Correlation between petrography, NAA, and ICP analyses: Application to early bronze Egyptian pottery from Canaan

Abstract

Under favorable circumstances petrographic studies supported by chemical analysis using inductively coupled plasma (ICP) suffice to establish the provenience of pottery. A case in point is Egyptian-style pottery of Early Bronze Age found in Canaan. The pottery was divided into three groups according to four criteria determined by thin section analysis supplemented by X-ray diffraction: sorting and volume of silt-sized quartz, heavy minerals, the amount of carbonates in the matrix, and the firing temperature. Chemical analyses confirmed the classification. The source materials inferred for the three groups are Nile muds, Egyptian marly sediments, and local loess. Although the chemical analyses obtained by ICP and neutron activation analysis ( N U ) were compatible, the existing database for NAA cannot be used indiscriminately. However, for provenience studies based on mineralogical and petrographic data, knowledge of the geology of the potential source areas can replace a n extensive database.

Instrumental Neutron Activation Based Provenance Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, With a Case Study on Mycenaean Pottery From Cyprus

“…Pottery provenance studies that were undertaken covered mainly the range of interests of researchers in the Institute of Archaeology and, as resources permitted, the interests of researchers from other institutions in Israel and abroad. Projects covered the time periods from Early Bronze (Porat et al 1991) to the Crusader period (Waksman et al 1997). Excavations that provided motivation and/or material for these studies included Tel Mevorakh (Yellin and Perlman 1978; Yellin 1984a), Tell Artel (Yellin and Perlman 1984a), Tel Qasile (Yellin and Gunneweg 1985), Galilee region (Adan‐Bayewitz 1985), Deir el‐Balah (Goldberg et al 1986; Yellin et al 1986, 1990), Tel Miqne (Gunneweg et al 1986), Tel Quiri (Sharon et al 1987), Tel Dor (Yellin 1990), Jerusalem, Judah and related sites (Mommsen et al 1984; Perlman et al 1986; Gunneweg and Yellin 1990; Gunneweg et al 1991; Maeir et al 1992; Zorn et al 1994; Cahill 1995; Yellin 1996a; Yellin and Cahill 1998, 2002, 2003a,b, 2004; Cahill and Yellin forthcoming), Tel Batash (Gunneweg and Yellin 1991), Tel Dan (Yellin and Gunneweg 1989a; Yellin and Maeir 1992), Jericho (Yellin and Gunneweg 1989b), Masada (Yellin 1994), Tel Anafa (Gunneweg and Yellin 1997; see also Gunneweg et al 1984), Qumran (Yellin et al 2001), the Ma’agan Mikhael shipwreck (Yellin 1996b, 1999; Yellin and Artzy 2004) and Tell es‐Sa’idiyeh, Jordan (Koehl and Yellin 1981 and forthcoming).…”

Neutron Activation Analysis at the British Museum, London

“…50 sherds. Few direct comparisons exist in the literature where the two analytical techniques have been applied to the same set of samples (e.g., Porat et al 1991; Little et al 2004). A remarkable feature of the post‐analysis statistical processing with principal components of the al Mina data was that the plot of first two components by the two techniques produced practically identical plots of the distribution of samples.…”

The History of the Peoples of the Eastern Desert

“…As the atomic mass of all elements is very accurately known, these data represent the elemental composition (fingerprint) of the (ceramic) sample. Interpretation of the results of ICP-MS analysis to provide information on the provenance of materials has been used extensively in geology (Jenner et al 1990;Longerich et al 1990) and archaeology (Porat et al 1991;Mallory-Greenough et al 1998;Glowacki and Neff 2002). As the size of a sample produced by laser ablation is relatively small and the fabric of pottery is a heterogeneous mix of clay, mineral inclusions and fillers, the data on the chemical composition as produced by LA-ICP-MS will vary with every analysis of a single sherd.…”