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To: SunkenCiv
Whatever his performance in the “James Ossary” case, the composition of the clay should nail down its origin pretty well and this technique seems to do that in a nondestructive manner. The source of 99.9% pure gold can be determined by the .1% impurities.
4 posted on 08/06/2010 3:47:15 PM PDT by JimSEA
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To: JimSEA; taxcontrol

It should come in handy (as the article states) to figure out provenance for the much more numerous clay items like pots and jars. So much of the clay shards winds up in the rubbish tips because there’s no identifying features on it — now there may be. This will work out as a proxy to determine, for example, the departure point of ancient shipwrecks, and the origin of the rarities such as the clay tablets found in the archive at Hattusas, the Phaistos Disk on Crete (interesting because the characters on it were made with dies, rather than hand cut, implying that it was manufactured; at least one modern scholar thinks the PD is a fake), and the 26,000 year old ceramics of Dolni Vestonice.


8 posted on 08/06/2010 4:53:25 PM PDT by SunkenCiv ("Fools learn from experience. I prefer to learn from the experience of others." -- Otto von Bismarck)
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