The application of X-ray fluorescence core scanning in multi-element analyses of a stratified archaeological cave deposit at Wee Jasper, Australia

Identifying Ancient Ceramics Using Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy Combined with a Back Propagation Neural Network

“…In addition, understanding ancient ceramics is a means of comprehending Chinese history, the first step of which is ceramic identification. Traditional spectroscopy methods, such as X-ray fluorescence (XRF), 1 proton-induced X-ray emission, 2 X-ray diffraction, 3 and inductively coupled plasma (ICP) spectroscopy, 4,5 have been widely used in various fields and archeological analysis. However, XRF technology mainly detects heavy metal elements and fails to identify several common elements.…”

pXRF method development for elemental analysis of archaeological soil

“…Other studies sieved with smaller meshes, including 1 mm (Cook et al . 2014; Theden‐Ringl and Gadd 2017), 120 μm (Hayes 2013) and 74 μm (Rouillon and Taylor 2016). Whilst the current study observed some increases in raw concentration when sieving to 106 μm, proportional distributions were unchanged.…”

“…Whilst each preparation step is important, demonstrating the insignificant difference in proportional concentration across ex‐situ stages limited the preparation steps required for accurate data. Instead, the key advantage of homogenizing soil was for operational reproducibility and reduced variation (Luo and Bathurst 2017; Theden‐Ringl and Gadd 2017). Sieving soil to remove debris, larger particles and assist with homogeneity is a standard stage of preparing soil for analysis, and should be applied to archaeological soil analysis, although sieving < 2 mm induced soil‐sorting effects (Elliott and Cambardella 1991; Shand and Wendler 2014; Thermo Scientific 2014).…”

An evaluation of methodologies for calibrating Itrax X-ray fluorescence counts with ICP-MS concentration data for discrete sediment samples

“…The 2 nd generation Itrax is capable of analyzing a range of elements with moderate atomic weight ranging from Al to Rb, although the detection limit for Al is generally only reliable at concentrations of > 22,000 ppm (2.2 %; Croudace et al, 2016). Attempts to calibrate lighter elements have been met with success when they are present in higher concentrations (Chéron et al, 2016;Huang et al, 2016;Theden-Ringl and Gadd, 2017). It is expected that a successful calibration should have strong positive correlations for most elements with moderate to high atomic weight that are present in higher concentrations, and that those with lower concentration, lower atomic weight, or both, may show weaker positive correlations due to…”