Exploration of Wet and Dry Portable X-ray Fluorescence for Archaeochemical Prospection: A Pilot Study in Comparative Method

Summary

Geoscience approaches are being applied for prospection and intra-site analysis with increasing frequency in a variety of contexts around the world. There currently are a variety of archaeochemical procedures in use, each of which suffers from inherent limitations Colorimetric measurement is limited in the number of elements measured simultaneously. Inductively Coupled Plasma techniques are expensive and restricted to a narrow range of institutions. Yet the recent availability of Portable X-ray Fluorescence (pXRF) offers a more flexible (wide spectrum of elements) and relatively inexpensive piece of equipment that is potentially more widely applicable to archaeological issues. However, pXRF is most often used for whole-sample, dry chemistry which introduces a potentially geological confounding factor. In contrast, weak acid extraction preferences weakly adsorbed, and more likely anthropogenic, ions. We perform a comparative analysis of colorimetric measurement of phosphate, ICP-OES measurement of multiple elements, and both wet and dry pXRF of soil samples from a variety of glacial till plain contexts to assess the ability of pXRF to comparably measure the chemical imprint of human activity in till plain soils.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage