Analyses of Materials

Mineralogical, metalographic, chemical, and physical methods with the help of which mineral and chemical composition, structure, and characteristics of archaeological mineral, metal, and organic materials are determined: optical microscopy, SEM, EDX, DTA, AAS, NAA, ICPAES, ICP-MS, XRF, PIXE, IRS, RSS, NMR.
• Mineralogical macro- and microscopic analyses of stone artefacts.
• Characteristics and characterisation of archaeological pottery: raw material, additives, granulation, firing temperature, mineral composition, microstructure of a shard, deposits of raw clay in Slovenia, surface processing of a shard: engobes, glazes.
• Historic plasters and mortars: binders, aggregates, organic additives, technology of making binders and plasters, dating.
• Inorganic pigments: their identification.
• Glass artefacts: choice of raw material, technology of making.
• Statistical processing of analyses results, statistical methods.
• Archaeological metal objects: metals and alloys, outline of early mining in Europe, basics of certain ore extraction (copper, lead, silver, iron) and procedures of their processing into metal.
• Chemical composition of organic materials.
• Correlating between material characteristics of objects and their archaeological classification (chronological and cultural).
• Dendrochronology – dating of wood and wooden objects and its use in archaeology: tree-ring density measurements (densitometry) or density of early and late wood, isotopic composition (carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen) of a tree-ring or of early and late wood.