Analysis of Ancient Pottery from Tel Al‐Baharia Site in Damascus, Syria

Abstract

The radioisotope x‐ray fluorescence (XRF) method has been utilized in the analysis of forty archaeological pottery fragment samples from the Tel Al‐Baharia site, Damascus City, Syria. The samples were irradiated by a 109Cd radioisotope source (∼9 × 108 Bq) for 1000 sec. Eighteen chemical elements (K, Ca, Ti, Cr, Mn, Fe, Ni, Cu, Zn, Ga, As, Br, Rb, Sr, Y, Zr, Nb, and Pb) were determined. These elemental concentrations have been processed using two multivariate statistical methods. The purpose of the analysis was to characterize, by means of element contents, the pre‐historical pottery raw material sources from the Tel Al‐Baharia archaeological site. The results obtained by factor score confirm that the pottery samples classified by cluster analysis (CA) are correctly classified. In this study, most of the samples could be divided into four categories. The results provided persuasive evidence that Tel Al‐Baharia pottery used at least four different clay sources. Moreover, by means of a systematic local clay analysis, it will be clear whether these sources are local or not.

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