Researchers and museums struggling to identify forged antiquities may soon be able to rely on a new ally: the earth’s magnetic field.
A team led by Israeli researcher Yoav Vaknin has developed a method to distinguish genuine clay artifacts from modern fakes by reading faint magnetic signals locked into the objects when they were fired thousands of years ago.
The technique, described in a paper published this week in the scientific journal PNAS, could give museums, law enforcement agencies and archaeologists a new way to test contested artifacts, Vaknin told The Times of Israel.
Vaknin’s approach builds on a branch of geophysics known as archaeomagnetism, which studies how changes in the Earth’s magnetic field are recorded in physical materials. When pottery is fired in a kiln, iron-bearing particles in the clay act like tiny compass needles, recording the direction of the Earth’s magnetic field at the time, he explained.
“Pottery is a very good recorder of the Earth’s magnetic field,” Vaknin said. “We can’t see it, but it’s all around us. And when a material is fired to high enough temperatures, these particles align with the direction of the magnetic field.”
