No abstract

Lime mortar is a complex mixture resulting from hardening of lime, water, and aggregates. Lime mortar was used from the time of the Roman Empire until the Industrial Revolution. The recipes used differ according to the period, geographical area of preparation, craftsman, or function. This is why the study of archaeological mortars is of such great importance in building archaeology. In this study, we used laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) to characterize the elemental composition of three lime mortar samples with a µ-LIBS instrument, allowing elemental image compilation. These samples originate from three different geographical locations: Angers (France), Dardilly (France), and Pompeii (Italy), and were taken from buildings that had different functions: cathedral, aqueduct, and house, respectively. Thanks to image processing and the creation of masks, it was possible to extract not only the lime signature and nature of the aggregate but also its granulometry and circularity. All this information is essential for cultural heritage research. This study shows the potential of the LIBS technique in archaeometric analysis of archaeological mortars.

This article presents the base-line design and implementation of the ATLAS Trigger and Data Acquisition system, in particular the Data Flow and High Level Trigger components. The status of the installation and commissioning of the system is also presented.

St Martin's church, Angers, is emblematic of the problems raised in pre-12 th century history of architecture. In view of the importance of this building, it was necessary to attempt to define its dating and this study particularly focuses on its bell-tower. In addition to the conclusion resulting from the interpretation of written sources and typological criteria positioning the construction of the site at the beginning of the 11 th century, not only a significant number of 14 C dates were carried out on charcoals from the masonry structures, but also independent dating by archaeomagnetism and thermoluminescence were performed on bricks from the bell-tower. The whole results from these three different methods agree and indicate the lower level of the bell-tower was likely built in the 9 th century, disputing evidence to the theory of construction in the 11 th century of the church. Presented here are the detailed results obtained from the thermoluminescence (TL) dating analysis.

With the development of micro-LIBS imaging, the ever-increasing size of data sets (sometimes >1 million spectra) makes the processing of spectral data difficult and time consuming. Advanced statistical methods have...