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

Abstract

A neutron activation programme aimed at archaeological provenance research operated at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem between the years 1974 and 1997. The history and accomplishments of that laboratory are presented. Endeavours to preserve unpublished results are described. Results on Cypriote pottery are presented.

Lead Isotopic Analysis for the Identification of Late Bronze Age Pottery From Hala Sultan Tekke (Cyprus)

“…2002; Mommsen et al . 2002; Asaro and Adan‐Bayewitz 2007; Yellin 2007). This approach is often successfully combined with petrographical analysis (e.g., Day et al .…”

“…For decades, elemental analysis has been widely used in pottery provenance studies (e.g., Knapp and Cherry 1994;Hein et al 2002;Mommsen et al 2002;Asaro and Adan-Bayewitz 2007;Yellin 2007). This approach is often successfully combined with petrographical analysis (e.g., Day et al 1999;Ben-Shlomo et al 2007) and other analytical techniques (e.g., Tchegg et al 2008Tchegg et al , 2009).…”

A provenance study of Mycenaean pottery from Northern Israel

“…Several studies using Instrumental Neutron Activation Analysis (henceforth, INAA) on Mycenaean pottery from various contexts around the eastern Mediterranean were performed in the last decades (e.g., Asaro and Perlman, 1973;Gunneweg et al, 1992;Mommsen et al, 1992Mommsen et al, , 1995Mommsen et al, , 2002Mommsen et al, , 2005Hoffmann and Robinson, 1993;Maran et al, 1997;Gunneweg and Michel, 1999;Hein et al, 1999;Mommsen andMaran, 2000-2001;French and Tomlinson, 2004;D'Agata et al, 2005;Badre et al, 2005;Mommsen and Sjö berg, 2007;Yellin, 2007). Despite the fact that some of these studies refer, directly or indirectly, to examples of Mycenaean pottery found in LBA southern Levant, no systematic large-scale provenance study has yet been carried on this group (a notable exception is the analysis of 86 Mycenaean sherds from Tell Abu Hawam, published in a cursory manner in Hoffmann and Robinson, 1993).…”

Composition of Roman period pottery from Jerusalem revisited

“…The methodology employed followed the prescription of Perlman and Asaro (1969) for pottery analysis with INAA with various modifications necessitated by differences in instrumentation, spectral analysis, computations, nuclear reactor parameters, and neutron irradiations. More details are given in Gunneweg et al (1984), Yellin (2007), Yellin and Maeir (2007), and in Yellin (2018).…”