Speciation studies of iron in ancient pots from Sicily (Italy)

The proposed method, even if considered destructive by archaeologists, allows the speciation of iron, using quantity of sample in the order of milligram. In order to achieve information about their firing conditions, thirty-nine pottery samples belonging to the archaeological Sicilian site of Himera (Sicily, Italy) were characterized for Fe(II) and Fe(III) by means of a UV-Vis spectrophotometric method proposed by us, while total iron was checked by ICP-OES. Were identified two groups of samples, the first (A), which is particularly rich in Fe(II) (the archaeologists have not identified the stylistic characteristics of most of this samples) the last group is instead rich Fe(III).