Compare methods

	Ceramic Thin-Section Petrography	X-Ray Fluorescence Sourcing
Field	Archaeology	Archaeology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2013	2011
Originator	Adapted from geological petrography; codified for archaeology by Patrick Sean Quinn	Energy-dispersive XRF; archaeological obsidian sourcing pioneered by Cann & Renfrew, synthesized by M. Steven Shackley
Type	Optical microscopic characterization of ceramic fabrics for provenance and technology	Elemental analysis for compositional sourcing of artifacts to geological origins
Seminal source	Quinn, P. S. (2013). Ceramic Petrography: The Interpretation of Archaeological Pottery & Related Artefacts in Thin Section. Archaeopress. ISBN: 9781905739592	Shackley, M. S. (Ed.). (2011). X-Ray Fluorescence Spectrometry (XRF) in Geoarchaeology. Springer.
Aliases	Ceramic Petrography, Pottery Thin-Section Analysis, Petrographic Fabric Analysis, Optical Microscopy of Ceramic Fabrics	XRF Provenance, Portable XRF Sourcing, pXRF Elemental Analysis, X-Ray Fluorescence Spectrometry
Related	2	2
Summary	Ceramic thin-section petrography characterizes pottery by examining a wafer-thin slice of a sherd under a polarizing microscope, the same instrument geologists use to study rocks. Because most pottery is made from clay tempered with sand, crushed rock, grog, or shell, the mineral and rock inclusions visible in thin section carry a geological fingerprint of the raw materials, while the clay matrix and voids record how the pot was formed and fired. As Patrick Quinn's reference work sets out, the analyst identifies and quantifies these constituents, sorts sherds into petrographic fabric groups, and then relates each group's mineralogy to regional geology to infer where the pottery was made and how it was manufactured. It bridges the visual world of ceramic typology and the elemental world of chemical provenance.	X-ray fluorescence (XRF) sourcing identifies where an artifact's raw material came from by measuring its elemental composition. When a sample is irradiated with high-energy X-rays, each element emits secondary X-rays at characteristic energies, and the intensities of these emissions reveal how much of each element is present. Because volcanic glass, clays, and ores from different geological sources carry distinct trace-element signatures, comparing an artifact's composition to a library of source samples can assign it to its origin. As the geoarchaeology volume edited by M. Steven Shackley documents, XRF — including rapid, non-destructive portable instruments (pXRF) — has become a workhorse for sourcing obsidian, and is also applied to ceramics, metals, and other materials. The resulting provenance data drive reconstructions of procurement and exchange.