Geochemical characterisation of north Asian glazed stonewares: a comparative analysis of NAA, ICP-OES and non-destructive pXRF

Geo-material provenance and technological properties investigation in Copper Age menhirs production at Allai (central-western Sardinia, Italy)

“…In agreement with Mitchell et al (2012), the results of non-destructive pXRF analysis, although concerning a limited number of major, minor and trace elements, are sufficient to reveal chemical differences/similarities useful for a samples clustering. This claim is proved by the chemical features of the geological samples of Allai that are grouped in a unique cluster by non-destructive pXRF, ICP-OES and ICP-MS data.…”

“…The non-destructive method was first validated in terms of reliability and effectiveness in the samples clustering by pXRF, ICP-OES and ICP-MS on the powdered geological samples (for a specific study on the comparison between pXRF and ICP data, although on archaeological non-lithic materials, check Mitchell et al 2012). The coherence of results collected on the geological material applying different techniques on powdered and intact samples, proved the possibility to obtain effective chemical information even using only the non-destructive approach.…”

Relaciones Cerámicas Y Sociales Entre San Pedro De Atacama Y El Loa Superior Durante El Período Intermedio Tardío a Través Del Análisis De Fluorescencia De Rayos X Portátil

“…Sin embargo, durante más de cinco años, tenemos resultados importantes de investigaciones de obsidiana y cerámica con instrumentos portátiles (Williams- Thorpe et al 1999;Jia et al 2010;Forster et al 2011;Sheppard et al 2011;Speakman et al 2011;Goodale et al 2012;Mitchell et al 2012;Frahm 2013;. Estos estudios mostraron que el FRXp ha podido identificar los mismos agrupamientos que otros métodos (a veces con distintos elementos diagnósticos), y que estos grupos tienen valor arqueológico interpretativo, que la consistencia interna de los instrumentos ofrece un nivel importante de confiabilidad en los datos y, como ya veremos, el uso de estándares demuestra que FRX portátil puede confirmar resultados precisos obtenidos con otros instrumentos.…”

“…En el caso de esos elementos, pueden entrar a la pasta cerámica como sales diluidas en agua, por lo que no los incluimos en nuestros análisis. Se reducen las variables consideradas no solo para eliminar elementos pocos confiables, sino para identificar los elementos diagnósticos, y así facilitar la interpretación geológica de los resultados (Mitchell et al 2012). Los resultados así reducidos fueron sometidos a análisis de Componentes Principales (Figuras 3 y 4) y se Figura 3.…”

Empirical study of the effect of count time on the precision and accuracy of pXRF data

“…Several studies have demonstrated that the analysis of compositional data obtained using pXRF can effectively discriminate sources of obsidian in several regions of the world (Craig et al, 2007;Forster and Grave, 2012;Frahm, 2013a;Frahm et al, 2014;Nazaroff et al, 2010;Phillips and Speakman, 2009;Rademaker, 2012;Sheppard et al, 2011). Given the favorable results achieved with obsidian, archeologists have used pXRF for the compositional analysis of fine-grained volcanic (FGVs, e.g., andesites, dacites, and basalts) artifacts (Goodale et al, 2012;Grave et al, 2012), glass beads (Liu et al, 2012), earthenware and stoneware ceramics (Forster et al, 2011;Mitchell et al, 2012;Tykot et al, 2013), and metals (Karydas, 2007;Karydas et al, 2004). For the most part, these analyses have generated compositional data useful for discriminating raw material sources, assessing manufacturing techniques, and addressing other anthropological questions (though for a discussion of the difficulties in using pXRF for the compositional analysis of ceramics see Speakman et al, 2011).…”