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Two separate provenience studies were performed on Byzantine pottery and ceramic tiles from Northern Greece and the area around Istanbul (Constantinople). NAA, XRD, and SEM/EDS, were the primary techniques used.
In the first study, seventy-two pottery samples recovered from three sites in northern Greece-- Serres, Thessaloniki, and Philippi--were analyzed to determine whether stylistically similar pottery was manufactured at one site or several. A large sample of the pottery was recovered at Serres, a known pottery manufacturing center. NAA demonstrated that most of samples were, in fact, manufactured at Serres, but a smaller group was produced in Thessaloniki.
The second study focused on 48 decorative tiles from Istanbul and related sites housed at two museums, Dumbarton Oaks (Harvard University, Washington, D.C.) and the Walters Art Gallery (Baltimore, Maryland). Analysis of the compositional data indicated that all but five tiles belong to a single compositional group. In addition to the 48 tile specimens, several examples of pottery recovered from and presumably made in Istanbul were tested. While the chemical signatures of these pottery samples and the 48 tile samples were not precise matches, the area of Istanbul seems a likely source of the tiles.
See the exhibition catalogue from the 1992 Krannert Art Museum exhibit, "Ceramic Art from Byzantine Serres" by Demetra Papanikola-Bakirtzis, Eunice Dauterman Maguire, and Henry Maguire (University of Illinois Press 1992) with a separate article on The Materials Analysis of Byzantine Pottery,by Sarah Wisseman (pp. 66-69).
Wisseman, S., De Sena, E., Landsberger, S., Ylangan, R., Altaner, S. & Moore, D. (1997). Compositional Analyses of Ceramics from Serres and Thessaloniki. In (H. Maguire, Ed) Materials Analysis of Byzantine Pottery.Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, pp. 157-170.
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