XRF analysis of ancient Numidian coins: a comparison between different kingdoms

FUXYA2020: A Low-Cost Homemade Portable EDXRF Spectrometer for Cultural Heritage Applications

“…Energy dispersive X-ray fluorescence (EDXRF) is a very suitable analysis method for the examination of cultural heritage materials and is widely used, thanks to its relative straightforwardness of use and its totally non-destructive character, allowing for analysis without any sample preparation. EDXRF has numerous applications in this field, as it is able to detect elements from sodium to uranium, and in certain cases can go down to carbon [1], moreover the data treatment (e.g., qualitative analysis, PCA [2,3], semiquantitative analysis [4][5][6], quantitative analysis) makes this technique suitable to answer numerous questions. Thus, EDXRF is commonly used to perform provenance studies on ceramics, coins and glass [3,[7][8][9], to evaluate corrosion processes on metals [10,11], find restorations in paintings [12][13][14] or fake objects [15], or to identify worn out pigmentation in ancient polychromies [16][17][18][19].…”

“…Their diversity of designs and their features affect the final price of this kind of instrumentation, making it accessible to a small circle of researchers. It must be pointed out that some hand-held instruments do not offer the easy possibility of working on raw spectra, but only to gain a quantitative evaluation of element concentrations [2,33]. This aspect makes these instrumentations fake user-friendly, as they require high skills to handle and customize the routines and analytical modes provided by the manufacturer.…”