Geochemical data of archaeological pottery from West Africa (revised version)

The geochemical data of pottery from sites in West Africa was obtained by using a pXRF. Measurements were conducted using a Niton GOLDD+ portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF) device from Thermo Fisher. A 50 kV and 100 mA tube with an Ag anode generates X-ray and the secondary radiation is detected by larger silicon drift detector. The diameter of the measurement window is 8mm. The “TestAll Geo” Mode was used as it is well suited for ceramics (Eslami et al. 2020). Before measurements, the device was powered on for one hour to achieve thermal stability. A pottery standard was measured at regular intervals to ensure consistency. Each measurement took 330 seconds (filters: standard 60 sek; low 60; high 90; light 120) ensuring the accurate detection of lighter elements (Beck 2017, 56). The measurements were corrected using 32 ceramic samples from the “Forschungstelle Keramik” of the Goethe University Frankfurt previously measured with WD-XRF (Furger & Helfert 2023), in order to ensure data comparability and usability by other researchers. For this the munich procedure (Schauer 2024) was used. The pottery includes samples from the following sites: Birni Gazargamo (Nigeria), Essouk (Mali), Garumele (Niger), Kamaka (Chad), Lamadji (Chad), Marandet (Niger), Mdaga (Niger), Misgoungou (Niger), Walasa (Nigeria), Zilum (Nigeria). The rawdata contains information on the Site and Region aswell as the ID of the pottery sample. The measurements are given in the format provided by the pXRF tool. The coefficient corrected data contains only those elements that could be corrected sufficiently. rawdata: pXRF_rawdata.csv coeffcorrected data: pXRF_coeffcor.csv For the code used for the analysis see: https://github.com/JuanMarcops/Tracing-Connections-Provenance-Analysis-of-West-African-pottery-using-pXRF The paper: Puerta Schardt, J.-M., Magnavita, S., 2025. Tracing connections: Exploring links between Marandet (Central Niger) and the Chad Basin through pottery provenance analysis using pXRF. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 67, 105382. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2025.105382