Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY A-MATHEMATICAL PHYSICAL AND ENGINEERING SCIENCES
Volume 465, Issue 2108, Pages 2407-2415Publisher
ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rspa.2009.0117
Keywords
ceramics; brick; archaeological dating; rehydroxylation
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Funding
- Leverhulme Trust
- Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
- Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council [EP/F037813/1] Funding Source: researchfish
- EPSRC [EP/F037813/1] Funding Source: UKRI
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Fired-clay materials such as brick, tile and ceramic artefacts are found widely in archaeological deposits. The slow progressive chemical recombination of ceramics with environmental moisture (rehydroxylation) provides the basis for archaeological dating. Rehydroxylation rates are described by a (time)(1/4) power law. A ceramic sample may be dated by first heating it to determine its lifetime water mass gain, and then exposing it to water vapour to measure its mass gain rate and hence its individual rehydroxylation kinetic constant. The kinetic constant depends on temperature. Mean lifetime temperatures are estimated from historical meteorological data. Calculated ages of samples of established provenance from Roman to modern dates agree excellently with assigned (known) ages. This agreement shows that the power law holds precisely on millennial time scales. The power law exponent is accurately 1/4, consistent with the theory of fractional (anomalous) 'single-file' diffusion.
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