A New Instrument for the Energy Dispersive X-Ray Fluorescence Analysis of Objects of Art and Archaeology

Abstract

Objects of art and archaeology are relicts of the past, and art historians, archaeologists and conservators are constantly concerned with the questions of where, when or by whom such artifacts were made. Usually stylistic considerations can provide answers to these questions, but as styles were sometimes copied at locations and times quite different from those for which they were most characteristic, material analysis is often essential when one is attempting to infer how and of what materials an object was made. The use of several compounds e.g. as pigments in paintings, or the deliberate alloying of Cu with Sn, As, Sb and Pb, has varied greatly from region to region and from time to time and can be used to infer the geographic origin of an object or at least the origin of the materials, out of which it was made.