Our Conservation Department is fortunate to have a portable x-ray fluorescence analyzer (pXRF), and today we started putting it to use in the Artifact Lab!

Conservator Nina Owczarek uses the pXRF to analyze pigments on a wall painting fragment

What can we do with a pXRF, you might ask? Well, Nina Owczarek provides a good overview about the use of this instrument in a previous post and also in a presentation which you can watch by following this link.

I’ve used a pXRF before, but it’s been awhile, so today Nina came up and gave us all a refresher. Essentially, x-ray fluorescence is a non-destructive analytical method that uses x-rays to identify elements present in objects or samples. This technique is particularly useful for characterizing pigments and metal alloy components, and that is what we’re using it for in the Artifact Lab.

A view of Nina and I discussing the pXRF from outside the lab

After examining a few artifacts visually, we had some questions about materials and wanted to do some further investigation with the pXRF. For instance, we are interested in these metal ribbons on the Ahanakht coffin boards (see Lynn Grant’s previous post about the boards).

The pXRF positioned in contact with the metal ribbons on one of the smaller coffin boards

After examination of these ribbons under the microscope, it was still difficult to determine what type of metal they are made of. With the pXRF, after a 180-second scan and using special software, a spectrum was produced that showed a large peak for copper and very small peaks for tin, iron, arsenic and lead. We haven’t been able to analyze the data much yet, but this does tell us that these are indeed made of copper.

We will follow this post soon with more information and interpretation of our results.