Things People Do with XRF

Summary

This is an abstract from the "2019 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of M. Steven Shackley" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Over the past 15-20 years, archaeological chemistry has moved largely from centralized laboratories of interdisciplinary expertise to decentralized laboratories where expertise often times is lacking. This shift is most pronounced in the widespread adoption and use of inexpensive, compact, highly portable XRF instrumentation. The proliferation of this technology has resulted in an increase in "black box" science where some practitioners analyze anything and everything with complete disregard for foundational studies that demonstrate such an analytical approach is not feasible, desirable, or even possible and/or where the practitioners ignore fundamental issues of reliability and validity in the measurements. In this presentation, I explore published examples of XRF "gone wrong" using case studies solicited from the archaeological science community.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• 2019 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of M. Steven Shackley   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25464