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May 21, 2009

Rehydroxylation, Pottery Dating And The Missing Paper

Yesterday there were multiple reports of what I thought just might be an abnormal interesting paper on pottery dating. The BBC's version said this, in part,

Fired clay ceramics start to react chemically with atmospheric moisture as soon as it is removed from the kiln.

Researchers believe they can pinpoint the precise age of materials like brick, tile and pottery by calculating how much its weight has changed.

The team from Edinburgh and Manchester universities hope the method will prove as significant as radiocarbon dating.

Edinburgh University's Christopher Hall explained: "Almost every archaeological site has old bits of old pot but there's no good method to date it."

Radiocarbon dating, used for bone or wood, cannot be used for ceramic material because it does not contain carbon.

Their new rehydroxylation dating method, reported in Proceedings of the Royal Society A, measures the amount of water the material has "recombined with."

And ScienceBlog added an important bibliographic detail, the date of the paper, "The exciting new findings have been published online today (20 May 2009) by the Proceedings of the Royal Society A."

So I headed off to the Proceedings of the Royal Society A website to take a look for myself. I was curious how the new paper related to Shoval, Beck, Kirsh, Levy, Gafttand and Yadin's 1991 paper "Rehydroxylation Of Clay Minerals And Hydration In Ancient Pottery From The 'Land Of Geshur'" (Joumal of Thennal Analysis, 37 (1991) 1579-1592). But try as I might, I couldn't find the new paper on the Royal Society's site. The news release from which the all the reports seem to have come is on the Royal Society's site but not the paper.

Shoval et al. used IR thermospectrometry to measure hydroxyl radical content as well as moisture while the Wilson study appears to have used weight difference before and after refiring the samples at high temperature and focused on moisture alone. And while Shoval et al. used two groups of broadly dated samples they were not primarily interested in dating. That said, I was hoping to see how Wilson addressed the Shoval paper. But without being able to see the actual paper, I can't be sure. Perhaps the paper will reappear soon. But until it does or until I find it elsewhere, instead of an abnormally interesting post on the subject of rehydroxylation dating you'll have to put up with this one which is about the same as everyone else's.

Update: May 22, 2009
I learned that the Wilson paper is available in a rather obscure corner of the Royal Society website and it appears to be open access for now. I guess I need to read it.

Posted by Duane Smith at May 21, 2009 8:34 AM | Read more on Archaeology |

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Posted by: MDH at May 21, 2009 11:46 AM

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