Mahmut AYDIN
(FOCUH & Batman University Department of Archaeology Batman, Turkey)
Keywords: P-EDXRF, Authenticity, counterfeit, Silver objects, Gold objects
Abstract:
Traditional way of determination authenticity of cultural heritage goods in Turkey and most of other countries is visual inspection. This way mostly lost its validity because of modern replication technology used by forgers. In USA and developed few European countries archaeometric techniques started to commonly used in last few years. Especially development of non-destructive spectrometers let archaeometrists to works on authenticity of cultural goods. Forgers mostly prefer to make fake metals objects that cannot be directly dated with archaeometric techniques such as C14 or thermoluminance. There are no archaeometric techniques that let archaeometrists to directly date cultural heritage goods made of metals.
Elementalanalysis contributes to authentication knowing the elemental composition and consideringthe information about the usual composition of the objects indifferent historical periods it can be established if the itemis original or fake.
Because of cultural heritage objects are unique; they need to be analyzed in non-destructive way. One of the most common used non-destructive spectrometer used in characterization of metal cultural heritage objects is Portable Energy Dispersive X-Ray Florescence (P-EDXRF). Because of P-EDXRF analysis results can be get in a few seconds (30s), qualitative and quantitative analysis, many analysis is possible from big objects and its lightness (1,5 kg) make P-EDXRF the most popular non-destructive spectrometer.