Spectroscopic and statistical approach of archaeological artifacts recently excavated from Tamilnadu, South India.
The ancient materials characterization will bring back the more evidence of the ancient people life styles. In this study, the archaeological pottery shards recently excavated from Kodumanal, Erode District in Tamilnadu, South India were investigated. The experimental results enlighten us to the elemental and the mineral composition of the pottery shards. The FT-IR technique tells that the mineralogy and the firing temperature of the samples are less than 800 °C, in the oxidizing/reducing atmosphere and the XRD was used as a complementary technique for the mineralogy. A thorough scientific study of SEM-EDS with the help of statistical approach done to find the provenance of the selected pot shards has not yet been performed. EDS and XRF results revealed that the investigated samples have the elements O, Si, Al, Fe, Mn, Mg, Ca, Ti, K and Na are in different compositions. For establishing the provenance (same or different origin) of pottery samples, Al and Si concentration ratio as well as hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) was used and the results are correlated.
Department of Physics, Periyar University, Salem, Tamil Nadu 636 011, India.
D
D
Seetha
Department of Physics, Periyar University, Salem, Tamil Nadu 636 011, India. Electronic address: gvelraj@yahoo.co.uk.
G
G
Velraj
D001106:Archaeology; D016477:Artifacts; D001272:Atmosphere; D016000:Cluster Analysis; D007194:India; D008855:Microscopy, Electron, Scanning; D008903:Minerals / Q000737:chemistry; D013052:Spectrometry, X-Ray Emission; D017550:Spectroscopy, Fourier Transform Infrared; D013223:Statistics as Topic; D013696:Temperature; D058989:Vitrification; D014961:X-Ray Diffraction
D008903:Minerals
FT-IR; HCA; SEM–EDS; SiO(2)/Al(2)O(3) concentration ratio; XRD; XRF