Earth consolidant

The outer crust of earth has provided the solid foundation for the evolution of human beings, who are the prime focus of interest and concern to archaeology. The main components of this crust are minerals and rocks, some consolidated and others occurring as sediments, nonconsolidated deposits, created by weathering processes from the minerals and rocks. All these minerals, rocks, and sediments, as well as everything else in the universe, are made up from just over 100 chemical elements listed in Appendix I. Most of the elements in the crust of the earth occur in extremely low relative amounts, and only a few, listed in Table 1, make up almost 99% of its total bulk (Bloom 1969). 

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... 

Comets are generally considered to be weakly consolidated, and active comets are commonly observed to split into fragments. This is sometimes due to the tidal forces of a close planetary encounter, such as affected comet Shoemaker-Levy when it passed close to Jupiter in 1992 and broke into 21 pieces. More commonly, a comet spontaneously fragments multiple times over its orbit period, without any obvious cause. Disintegrating comets leave trails of small particles in their wakes. These trails are known as meteor streams, and when the Earth passes through such a meteor stream, as it does several times a year, a meteor shower occurs. Meter-sized rocks are known to occur within cometary meteor streams. 

SOIL. All consolidated earth material over bedrock. Soil is approximately equivalent to regolith.1 Agriculturally, soil is any one of many varied natural media that support or can support land plant growth outdoors or. when in containers, indoors. The lower limit of topsoil is normally the lower limit of biologic activity, which usually coinrides with the common rooting of native perennial land plants. The word soil is derived from the Latin solum for ground, ... 

When pressure is applied to a mass of irregular particles confined in a chamber, the particles tend to consolidate and reduce the porosity. A marked decrease in porosity has been observed with regard to oil sands and shales far below the surface of the ground. In this connectibn, A thy (1930) has shown that the porosity of compact material below the earth s surface is given by the formula ... 

Diatoms are single-celled algae that produce a hard skeleton made of hydrous silica (opal). The rock that forms from consolidated layers of diatom skeletons is called diatomite. This material has many common and commercial names, including diatomaceous earth, Fuller s earth, kieselgur, and tripo-lite. Diatomite is mined and used as building material, in filters, as insulation, as a mild abrasive, and as a filler in dry chemicals. 

Figure 1 depicts the major components of the OC cycle on and in the Earth s cmst. Greater than 99.9% of all carbon in the Earth s crust is stored in sedimentary rocks (Berner, 1989). About 20% of this total ( 1.5Xl0 Gt) is organic, and the majority (>90%) of the OC in these consolidated... 

---