Non-destructive characterisation and classification of ceramic artefacts using pEDXRF and statistical pattern recognition.

Background: Portable energy dispersive X-ray fluorescence (pEDXRF) spectrometry analysis was applied for the characterisation of archaeological ceramic findings from three Neolithic sites in Serbia. Two dimension reduction techniques, principal component analysis (PCA) and scattering matrices-based dimension reduction were used to examine the possible classification of those findings, and to extract the most discriminant features.

Results: A decision-making procedure is proposed, whose goal is to classify unknown ceramic findings based on their elemental compositions derived by pEDXRF spectrometry.