Areas and limits of employment of portable EDXRF equipment for in situ investigations

The use of mobile spectrometers in the archaeo-metric study of ancient artefacts has become a very common practice over the past few years. It does open methodological questions on the employment of such techniques in a non-destructive manner, i.e. avoiding the damage of the artifact. Some additional methodological questions come by (i) the use of such instrumentation for diagnostic scopes (in which a different approach to the measurement is required) and (ii) the use of the spectrometers in systematic analysis on big number of artefacts, stored in several museums (during experimental campaigns). This paper's aim is to discuss some of this questions, on the basis of the experience in the use of mobile (or Field Portable) systems for Energy Dispersive X-ray Fluorescence (EDXRF) spectroscopy that we have harvested in the last years. Our conclusions mainly regard the precision of measures, which is related both to the positioning of the spectrometer and to the instrument's instability. Also we deal with the more complex problem of the object's matrix not being homogeneous and of how this can affect the response of the measuring system. Moreover, it is discussed the more general question of the use of portable spectrometers and, consequently, of the meaning one can give to the results so obtained. As a matter of fact the use of such systems, which have an intrinsic analytic potential, in a non-destructive manner, frequently creates ambiguities that have not been, sometimes, taken into account with attention by the investigators. Finally some ideas are traced on the development of methodologies which favor a better use of such spectroscopic systems for the analysis of ancient artefacts. (authors)