Evaluation of complementary methodologies applied to a preliminary archaeometric study of glazed pottery from Agsu (Azerbaijan)

Agsu town is an Azerbaijan's recently excavated, important archaeological site, considered a crossroads of commercial routes since the ancient times between China, Asia Minor and Europe. For this reason, the area is rich in different typologies of artifacts with various provenances such as stone objects, glazed pottery and coins. The excavations indicated the presence of workshops specialized in various spheres of metallurgy, as well as of dye-works. A non-invasive or, at least, micro-destructive multi-technique approach was applied for the characterization of eight archaeological pottery fragments taken from Agsu Site (Azerbaijan) dated back XIX century A.D.. At different spatial scales, a combination of complementary optical microscopy (OM), scanning electron microscopy – energy dispersive spectroscopy (SEM-EDS), X-ray diffraction (XRD), and prompt gamma activation analysis (PGAA) was applied. The proposed study is aimed at addressing issues such as the characterization of raw materials, the determination of manufacturing, the reconstruction of the firing technology, the identification of the pigments used for decoration and the formulation of a first hypothesis about provenance of the artifacts considered the scarce studies about it in literature.