Rapid qualitative compositional analysis of ceramic paints

In previous research Van Keuren and colleagues used time of flight-laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (TOF-LA-ICP-MS) to infer distinct paint composition groups in glaze-painted White Mountain Red Ware (WMRW) from late pre-Hispanic villages in eastern Arizona. This analytical approach cannot be reasonably applied (in a non-destructive way) to the study of paint composition on whole vessel collections. To expand the earlier study and examine the link between compositional group and whole vessel decoration, we used portable x-ray fluorescence (pXRF) to qualitatively examine the composition of glaze-painted designs on a large corpus of WMRW whole vessels curated at the National Museum of Natural History. This paper summarizes the previous ICP research, explains the methodology behind the qualitative XRF analysis, presents the results of the whole vessel analysis, and proposes additional applications for the qualitative analysis of ceramic paints using pXRF.