Potteries of the Caribbean

Our last lecture of 2017 took place on Friday 24 November and was given by our departing section secretary Dr Becki Scott who described her recent scientific adventures in the Caribbean in ‘Potteries of the Caribbean’. The lecture took place in the social area behind Brel Theatre at the British School of Brussels.

The Caribbean has a rich and varied past, often represented by ceramic objects. Ceramic objects are usually prolific on archaeological sites and therefore form a focus for many interdisciplinary studies.

These remains can provide a wealth of information about past cultures, relating to style, manufacturing technology, and ultimately past trade and resource management. Stylistic and typological studies can be used to create relative chronologies for a site, while chemical and petrographic analyses are used to provenance the raw material(s) used in the manufacture of the object. Although fragments of ceramics are sometimes available for destructive analyses, many objects held in collections are not. Likewise, these precious objects cannot always be transported to laboratories for further study.

Provenance
Becki was involved with a couple of projects focusing on the provenancing of ceramic objects from the Lesser Antilles. Ceramic fragments from excavation contexts in the Caribbean had been sent to Europe for destructive chemical and petrographic analyses. However, larger, more complete objects in collections on the islands of Grenada and St. Vincent could neither be sub-sampled nor exported.

Becki developed a method of using a portable X-ray fluorescence spectrometer (pXRF) to analyse these objects. In other words, she took the instrument to the objects, rather than the objects to the lab. The result of this work has meant that objects, which would otherwise not be analysed geochemically, could be used to contribute to studies determining the cultural interactions between the islands of the Lesser Antilles.

Find out more about Becki's Caribbean adventures and her work in other areas on her blog.

Bye-bye Becki
The event will also be a chance to say ‘au revoir’ to Becki (pictured below with her pXRF spectrometer) as she is now working at Greenwich University in the UK and is resigning as section secretary. However Becki did manage to make a final appearance for RSC Belgium as part of our curling team in December.

Dr Rebecca Beasant Scott – Becki - has been an active member of our section committee, which she joined in 2012, and has acted as section secretary for the past two years.

Born and brought up in Norfolk, Becki had an early interest in archaeology and took a BA in the subject at the University of Wales, Lampeter including a dissertation that focused on an area of south Norfolk that may have been in continuous occupation and use from the Iron Age to today. Joke?

She then took an MA in Cultural Landscape Management at Lampeter, followed by a MSc in Forensic Archaeology and Anthropology at Cranfield University awarded in 2008 for which she won the Inforce Prize for best overall academic performance.

This was followed by a PhD at Cranfield on the investigation and characterisation of colourless glass from forensic and archaeological contexts using multiple interdisciplinary analytical techniques.

A postdoctoral position at KU Leuven brought her to Belgium to research on the use of trace elements to provenance archaeological glass in 2010-2011. Followed by a second post-doc position in Leiden University in The Netherlands. Becki has now returned to the UK where she is employed as an Analytical Geochemist at the University of Greenwich on its Chatham campus.

White Gold at BSB

A good crowd of RSC Belgium members and friends braved some wintry weather on 14 March to hear a fascinating talk from forensic archaeologist Dr. Andrew Shortland of Cranfield University in the Swoosh Lounge at the British School of Brussels. Andrew described the work of his group in characterising porcelain - the 'white gold' of antiquity. 

Andrew started with the story of the 'Ruislip Vase' a seemingly modest piece of porcelain discovered in a very ordinary house in north-east London in 2010. Having been used recently as a bookend it was recognised as an 18th-century porcelain vase made for the Qianlong Emperor of China. Valued initially at £1 million it sold at auction for over £ 50 million: a world-record for such an artefact. However, the object was not collected or paid for by the purchaser and the vase has recently been finally sold by auctioneers Bonhams for a more modest - but still substantial - £20 - 25 million.

Clearly porcelain is truly a 'white gold'. This reputation has held true across the centuries and recently the volume of sales of antique porcelain has increased rapidly. And, of course, this attracts the interest of 'entrepreneurs'. Dr Shortland brings the techniques of modern analysis to porcelain with the aim of identifying copies and fakes in Chinese and European porcelain.

Art of porcelain
The production of the thin glass-like ceramic known as porcelain probably began in China in the first millennium BC, but the earliest fine examples date from circa 650 AD. From the early medieval period Chinese porcelain was being exported and was greatly prized throughout the royal courts of the old world.

There was huge competition to create porcelain in Europe to rival those pieces produced in East Asia and in the early years of the eighteenth century this was accomplished, first at Meissen and then throughout Germany, France, England and elsewhere. Early examples of both Chinese and European porcelain are rare and growing in value - as witnessed by the Ruislip vase story. They have therefore been extensively copied, both by the factories themselves and by others seeking to imitate their wares.

Andrew's talk showed how two modern non-destructive analytical techniques - hand held X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF) and Laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) can distinguish between genuine early objects and later copies and fakes in both Chinese and European porcelains. His research has been conducted with a number of the world's leading auction houses who - obviously - have a keen interest in the findings.

The insights provided by Dr Shortland was appreciated by our audience and there was a very good discussion after his presentation about the determination of the true provenance of antiques and art objects.

Fakes, Forgeries & Forensics

The RSC 2012 Autumn season got off to a great start on September 11 with an interesting and entertaining presentation from Dr. Patrick Degryse from the Centre for Archaeological Sciences at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KUL).

Entitled 'Fakes, Forgeries & Forensics: Chemistry & Archaeology' Dr. Degryse explained the services and research that his department offer to the world of archaeology to a good audience of members and friends in the cosy atmosphere of Le Chalet Vert in Tervuren.

Fakes
Much of the work involves isotopic and elemental analysis for provenance studies on items auch as Ancient Egyptian mummies, medieval triptych paintings and (as it turned out) a rather modern reproduction of an Anatolian idol. Dr. Degryse stated that it is very difficult to make an absolute positive statement about the provenance of an article but the work of the department can exclude some sources and narrow down the possibilities.

A specific research focus at KUL is on early glass. One recent PhD student was assigned to collect sand samples from beaches all around the Mediterranean to establish an elemental background reference for determination of the source of ancient glass samples.

Forgeries
Obviously when examining precious ancient objects non-destructive testing is preffered and one technique (X-ray fluorescence - XRF) was demonstrated on a contemporary source! Apparently the UK pound sterling is not as sound as one might hope with perhaps 3% or more of the coinage in circulation being forged. This has led to calls from international monetary authorities for the UK to withdraw and re mint the entire stock. The euro on the other hand is - at least on the forgery front - very sound due to a special alloy involved in its fabrication that makes it very hard to fake.

However, despite the best efforts of Patrick and his colleague RSC Belgium exec member Becki Scott we were unable to find any fake pound coins amongst the 30 odd sample size provided by our audience. The coins were analysed using a portable XRF device which seemed to have been modelled on a Star Trek phazer.

Dr. Patrick Degryse (right), Dr. Becki Scott and RSC Belgium chairman Prof. Bob Crichton are pictured with the 'XRF phazer' above.