Pot shards - Perspectives of transdisciplinary: Sharing archaeometric approaches on the investigation of ancient ceramics as part of a multi-disciplinary study.

Much can be said from pottery fragments about the past if you combine archaeological approaches for studying contexts and materials with laboratory based scientific techniques to examine in detail the various physical and chemical characteristics of the ceramic. This research is based on such powerful synergy to investigate ancient baked clay artefacts from different geographic areas and time periods across the globe. This was possible thanks to the existing interdisciplinary collaboration among different departments at the University of Turin at a Roman archaeological site in Costigliole Saluzzo (north-western Italy), and the research opportunities given by the EU project “Beyond Archaeology” (BeArchaeo), an interdisciplinary research project which joined researchers from various fields and nations to better comprehend Japan’s prehistory with an archaeometric approach. Archaeometric analyses using optical stereomicroscopy (OSM), portable X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (p-XRF), X-ray powder diffraction (XRPD) and Fourier-transformed infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), as well as archaeomagnetic analyses, such as archaeodirections, archaeointensity and magnetic mineralogy, were carried out on baked clay materials from prehistoric Japan and Roman times either to characterize these materials and their contexts or to contribute on the reconstruction of Earth’s magnetic field across time. Such a range of materials analysed by different techniques produced a large set of digital items, which also inspired on promoting digital data curation for the preservation and enhancement of digital data from interdisciplinary endeavours in archaeology. The goal was to preserve and display the data related to all the different steps of the scientific analyses. The semantic ontology developed within the BeArchaeo project was used here to display all the scientific analyses performed on a set of Japanese samples on the BeArchaeo record website, after having tested the efficacy of the developed interface to store and retrieve the archaeometric data. The testing phase led to prove that the interface is a simple-to-use and innovative tool for multidisciplinary projects. It is our firm belief that such work will inspire future research on carrying on such legacy and make excellent use of the vast data and interpretation from archaeological fragments.