The ancient (archaeological) and modern potsherds sourced from Deccan basaltic soils and sediments at selected sites in the Bhima and Godavari river basins of the western Maharashtra, India, show characteris-tic mineral magnetic properties. High magnetic sus-ceptibilities (χ lf) for the Deccan-sourced sherds enable their distinction from other sources in the region. The modern pottery sourced from Deccan soils shows sig-nificant lower χ lf than ancient pottery in the region, which further shows lower χ lf than the associated soils (/sediments) due to successive removal of detrital grains as a function of improvement in the pre-processing techniques. The ancient and modern pot-teries show higher superparamagnetic content that is otherwise absent in the source, suggesting its neo-formation during firing. High hematite content in modern pottery relative to ancient pottery further in-dicates higher oxidative firing in the former. Based on close examination of Isothermal Remanence Magneti-zation (IRM) acquisition rates, we suggest the ratios: IRM1.8 mT/IRM0.3–0.025 mT and HIRM/SoftIRM along with other routine mineral magnetic parameters to esti-mate the relative degree of oxidative heating, source discrimination and the levels of pre-processing of raw material amongst the Deccan-sourced pottery. The present approach being rapid and economic, a large quantitative database can be generated from the pot-sherds for detailed characterization of these archaeo-logical materials.
Keywords
Ancient Pottery, Basaltic Soils And Sedi-Ments, Mineral Magnetism, Modern Potsherds.
User
Font Size
Information