Archaeometallurgical Analyses on Two Renaissance Swords from the “Luigi Marzoli” Museum in Brescia: Manufacturing and Provenance

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This is a good paper which I suggest should be published in Heritage. It represents an interesting and multimethodological approach to the technology of two renaissance swords focusing on the “Luigi Marzoli” museum in Brescia. The work is based on solid methodological and analytical foundations which are wisely used to understand provenance and technological patterns in the analysed swords. Furthermore, presented results and discussion are accurate and in terms of analytical data presentation. Besides, the general structure of the paper and the summarized conclusions give the reader (specialised or not) an easy way to reach the author’s approach. I only have a few complaints.

• When describing the artefacts (section 3.1), weights could be informative in terms of general preservation.
• In line 313 there is a missing reference.

Author Response

The authors thank the reviewer and responded to the reviewer's comments in the attached file

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

In this study, Archaeometallurgical analyses on two renaissance swords from the “Luigi Marzoli” museum in Brescia: manufacturing and provenance. The authors assessed the history of the swords, evolved microstructure of the samples from various regions, with SEM-EDS, EPMA-WDS, and their hardness. The paper deserves to be considered, specifically due to the study of swords which were used in ancient periods showing involvement of heritage and to interpret such a structure by using fundamental theories. However, major adjustments and amendments are still required to accept this paper for final publication. The following are the suggestions and comments that I believe would help the authors enhance their study's quality. 

1. The author needs to work on the coherency of the story such as Historyà MotivationsàMicrostructure (SEM/EDS) à Hardness (Structure-property)
2. Can you provide the entire parts of the G6 which include medio and debole with a picture?
3. Line 146: change it to Table 2, as it is written “Table 1”.
4. Higher magnifications of figure 4 is suggested to add with indication of phases for better visualization of the reader.
5. “E2” in figure 4 show much columnar structure or it is kind of textured. Kindly provide additional justifications.
6. Figure 5 need to be justified in detail and clearly such as how can you say the from the microstructure that it tempered martensite, epsilon carbides etc. It should have detail investigation to justify all the figures. It is difficult to confirm the presence of carbides at that scale and there is no evidence of XRD to prove that they are carbides. You should also refer from the literature that any similar microstructure has been reported.
7. Table S3 doesn’t show any trend and the values must be checked again. Kindly go through the literature and see it the steels and martensite show the same hardness behavior. The reviewer cannot buy your justified results.
8. Microstructure characterization is written poorly and needs to be justified in a systematic way with referring to the literature, if reported.
9. How can one say from the SEM images that they are hot forged line? Provide evidence from the literature.
10. The authors have stated the statements with irrelevant citations such as “Line 347: According to literature, they are mainly composed of silicate minerals (clays) or grinded bones [34].”
11. SEM-EDS can quantify the amount of each element present. The data/composition of the compounds such as SiO2, Al2O3 is not suggested to draw conclusion by SEM-EDS. Table 7 shows the SEM-EDS and EPMA-WDS data which seems to be investigated in detail.
12. Grammar needs to be improved upon review.
13. As this article is based on the history of the instrument (archeometallurgy) and its characterization, it is not professional to throw the statements without citing the literature.
14. Systematic connectivity is missing in showing the structure-property correlation of the materials.

Author Response

The authors thank the reviewer and responded to the reviewer's comments in the attached file

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors have made the necessary changes and the article is good to accept for this journal