Stone artefacts and neutrons - Case studies from Hungary

Many archaeometrical studies aim at identifying the provenance of various archaeological finds. For a large group of objects, e.g. for stone artefacts, the chemical composition might be characteristic for the supposed geological source. In the last 20 years, several projects on different scales have been launched, based on the non-destructive prompt-gamma activation analysis at the Budapest PGAA laboratory. Depending on the type of the raw material (such as obsidian, flint, radiolarite or metamorphic rocks), the success of the various neutron-based studies can be expected at different levels. In this paper, we demonstrate the potentials of the mostly applied neutron-based techniques through case studies.