Investigation of pre-screening and cost-effective tools for mortar dating at circe and circe: Data from the usage of13c in the framework synthetic samples

CIRCE (Università della Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”) and CIRCe (Università di Padova) represent a unique multidisciplinary group with competences spanning different fields of research, from applied physics to geology, and including geochemistry involved in the development and characterization of dating methodologies for anthropogenic carbonates and mortars. Mortar dating often requires a specific tuninig of the applied procedure driven by the characteristics of each specimen in order to guarantee accurate dating. Such tuning is driven by the complex characteristics of mortars, and is often inferred by means of analyses such as Optical Microscopy on Thin Sections (TSOM), X-Ray Diffractometry (XRD) and Scanning Electron Microscopy Energy Dispersion X-ray Spectroscopy (SEM-EDS), but ultimately rely on the measurement of radiocarbon isotope ratios. Aiming to decrease the economic effort spent on dating the development of pre-screening analyses geared towards mortar quality evaluations represents a desirable tool. In this paper a model describ-ing the relationship between measured mortar δ13C and observed offset in radiocarbon ages is developed and validated onto a previ-ously published dataset Marzaioli et al. 2011a. Overall agreement verified on this experimental dataset allowed us to simulate δ13C for archeological mortars, pointing out its validity in a defined range, especially if measured using the purification procedure.