A multidisciplinary non-destructive study of historical pipe organ fragments

A multidisciplinary non-destructive study has been carried out on historical pipe organ fragments, trying to infer whether the spatial occurrence of different crystallographic phases (that is alpha-tin, beta-tin, cassiterite or romarchite) reflects the visible alterations patterns. We could indeed derive the presence of the beta-tin phase. Several tin oxide phases have been detected too, associated with the visible occurrence of “grey regions” and hole borders (mapped by Raman spectroscopy), and hydrate phases (mapped by neutron imaging). We aim to demonstrate that neutron and Raman techniques can give relevant indications in archaeometallurgy studies of cultural heritage artifacts, where only non-destructive experiments can be performed. The combination of the two probes could be considered a protocol to be applied in the characterization of tin based specimens.