From Archaeology to Archaeometry
Trans-disciplinary Research of our Cultural Heritage

IDENTIFICATION of materials by chemistry, optics and mineralogy & written texts by epigraphy and palaeography

PROSPECTION (The research of Where and What to excavate)

CHRONOMETRY (Techniques for Dating architectural, art and archaeological finds)

PROVENIENCE (The search for the Site where an artefact was manufactured)

ENVIRONMENTOLOGY (The study of ancient climatic, volcanic and geological changes in a given area at a given time span)

BIOSPHERE (The research into the Palaeo-ethnic-botany and Zoo- and Anthropo-archaeology)

RESTORATION-CONSERVATION (The study of how to restore and conserve ancient artifacts belonging to our cultural heritage)

The following items are shown in this homepage:

• A description of the method of Instrumental Neutron Activation Analysis used to establish the origin of pottery.

List of Publications and their Abstracts of our research on the origin of pottery and Textiles



The Qumran-Science Project on the Provenance of the ceramic evidence by INAA at the Hebrew University, in collaboration with the Nuclear Facility at the Technical University of Budapest and the Ecole Biblique of Archaeology in Jerusalem



The Qumran May 22-23 Meeting in Jerusalem Meeting of the Cost G8 Action and the Hebrew University on Bio- and Material Culture research of Qumran's Dead Sea Heritage in connection with the Preservation of Europe's Cultural Heritage. The meeting was scheduled as a cooperation between scholars who maintain the cultural heritage as art historians, archaeologists and conservators, as well as analytical scientists, as physicists and chemists, who perform non- or minimal destructive analytical testing.




The Qumran Meeting Proceedings Cover This is the cover of the Proceedings that appeared in September 2006





The Synchrotron 2004 Press Release on our collaboration with the Synchrotron at Grenoble on Qumran textiles. Fiber identification in cooperation with the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (Jan Gunneweg), Daresbury laboratory at Warrington (E. Pantos) and Kiel University (M. Mueller & Bridget Murphy).





The answer to Orientalische Zeitung 2010 Review by A. Lange from Vienna





Newest publication of Archaeology vis-a-vis Qumran (2011) entitled Qumran vis-a-vis Science-based Archaeology: How to go about?" by J. Gunneweg in Qumran und die Archaeologie, Frey-Claussen & N. Kessler eds., Mohr Siebeck (2011)





• The Bible vis-a-vis Archaeology and Science interaction as attacked in the Israeli media by some Israeli scholars





The Edomite and anthropomorphic cult vessels found at 'En Hazeva in Israel's Arava desert.

A Map of Israel with Sites from where ancient pottery has been analyzed by Neutron Activation Analysis (corresponding to the list of the Abstracts above)

The Anthropoid Coffins of the Late Bronze II Age a tentative solution for the technology employed to fire these more than life-size ceramic coffins

The Mugrabi Gate near the Wailing Wall esplanade towards the western Temple Precinct wall.



At the left the golden Dome of the Rock. In the middle, the temporary bridge from the Wailing Wall esplanade to the Gate of the Mores. On the right the excavations in progress to save the already excavated area from a dangerous landslide toward the North as well as the South. The style of the future bridge is still under discussion, due to the danger of collaps. The excavations aren't.





Ostracon with early Proto-Caananite script (15x15 cm), found by Y. Garfinkel at Qeiyafa (the Ella Valley) mentioning the words Judge, King, Servant and "don't do" (as in the Ten Commandments). In Hebrew, the words are: Shofet, Melekh, Eved and al-ta'ase, respectively. The date of the ostracon was established by radiocarbon dating of the organic contect in which it was found. Thermoluminescence dating of the shard itself will give the age of the pot and not necessarily that of the writing. The faint script is not very promising for either HPLC composition-identification or Raman Spectroscopy and its subsequent dating by C14.
The ostracon was analyzed by Jan Gunneweg for INAA to learn the origin of the letter
A caveat is in its place here. Petrography proved that the potshard was made in the Lachish area. INAA, however, could NOT find a statistical match that would prove that the shard was indeed of the Lachish area, in spite of the fact that we have a lot of INAA data on our two databanks, the Hebrew University and Bonn laboratories. It is, therefore, suggested to get more analyses performed by INAA to realy prove the proto-Canaanitic script provenience. It is also suggested to get a precise date for the ostracon based on the shard itself and not that much on its organic material context, which was performed by radio-carbon dating.





On his 1989 Sabbatical at the LBL in Berkeley, Gunneweg got a glimps of the Extinction theory of the dynosaur by an astroid as Louis Alvarez suggested. This was subsequently proved by iridium measurements performed on 2.5 cm thick clay layer that was deposited allover the world. Schematically, this is rendered in the following site the K-T Boundary (Cretacious-Tertiair). This disaster was the end of the Dynosaur population. more than 65 million years ago.





Bronze Hoard at Tiberias A hoard of bronze artifacts that has been found nearby Tiberias at the Lake of Galilee



Iz Perlman commemorated. Iz Perlman founded the Archaeometry Unit for Neutron Activation Analysis at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1973 and headed it until his retirement in 1983. In 1991, he died un untimely death. Lee, his spouse, died in 2005.



From left to right: Gunneweg, Perlman, Asaro and Perlman's daughter at Perlman's 75th birthday



Umm a-Shakef is a small village with houses abandoned somewhere in 1850 during the Ottoman period. The village covers a wide restrict that is filled with abandoned homes and hand-dug water wells, sometimes more than 20 meter deep. Umm a-Shakef had a mosque and also a church, although the latter is a remain of the Late Byzantine period. The only remain visible is the very end of a pillar that robbers could not take home, although they tried hard.

Umm a-Shakef as it looks today

A Caveat for the 2000 year old date from Masada that suddenly grew again

An additional caveat is directed to all kind of seals, palaces and ostraca that are found in Israel during the past 3-6 years. They all have in common the assumption that they are certainly of the Iron Age I period and prove that David had his palace in Jerusalem, that personal king's seals point to kings mentioned in the Bible, whereas the latest find, an ostracon, shows the name of Goliat written in a language that is similar to that of the Philistines, called "Lydian" or pre-Hebraic. However, first, no archaeologist has ever found the remnants of a "Philistine language" except for a single seal with some signs on it, whereas we are also begged to believe that the non-semitic words "'alot" and "lat" indeed mean Goliat. And all this because of the urge to prove that the biblical story of Goliat is not a myth. Sic! During the March-2006 Archaeological Congress in Jerusalem, one explained that the inscription must be dated to the Iron Age II and that it means something as Goliat-alike, as if the name lives on in later periods.

The next Caveat concerns the fact that lately too many finds appear too sudden in a too small territory of Israel in the hands of too few people to prove too vague historical evidence from holy writings that, in fact, can do without all these new finds. The Newsmedia are out to get first-hand on all these inventions, whereas serious scientific studies of artifacts are considered "a big bore" and, thus, never hit any Evening News.

Still another Caveat concerns the tomb of Jesus' entire family that only has been revealed to National Geographic with the help of the maker of 'The Naked Archaeologist'.

The next item is the Japanese capsule that after 7 years returned to Earth on June 14 2010 containing dust from the astroid belt that is about 860 million km from our Earth.I hope that the elemental analyses will be done by competent scholars because we need quantitative data.
From the other side, it could be that the dust contains elements that are unknow here and for that one needs people who are able to differentiate between different elements of isotopes with interfering peaks in astroid dust that leaves traces that only people as Iz Perlman (my colleague for 15 years), Glenn Seaborg, Louis Alvarez, all deseased, but also Frank Asaro with a blessed long life at NLBL Berkeley are able to take apart by using techniques such as INAA and Alvarez-Coincidence Spectroscopy.