Ceramic materials ancient

Common ancient ceramic materials often found in archaeological excavations, such as fired brick and pottery, were made mostly from a mixture of a secondary clay and fillers. The nature, composition, and properties of clay have been already discussed the nature of the fillers, the changes undergone by the clay as well as by the fillers during their conversion to ceramics, and the unique properties of ceramic materials, are reviewed in the following pages. Attention is drawn also to studies that provide information on the composition and characteristics of ancient ceramic materials. 

Heimann, R.B. and Maggetti, M. (2014) Ancient Ceramics. Materials, Technology, Art, and Culinary Traditions, Chapter 16, Schweizerbart Science Publishers, Stuttgart. 

Torres, Marcos Martinon- and Thilo Rehren. "Ceramic materials in fire assay practices A case study from 16th-century laboratory equipment." In Proceedings of the 7th European Meeting on Ancient Ceramics (EMAC), Lisbon, 27-31 October 2003.. ... 

Pottery, one of the earliest human-made ceramic materials, is actually an artificial form of stone, made by combining the four basic elements recognized by the ancient Greeks earth (clay), water, air, and fire. In fact pottery is made from a circumstantial or deliberately prepared mixture of clay, other solid materials known by the generic name of fillers, and water. When a wet mixture of clay and fillers is formed into a desired shape, then dried and finally heated to high temperature (above 600°C), it becomes consolidated... 

Trace elemental analysis of ancient ceramics has been proven a very useful tool for tracing the circulation of this material. Instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA) was for years the analytical technique of choice to measure the composition of ceramics because of the large number of elements it could determine and its good sensitivity. Lately, a few publications have shown that laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) could provide similar results as INAA more quickly and at lower cost. A protocol has been developed to determine 51 elements using LA-ICP-MS and tested it on Wari period ceramics previously analyzed using INAA. We show how INAA and LA-ICP-MS analysis lead to the same conclusion in terms of sample groupings. 

A nondestructive thermoacoustic material signature (TAMS) imaging method in scanning acoustic microscopy (SAM) was recently utilized to study the matrix and tempers signatures of ancient ceramics (90). 

Mullite is a solid solution phase of alumina and silica commonly found in ceramics. Only rarely does mullite occur as a natural mineral. According to introductory remarks made by Schneider and MacKenzie at the conference Mullite 2000 [1], the geologists Anderson, Wilson, and Tait of the Scottish Branch of His Majesty s Geological Survey discovered the mineral mullite less than a century ago. The trio was collecting mineral specimens from ancient lava flows on the island of Mull off the west coast of Scotland when they chanced upon the first known natural deposit of this ceramic material. The specimens were initially identified as sillimanite, but later classified as mullite. 

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