Abstract
At the reactor of the NCSR “Demokritos” epithermal irradiation was used in connection with the loss-free counting technique to investigate Neolithic ceramic shards from the Alepotrypa cave of Diros, Greece. The samples were subjected to a 10 min irradiation and a combination of two measurements, a first short one after a cooling time of 3 h, using loss-free counting and a second long one after 18 h in a well-type detector, allowing the study of 17 elements. Pottery of local origin can show depth-depending changes of composition caused by chemical influences from the geological environment, especially the groundwater, which may be or may have been in direct contact with the objects. It may occur also that, because of the progress of mining, various strata of a clay deposit differing slightly in chemical composition, transfer these changes to the ceramic. To study these possible effects determinations were performed with samples from three different depths and dated by the carbon-14 method, using carbonised objects of the same strata. Finally, changes in the concentrations of Mn, K, and Sb in relation to the age should be the effect of a reductive environment and of ion exchange processes, and could be assessed by statistical evaluation. This estimated age dependence of the concentrations should be taken into consideration when provenance studies are carried out.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors are grateful to the staff of the reactor of the NCSR Demokritos for performing the irradiation. They thank Mrs E Giannakopoulou for her help in preparing and measuring the samples.