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[Silver anomalies found in Jerusalem pottery hint at wealth during second Temple period]

Scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Bar-Ilan University have discovered unusually high concentrations of silver in samples of many different types of pottery from excavations in Jerusalem of the late Second Temple period, the first century BCE (Before the Common Era) through 70 CE (Common Era). This is the first study ever conducted on silver in archaeological ceramics.

David Adan-Bayewitz, Associate Professor at Bar-Ilan in Ramat-Gan, Israel, and a guest at Berkeley Lab, and Frank Asaro and Robert D. Giauque of Berkeley Lab's Environmental Energy Technologies Division made their discovery of performing measurements on 1,200 pottery vessels from 38 sites in Roman Judea (present-day Israel). They used high-precision X-ray fluorescence (HPXRF) and instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA). The Berkeley Lab team developed a variation of INAA, the INAA coincidence technique, specifically for measuring silver concentrations in archaeological samples, as a more accurate means of checking the results of HPXRF and conventional INAA.

The major finding is that samples of pottery from Jerusalem during this era showed anomalously higher concentrations of silver, as compared to samples from all other non-urban sites dated to the same period of time. Many of the samples from Jerusalem and other sampled sites were otherwise indistinguishable in date, shape and chemical composition. High silver abundances were also detected in pottery found at other urban sites. But many of the Jerusalem samples had higher silver values than any of the samples from the other cities.

"Because pottery samples containing higher amounts of silver were all recovered from sites in cities, and because the cities were distant from one another," says Asaro, "we concluded that the silver anomalies are associated with human activity." Natural causes do not explain the geographical distribution of samples with high silver content. The researchers also concluded that silver was washed into the pottery through the action of groundwater.