Combination of Total-Reflection X-Ray Fluorescence Method and Chemometric Techniques for Provenance Study of Archaeological Ceramics

Abstract

The provenance study of archaeological materials is an important step in understanding the cultural and economic life of ancient human communities. One of the most popular approaches in provenance studies is to obtain the chemical composition of material and process it with chemometric methods. In this paper, we describe a combination of the total-reflection X-ray fluorescence (TXRF) method and chemometric techniques (PCA, k-means cluster analysis, and SVM) to study Neolithic ceramic samples from eastern Siberia (Baikal region). A database of ceramic samples was created and included 10 elements/indicators for classification by geographical origin and ornamentation type. This study shows that PCA cannot be used as the primary method for provenance purposes, but can show some patterns in the data. SVM and k-means cluster analysis classified most of the ceramic samples by archaeological site and type with high accuracy. The application of chemometric techniques also showed the similarity of some samples found at sites located close to each other. A database created and processed by SVM or k-means cluster analysis methods can be supplemented with new samples and automatically classified.

A Workflow for Uncertainty Assessment in Elemental Analysis of Archaeological Ceramics: A Case Study of Neolithic Coarse Pottery from Eastern Siberia

“…To date, our research group has carried out studies of the mineral and elemental compositions of pottery from the Popovsky Lug archaeological site located in the valleys of Upper Lena River, Eastern Siberia, Russia [14,17,18,26]. This is a multilayered site containing cultural deposits of various Neolithic stages [27].…”

“…Ceramic is among the most complex archeological materials because it consists of clay minerals, non-plastic inclusions, and intentionally added tempers in different proportions. For archaeological ceramics, quantitative elemental analysis can be performed by means of analyzing dry, powdered, and homogenized ceramic fragments using instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA) [4][5][6], inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) [7][8][9], conventional X-ray fluorescence spectrometry (XRF) [7,[10][11][12][13][14], and total reflection XRF [14][15][16][17][18]. It is evident that the pulverization and thorough mixing of large ceramic fragments provide a homogeneous representative sample for further elemental analysis.…”