophysics is required. The authors are probably right that you can only feel equal weights to within ~10%, but a suspended balance is far more accurate by at least a factor of ten. The article says,"The most striking discovery the team made when comparing the weights of these various items was that 70.3 percent of bronze rings — which total more than 2,600 items — all fell within a weight range of [B]176 to 217 grams[/B]. Using the Webster fraction, the team writes that these items are then [B]indistinguishable from 195.5 grams[/B]." So between 5.6 troy ounces and 7 troy ounces one finds the indistinguishable 6.3 Troy ounce unit of weight. I can imagine paleolithithic hunter gatherers hefting a couple of nuggets to find the heaviest, but not bronze age metalurgists. They would need to know how much tin to add to the copper to get a good alloy. So it is no accident that that the earliest balance scales date from 2000 BC and were found in the bronze age civilization of the Indus Valley. The fact that many objects were near in weight to their 6.3 Troy ounce standard probably has more to do with smelting procedure than a hopelessly inaccurate standard wieght. Their idea of looking for a common weight standard is a good one, but pschophysics doesn't answer the question of how big the furnaces were and the size or weight of the charges used.[/QUOTE]
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