Neural network applied to elemental archaeological Marajoara ceramic compositions

In the last decades several analytical techniques have been used in archaeological ceramics studies. However, instrumental neutron activation analysis, INAA, employing gamma-ray spectrometry seems to be the most suitable technique because it is a simple analytical method in its purely instrumental form. The purpose of this work was to determine the concentration of Ce, Co, Cr, Cs, Eu, Fe, Hf, K, La, Lu, Na, Nd, Rb, Sb, Sc, Sm, Ta, Tb, Th, U, Yb, and Zn in 160 original marajoara ceramic fragments by INAA. Marajoara ceramics culture was sophisticated and well developed. This culture reached its peak during the V and XIV centuries in Marajo Island located on the Amazon River delta area in Brazil. The purpose of the quantitative data was to identify compositionally homogeneous groups within the database. Having this in mind, the data set was first converted to base-10 logarithms to compensate for the differences in magnitude between major elements and trace elements, and also to yield a closer to normal distribution for several trace elements. After that, the data were analyzed using the Mahalanobis distance and using the lambda Wilks as critical value to identify the outliers. The similarities among the samples were studied by means of cluster analysis, principal components analysis and discriminant analysis. Additional confirmation of these groups was made by using elemental concentration bivariate plots. The results showed that there were two very well defined groups in the data set. In addition, the database was studied using artificial neural network with unsupervised learning strategy known as self-organizing maps to classify the marajoara ceramics. The experiments carried out showed that self-organizing maps artificial neural network is capable of discriminating ceramic fragments like multivariate statistical methods, and, again the results showed that the database was formed by two groups.