Practical alchemy - archaeological applications of NAA

Archaeometry (using this term to denote the applications of the physical sciences in archaeology) is often accused of being a discipline which has 

Until ICP and PIXE were developed in the 1980s NAA was the standard analytical method for producing multielement analyses, with detection levels 

The most intense NAA study of archaeological ceramics has been focused on the Bronze Age Mycenaean and Minoan pottery of Greece and Crete, and related areas around the eastern Mediterranean (Mommsen et al. 2002). This work began in Berkeley, California, in the 1960s with the work of Perlman and Asaro (1969), who went on to analyze 878 shards of pottery. The results were never fully published according to Asaro and Perlman (1973, 213), the question of provenience of the vast quantities of Mycenaean wares has 

The study of obsidian by NAA has proved to be particularly fruitful because of the relatively limited number of sources and the extent to which it was traded (Beardsley et al. 1996, Cook 1995, Darling and Hayashida 1995, Kuzmin et al. 2002, Leach 1996). Studies have also extended to include other volcanic materials such as pumice (Bichler et al. 1997, Peltz et al. 1999). NAA has also been used for the analysis of flint as OES is insensitive and not reproducible due to the effect of the high silica content, and AAS requires significant sample preparation (Aspinall and Feather 1972). The wide range of appropriate materials extends to organic materials such as human bone (Farnum et al. 1995), and its exceptional sensitivity to trace elements has led to its wide use in geochemistry (for example in determining trace [ppb] contaminants in waters) and more recently in forensic chemistry. 

Because of the gradual loss of neutron irradiation facilities (and the general public unpopularity of nuclear sciences), NAA is being slowly replaced by other techniques, chiefly ICP-OES, and more recently ICP MS, which has comparable sensitivity. It has, consequently, become necessary to carry out research comparing these techniques since there is a need to know how compatible ICP data are with the vast databanks (such as the Aegean databank discussed above) of NAA. This has included comparison of NAA with ICP OES on bone (Akesson et al. 1994) XRF and NAA on ceramics (Garcia-Heras et al. 2001) NAA, XRF, ICP-OES, and ICP MS on ceramics 

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