Sabrina Save just published, in collaboration with site directors from different French commercial units, an article in Archaeological Prospection on the method she has developed in the past years for surveying large areas with pXRF. The abstract of the article is available through this link.
In the article she summarizes the development in the last decades of geochemical analysis dedicated to the identification of human activities and their impact on the environment. She details the methodology she implemented in the field to develop and adapt pXRF surveys to large-scale projects, and in particular in the developer-funded archaeological context. Through concrete exemples from 5 French developer-funded archaeological projects, she demonstrates the interest and value of this new method of investigation, enlarging the spectrum of chemical elements ever investigated and showing their potential for archaeological research.
The reviewers of the article consider the article to be a major publication which will have a large impact on geochemical surveys and analysis in Archaeology. They encourage Sabrina Save to develop further her research and keep publishing her work in international reviews. More articles should come out in the next months, probably more centered on individual or typo-chronologically similar sites.
For more informations on the method, you can visit our page dedicated to pXRF analysis.
