Provenance study of ancient Iranian luster pottery using PIXE multivariate statistical analysis

Although luster potteries are frequently excavated at archeological sites in Iran, a thorough scientific study of their provenance has not yet been performed. In this work, 43 pieces of Iranian luster pottery (bowl, dish and tile) excavated from Rayy, Kashan, Maragheh, Alamoot, Takht-i-Sulayman and Jiroft were analyzed in order to investigate their origin. The luster shards which belong to Seljuks and Il-Khanids dynasties (12th–13th centuries) were analyzed using proton induced X-ray emission (PIXE) technique. To classify the fragments according to their location and origin, principal component analysis (PCA) and hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) were applied to the chemical compositions of the body of the shards. We were able to classify the samples into three distinct groups using PIXE.