Photothermal and optical spectroscopy analysis of burned bones

摘要

In this work the possibilities of infrared thermography for the study of burned human bones of outstanding interest in archaeology and anthropology are explored. The technique used consisted in the illumination of the sample using an infrared solid state laser beam and the observation and the monitoring of the surface temperature with an infrared camera. The bones analyzed were previously thermally treated in a furnace and boiled in water. It is shown that the effect of the thermal treatments can be observed in the infrared images, from which the dynamics of the cooling process of the sample is obtained. It is shown that the cooling process of the samples could be used to identify the possible burning treatment at which a given material could have undergone previously. As an auxiliary technique X-ray diffraction was used to analyze the crystallization of the material and to look for a correlation with different thermal treatments.