Abstract
AN increasing awareness of the number of British medieval pottery kilns working at any one time has thrown into sharp perspective the problem of establishing local ceramic sequences by programmes of kiln excavation. Traditional methods and residual magnetic dating techniques often enable reasonably precise dates to be given to kilns and thus their products. It remains, then, to establish a technique whereby material excavated from sites other than kilns can be identified back to its source of production, and thus to make use of scientifically established dates. Recently neutron activation analysis has been used with some success to distinguish between specimens of ancient pottery1–5 and glass6. Differences in concentrations of trace elements in samples have been noted. A programme of work has therefore been initiated, using lithium-drifted germanium detectors, to examine the trace element constituents of pots from some eighty British kiln sites.
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ASPINALL, A., SLATER, D. & MAYES, P. Neutron Activation Analysis of Medieval Ceramics. Nature 217, 388 (1968). https://doi.org/10.1038/217388a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/217388a0
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Journal of Radioanalytical Chemistry (1969)
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