Trace element and Pb isotope provenance analyses of native copper in northwestern North America: results of a recent pilot study using INAA, ICP-MS, and LA-MC-ICP-MS

Identifying American native and European smelted coppers with pXRF: a case study of artifacts from the Upper Great Lakes region

“…Archaeologists have visually documented Native American metalworking techniques applied to copper artifacts to categorize technological styles of working native and smelted copper (Latta et al, 1998;Anselmi, 2008). In addition, sophisticated analytical techniques such as Instrumental Neutron Activation Analysis (INAA) (Wayman et al, 1985;Hancock et al, 1991Hancock et al, , 1993Hancock et al, , 1994Cooper et al, 2008;Michelaki et al, 2013 (INAA of copper and brass)), Particle X-Ray Induced Emission (PIXE) (Gersch et al, 1998;Ehrhardt et al, 2000;Fleming and Swann, 2000), Laser Ablation e Inductively Coupled Plasma e Mass Spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) (McKnight, 2007;Dussubieux et al, 2008;Hill, 2012) and X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF) (Ehrhardt and Kaiser, 2011;Abel and Burke, 2014) have been applied to determine the composition of metal artifacts. Previous research established that North American native copper contains very low levels of impurity in contrast with European smelted copper.…”

Role of laser ablation–inductively coupled plasma–mass spectrometry in cultural heritage research: A review

“…Authors ascribed this issue to the inaccurate correction for the instrumental mass bias when using NIST610 (glass) as an external standard. The very low content (tenth of ppm) in the investigated copper samples made the application of LA-MC-ICP-MS for the Pb isotopic analysis, described by Cooper et al [111], unsuccessful as well. The authors tried to perform Pb isotopic analysis on CANMET copper metal rod standards (SSC-1, SSC-2 and SSC-3) and native copper samples from south-central Alaska, with the aim to trace their provenance.…”

Determination of Metal Concentration in Road-Side Trees from an Industrial Area Using Laser Ablation Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry

“…However, more recently developed pulsed Nd:YAG and excimer lasers have made it possible to analyze solid samples using laser beams with diameters of 1 to 200 µm. LA-ICP-MS has been applied to analyze a variety of materials, including biological samples (e.g., protein and lichen) [2,3] and in-situ grain-scale minerals [4]. Prior environmental science research revealed that characteristics of past environments can be inferred from the distribution of metals in tree growth rings [5][6][7], and this is called dendrochemistry.…”