Contribution and limits of portable X-ray fluorescence for studying Palaeolithic rock art: a case study at the Points cave (Aiguèze, Gard, France)

A multi‐analytical approach to understand El Alto‐Ancasti's painted pottery (north‐western Argentina): Non‐invasive and micro‐invasive analyses of vessel's paintings from El Taco 19

“…The latter are chiefly connected to the unintentional analysis of underlying strata below paintings. This problem has been pointed out by many researchers in the study of pottery and other archaeological materials using portable XRF (Chanteraud et al, 2021; Dayet et al, 2022) and could be reinforced by our work. As has been noted, readings performed in painting motifs also contain signals of pastes and slips.…”

“…Intuitively, XRF spectra would be directly attributed to chemical elements related to materials employed in a vessel's decoration. However, due to the penetrating nature of X‐rays, the volume analysed at each point is approximately 1 mm 3 (Chanteraud et al, 2021). Consequently, all acquired spectra not only have information about paintings but also of subjacent slips and pastes, such as clays and other temper materials.…”

“…Another depth of data interpretation could be reached by statistical processing of XRF results. Among different types of unsupervised data analyses, principal components analysis (PCA) is one of most used in non‐invasive XRF studies (Chanteraud et al, 2021; Dayet et al, 2022). As can be seen from Figure 2 (a), the exploratory analysis of white‐coloured pottery does not show clear clustering of any particular style.…”

Standardization procedure to provide a unified multi-method elemental compositional dataset, application to ferruginous colouring matters from Namibia

“…Contrary to Chanteraud et al (2021), who did not calibrate their pXRF, unifying the data sets seems possible. Therefore, we decided to investigate the possibility to unify these different measures despite the existing discrepancies.…”

“…However, between-laboratory variations can limit comparisons of datasets acquired from distinct instruments or even on different days (Yellin et al, 1978 ;Popelka-Filcoff et al, 2012 ;Salomon et al, 2016) Fundamental differences in experimental conditions between distinct techniques raise more difficulties (Hein et al, 2002 ;Tsolakidou et al, 2002 ;Glascock et al, 2004) . So far, this has prevented researchers to reuse and share compositional data of ferruginous colouring matter acquired with different techniques or at distinct laboratories thus restricting studies to answer punctual questions (Salomon et al, 2016 ;Chanteraud et al, 2021). Previous works attempted to compare data acquired on ferruginous colouring matter samples with different techniques (SEM-EDS, PIXE, ICP-OES) (Dayet, 2012(Dayet, , 2021.…”