Benefits of combined PIXE and AMS with new accelerators

摘要

Combination of the elemental nondestructive analysis of artifacts by ion beam analysis (IBA) multielemental techniques (but mostly PIXE) with the accelerator mass spectroscopy (AMS) measurement of the age of the organic material discovered in the close vicinity of these artifacts (mainly available for recent excavations) gives new tools to archaeologists to improve their diagnosis in the study of the composition of ancient objects and of their workmanship in ancient times by using the same experimental facility for IBA and AMS. For potteries and metallic samples, IBA and AMS are to be applied on different samples excavated in the same environment but for organic archaeological samples, IBA and AMS techniques could be sequentially used on the same material. Results of these combined techniques on artifacts of various origins recently studied at CEDAD (CEntro di Datatione e Diagnostica), University of Salento, Lecce, Italy, are presented. Copyright (C) 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.