Abstract
Thermoluminescence (TL) dating and multivariate statistical methods based on radioisotope X-ray fluorescence analysis have been utilized to date and classify Syrian archaeological ceramics fragment from Tel Jamous site. 54 samples were analyzed by radioisotope X-ray fluorescence; 51 of them come from Tel Jamous archaeological site in Sahel Akkar region, Syria, which fairly represent ceramics belonging to the Middle Bronze Age (2150 to 1600 B.C.) and the remaining three samples come from Mar-Takla archaeological site fairly representative of the Byzantine ceramics. We have selected four fragments from Tel Jamous site to determinate their age using thermoluminescence (TL) method; the results revealed that the date assigned by archaeologists was good. An annular 109Cd radioactive source was used to irradiate the samples in order to determine their chemical composition and the results were treated statistically using two methods, cluster and factor analysis. This treatment revealed two main groups; the first one contains only the three samples M52, M53, and M54 from Mar-Takla site, and the second one contains samples that belong to Tel Jamous site (local).
Highlights
Analysis of archaeological ceramics can confirm the information recorded in historical documents, such as trade routes linking populations of different areas, and help to find out the chronology of events
Fifty-one of them labeled 1–51 come from the excavation at the site of Tel Jamous in Sahel Akkar region located at the west of Syria, which fairly represent ceramics belonging to the Middle Bronze Age (2150 to 1600 B.C.) according to archaeologists
Thermoluminescence (TL) dating and X-ray fluorescence (XRF) analysis combined with multivariate statistical method have been utilized to analyze 51 ceramics samples from Tel Jamous site, Syria
Summary
Analysis of archaeological ceramics can confirm the information recorded in historical documents, such as trade routes linking populations of different areas, and help to find out the chronology of events. In order to classify ceramics, we need to determine the chemical composition of a large number of samples and they should be from a single site and from a single period. To reach this goal many techniques were applied, since the initial ceramics study by Sayre and Dodson [6], such as Xray fluorescence (XRF) [7, 8], proton induced X-ray emission (PIXE) [9, 10], and neutron activation analysis (NAA) [3, 5, 11, 12]. The other aim was providing new additional data to the Syrian database
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