Ceramic Technology - Hardness

As part of my interests in studying changes in ceramic technology I purchased a Wilson Rockwell Dual Hardness Tester off of ebay (see photo below). This instrument provides precise hardness measures and because it is a "superficial hardness" tester (as well as Rockwell B and C scales), it can be used to study ceramics. A reasonable discussion of the use of this instrument can be found in Simon and Coglhan 1998 article in American Antiquity: The Use of Indentation Testing to Obtain Precise Hardness Measurements from Prehistoric Pottery . This can also be used for lithics and it will interested to integrate this work with the work Tim and I have been doing on measurement of fracture surface.

Dating ceramics via rehydroxylation kinetics

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.