Acid Extraction as a Simple and Inexpensive Method for Compositional Characterization of Archaeological Ceramics

Abstract

An acid-extraction method for analyzing the composition of ceramics produces highly precise results capable of intraregional discrimination of production loci. The method is safe, inexpensive, minimally destructive, and uses widely available instrumentation. It produces results that are highly useful in archaeological interpretation as illustrated by selected case studies.

Chemical characterization of Arctic soils: activity area analysis in contemporary Yup'ik fish camps using ICP-AES

“…All sample preparation and analysis was performed by the first author under the direction of James H. Burton. Using this wellestablished methodology [13,28,29,41], reproducibility of the technique is better than 5% (1 ) variation on all of the elements analyzed here. In this study, laboratory standards were analyzed every 5-10 samples.…”

Hohokam and Patayan interaction in southwestern Arizona: evidence from ceramic compositional analyses

“…Some previous attempts to analyze only the clay matrix [68,69,72,84] used the weak-acid extraction technique [13,14], which does not dissolve more resistant mineral inclusions. Given previous criticisms of this technique [52], we instead sought to exclude larger aplastics by physically avoiding them during sample introduction.…”

Sampling Design and Inferential Bias in Archaeological Soil Chemistry

“…To process the samples, I used the Burton and Simon (1993) extraction method that calls for dilute hydrochloric acid (1 M), again because of my small budget (this is a very inexpensive technique that works well with calcareous soil; e.g., Middleton and Price 1996). Samples were characterized with ICP-AES, and the resulting data were analyzed with principal components analysis and discriminant function analysis.…”