Beakers filled with material used for pottery-making sit on a tabletop

Photo: Scott S. Warren

Using the data collected on archaeological pottery shards as a guide, replication experiments were developed as part of postdoctoral studies by Marvin Cummings, working in both the labs at the Getty Conservation Institute and The Aerospace Corporation.

The goal of replication studies was to understand the thermal behavior of refined illite clay materials under controlled temperature and atmosphere conditions to reproduce not only the visual appearance of the slips but also the phase morphology, nanoporosity, and other structural heterogeneity at the submicron scale.

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