PIXE/PIGE Measurements of Archaeological Glass, its Conceptualization and Interpretation: A Case Study

Reliable scientific answers to questions posed by social sciences, like archeology, to exact sciences, like physics or chemistry, depend not only on meaningfully posed questions, well-selected and pretreated samples and accurate and precise measurements, but also on an area of interpretation that exists between the two fields. This interdisciplinary area consists of many representations of measurement data, notions, and concepts that evolve through solving particular problems. However, this set of concepts is not always determinate, clear and consistent, obscuring the problem and obstructing the interpretation of results. The chapter explains this starting with a concrete example of measurements of archaeological glass using simultaneous PIXE/PIGE measurements, explaining general and technical details of measurements, and proceeds to show how the measurements are treated, processed, and displayed in ways to comply with the concepts, interpret the results, and provide adequate answers to the questions posed by archeology. The chapter also offers some possible improvements through a few novel concepts and ways of interpretation.

Keywords: Compositional group, Conceptualization, Geological class, Kernel density estimate, PIGE, PIXE, Principal component analysis, Rare earth patterns, Roman glass.