Determining pottery provenance: Application of a new high-precision x-ray fluorescence method and comparison with instrumental neutron activation analysis

A recently developed high-precision X-ray fluorescence (XRF) method, applied for the first time to the study of archaeological pottery, determines the abundances of 13 trace and four major elements from one X-ray spectrum acquired over a 1000 second counting interval. For replicate archaeological samples, the short-term and long-term measurement precisions were close to 1% for the ten elements measured with highest precision. These are comparable to the best results achieved on replicates of clay and pottery standards, and obsidian, using instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA). High-precision XRF analysis, however, does not require a nuclear facility, and is markedly preferable to INAA in terms of the ease of both sample preparation and analytical procedure. Consequently, element abundance data can usually be provided by a single analyst within a few hours after the start of sample preparation. The accuracy of the method, determined by comparison with data of other workers on eight standard reference materials, averaged 2.4% for the ten best-agreeing elements. The effectiveness of the method for determining pottery provenance is demonstrated for a difficult problem, in which high-precision XRF analysis successfully distinguished the products of two nearby pottery manufacturers in Roman Galilee (Shikhin and Nahif) that had not been clearly differentiated by INAA. The greater effectiveness of high-precision XRF than INAA in this provenance study is a result of the different array of elements measured, and the higher precision obtained for certain elements, by XRF. These results suggest that high-precision XRF has potential broad applicability for pottery provenance studies.