MagNetZ With Despina Kondopoulou (2022/11/16) - Archaeomagnetism through eyes of a Palaeomagnetist
Channel: MagNetZ
Date: 2022-11-16

Archaeomagnetic Research through the eyes of a Palaeomagnetist:  potential impact on the study of baked clays in various geological environments in Greece

The video is also available for download at: https://earthref.org/ERDA/2544/
and can be referenced with the doi: 10.7288/V4/ERDA/2544

Title: Archaeomagnetic Research through the eyes of a Palaeomagnetist:  potential impact on the study of baked clays in various geological environments in Greece
Author: Despina Kondopoulou from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece

During the last decades archaeomagnetic research has increasingly developed at a large number of ceramic kilns, workshops and pottery throughout Greece. This large-scale research provided Secular Variation Curves which allowed to improve monitoring of the Geomagnetic Field Variations in Greece. The studied sites show an uneven distribution, partly as the result of the available archaeological record and rescue excavations, which nevertheless covers the majority of the geological zones in the broader, continental part, of the country as well as Crete. Given the variability of the outcropping formations, a problematic has developed according to which a connection could be searched between the magnetic properties of the raw clays and their heating products.
While such correlations have already been suggested through various disciplines, in the present contribution we investigate, for the first time, the input provided by the abundant palaeomagnetic data accumulated in Greece since the early 1980s. Such measurements performed on volcanics, granites, and sediments are systematically accompanied by rock magnetic experiments. The arising properties provide a valuable database likely to optimize the success of archaeomagnetic studies, strongly dependent on material preselection. We document our approach by presenting four case studies of Neolithic, Hellenistic Early Byzantine and Medieval workshops, situated in different geological contexts from which palaeomagnetic measurements were obtained prior to the archaeomagnetic research. This information, when carefully exploited, and combined to existing protocols, can be a valuable tool in order to reduce the failure of archaeomagnetic measurements, especially for the time consuming archaeointensity calculations.

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00:00 - Intro
00:36 - Presentation
29:35 - Questions
42:00 - Announcements