Compare methods

	X-Ray Fluorescence Sourcing	NAA Provenance
Field	Archaeology	Archaeology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2011	2003
Originator	Energy-dispersive XRF; archaeological obsidian sourcing pioneered by Cann & Renfrew, synthesized by M. Steven Shackley	Michael D. Glascock & Hector Neff (MURR provenance program)
Type	Elemental analysis for compositional sourcing of artifacts to geological origins	Multi-element compositional sourcing of ceramics and obsidian via INAA and multivariate grouping
Seminal source	Shackley, M. S. (Ed.). (2011). X-Ray Fluorescence Spectrometry (XRF) in Geoarchaeology. Springer.	Glascock, M. D., & Neff, H. (2003). Neutron Activation Analysis and Provenance Research in Archaeology. Measurement Science and Technology, 14(9), 1516-1526.
Aliases	XRF Provenance, Portable XRF Sourcing, pXRF Elemental Analysis, X-Ray Fluorescence Spectrometry	Neutron Activation Provenance, INAA Compositional Sourcing, Compositional Group Analysis, Chemical Provenance by NAA
Related	2	2
Summary	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.	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.