Tin pest

Barry Knight quotes Plenderleith and Organ on tin pest:

>   "It has not, in fact, been found possible to obtain a single
>    illustration known with certainty to represent authentic tin
>    pest of natural occurrence."

This is getting a little far from the original post, but the tin
ingots from the Ulu Burun shipwreck (excavated at depths down to 200
ft) in some cases had been completely transformed into powdery grey
tin or 'tin pest', making them extremely difficult to recover.

See Rob Payton's paper, 1987, "The Conservation of Artifacts from
One of the World's Oldest Shipwrecks, the Ulu Burun, Kas shipwreck,
Turkey' in Black J. (ed) Recent advances in the Conservation and
Analysis of Artifacts. (Institute of Archaeology, London).

Kathy Hall
Institute of Nautical Archaeology, Turkey

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                  Conservation DistList Instance 12:39
                Distributed: Wednesday, October 28, 1998
                       Message Id: cdl-12-39-007
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