¹Franz Brandstätter,^2,3Niels J. de Winter,⁴Alessandro Migliori,⁴Roman Padillia-Alvarez,¹Dan Topa,⁵Seerp Visser,⁴Steven Goderis,⁴Philippe Claeys,⁵Christian Koeberl
Meteoritics & Planetary Science (in Press) Link to Article [https://doi.org/10.1111/maps.14340]
¹Natural History Museum Vienna, Vienna, Austria
²Department of Earth Sciences, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
³Archaeology, Environmental Changes and Geo-Chemistry Group, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium
⁴Department of Nuclear Sciences and Applications, International Atomic Energy Agency, Vienna International Centre, Vienna, Austria
⁵Bellevuedreef 40, Antwerp, Belgium
⁶Department of Lithospheric Research, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria
Published by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons

The “Weltmuseum Wien” owns a large collection of kris daggers from Indonesia. These objects are famous for their metal blades consisting of numerous layers made by a complicated forging process involving repeated folding and welding of the individual layers. There is a widespread belief that some krises were manufactured by adding meteoritic nickel–iron from the Prambanan meteorite that fell in Central Java and is known since the late 18th century. In our study, we investigated a selection of five Ni-rich krises from this collection with the aim to identify in their blades nickel–iron from Prambanan or another iron meteorite source. To obtain a better insight into the forging process, we investigated analog objects that were produced by a forging procedure similar to the one applied in the production of original krises and by using iron meteorite material from the meteorites Campo del Cielo and Gibeon as admixture. These investigations were performed by nondestructive analytical techniques, including handheld X-ray fluorescence (HH-XRF) analysis, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and electron microprobe (EMP) analysis. The original daggers were investigated by HH-XRF and micro-X-ray fluorescence (μ-XRF) analysis, as well as by portable laser ablation (pLA) subsampling followed by trace element analysis using inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS). By comparing the data obtained for both materials, we demonstrate that the main difficulties in identifying the presence of a meteoritic component in the kris daggers are due to the exclusive use of (quasi-)nondestructive methods in combination with locally varying surface heterogeneities, resulting from contamination, corrosion, and etching features. We also show that the presence of significant amounts of Ni and Co (in the wt% range) in a premodern kris dagger does not imply that it was manufactured with an admixture of meteoritic metal. We found that among the five krises investigated, only a single dagger (no. 900382) was manufactured with the possible admixture of nickel–iron from the Prambanan iron meteorite, as it contains high concentrations of siderophile elements and has a Ni/Co ratio comparable to that of the meteorite.

¹Yuanyuan He, ²Flavio Siro Brigiano, ³Michel Sablier, ¹Nadezda Khodorova, ⁴David Boulesteix, ⁴Arnaud. Buch, ²Peter Reinhardt, ¹Sylvain Bernard,¹Laurent Remusat
Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta (in Press) Link to Article [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gca.2025.03.017]
¹Institut de Minéralogie, Physique des Matériaux et Cosmochimie, IMPMC, Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, UMR CNRS 7590, Sorbonne Université, 75005 Paris, France
²Laboratoire de Chimie Théorique, Sorbonne Université, 75005 Paris, France
³Laboratoire Sciences Analytiques, Bioanalytiques et Miniaturisation ESPCI CNRS UMR CBI 8231, 10 rue Vauquelin, 75005 Paris, France
⁴Laboratoire Génie des Procédés et Matériaux, LGPM, CentraleSupélec, University of Paris-Saclay, 91190 Gif-sur-Yvette, France
Copyright Elsevier

Amino acids detected in carbonaceous chondrites are commonly enriched in heavy isotopes of hydrogen compared to terrestrial counterparts. This is interpreted as the consequence of synthesis processes happening in cold extraterrestrial environments. However, the magnitude of this enrichment is variable among classes of chondrites and among individual amino acid in a given chondrite. In this study, we investigated the evolution of the D/H isotope ratio of amino acids experimentally exposed to pure D2O at 150 °C. We observed that not all the hydrogen-specific sites are prone to deuterium-hydrogen exchange under hydrothermal conditions. Ab-initio modeling pinpoints the higher acidity of the carbon in α position (Cα) leading to a site-specific preferential D-H exchange, affecting the hydrogen atoms bonded to Cα (α-H). This explains the low exchange rate of 2-aminoisobutyric acid and isovaline, these branched amino acids lacking α-H, and the rather high exchange rate of glycine, a-alanine and β-alanine, their α-H exchanging faster. By extrapolating these results, it can be assumed that chondritic amino acids lacking α-H and containing only primary hydrogen (i.e., –CH3 group) have better retained their pre-accretional D/H values despite hydrothermal alteration on the parent body.