Compare methods

	NAA Provenance	Ceramic Thin-Section Petrography	X-Ray Fluorescence Sourcing
Field	Archaeology	Archaeology	Archaeology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2003	2013	2011
Originator	Michael D. Glascock & Hector Neff (MURR provenance program)	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	Multi-element compositional sourcing of ceramics and obsidian via INAA and multivariate grouping	Optical microscopic characterization of ceramic fabrics for provenance and technology	Elemental analysis for compositional sourcing of artifacts to geological origins
Seminal source	Glascock, M. D., & Neff, H. (2003). Neutron Activation Analysis and Provenance Research in Archaeology. Measurement Science and Technology, 14(9), 1516-1526.	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	Neutron Activation Provenance, INAA Compositional Sourcing, Compositional Group Analysis, Chemical Provenance by NAA	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	2
Summary	NAA provenance is the use of instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA) to determine where archaeological ceramics, obsidian, and other materials were made or obtained, by exploiting their high-precision multi-element chemical fingerprints. INAA irradiates a sample with neutrons, making its elements briefly radioactive, and measures the characteristic gamma rays they emit to quantify the concentrations of roughly thirty elements, including many trace and rare-earth elements at very low levels. As Glascock and Neff describe in their account of the technique's role in archaeology, the analytical power of NAA lies less in the measurement itself than in what follows: the statistical formation of compositional groups and the assignment of artifacts to those groups and to geological or production sources. This entry focuses specifically on that provenance application — building compositional groups and attributing artifacts by Mahalanobis distance — rather than on the instrumental measurement in general.	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.