It's a poorly kept secret that the pre-publication paper "Wilson, M.A. Carter, M.A. Hall, C. Hoff. W.D. Ince, C. Savage, S.D. McKay, B. and Betts, I.M. 2009 ‘Dating fired-clay ceramics using long-term power law rehydroxylation kinetics’, Proceedings of the Royal Society A. doi:10.1098/rspa.2009.0117 is generating a lot of attention and interest among archaeologists everywhere. The ability to inexpensively date fired ceramics simply through measuring weight change caused by rehydroxylation is simply amazing. We need to replicate the results. Here at CSULB we can do that -- and we have many samples that we have dated via OSL and the basic instruments (a furnace and an ultra precision microbalance) are available. I'm thinking that the use of TGA might be a great way to evaluate this work since the TGA is basically a furnace with a ultra high precision balance. I think the combination of OSL dating (to determine rates) might make an robust solution that would vastly increase our ability to specify the depositional history of whole deposits. Very cool.
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