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A new look at XRD patterns of archaeological ceramic bodies

An assessment for the firing temperature of 17th century haft rang tiles from Iran

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Abstract

In this paper, the general rules of phase transformations in calcareous clay bodies during firing were used to estimate the equivalent firing temperature (EFT) of seventeenth century polychrome Persian haft rang tiles based on their X-ray diffraction (XRD) patterns. The novelty of this work is, however, that it handles the XRD patterns of archaeological clay bodies with principal component analysis (PCA) in order to have a new look at their firing and thermal behaviour. Statistically handling the XRD patterns, different clusters were discriminated in the clay bodies whose mineralogical composition showed various proportions of amorphous and quartz contents. The results showed interesting trends in the different clusters in terms of the EFT, quartz content and the density of the bodies. The present work uses PCA to have a new look at XRD patterns of archaeological clay bodies and, moreover, to interpret the PCA results in order to estimate the EFT of a large number of archaeological clay bodies.

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Acknowledgements

The first author expresses his gratitude to the Iranian Ministry of Science, Research and Technology and the Italian Ministry for Foreign Affairs for their financial supports. Two anonymous reviewers are cordially acknowledged for their critical reading and suggestions, which considerably improved the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Conservation, Art University of Isfahan, Hakim Nezami St., P. O. Box 1744, Isfahan, Iran

    Parviz Holakooei

  2. Diaprtimento di Fisica e Scinze della Terra, Università degli Studi di Ferrara, Via Saragat 1, 44100, Ferrara, Italy

    Umberto Tessari, Massimo Verde & Carmela Vaccaro

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  1. Parviz Holakooei
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Holakooei, P., Tessari, U., Verde, M. et al. A new look at XRD patterns of archaeological ceramic bodies. J Therm Anal Calorim 118, 165–176 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10973-014-4012-z

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