The emergence of hand-held X-ray fluorescence devices (HH-XRF) has changed the cultural approach to the analysis of ancient materials. These instruments are characterised by highly miniaturised hardware and powerful software and much of the designer s efforts are devoted to encourage users to consider the device as a black box, with no need to go into the substance of its functioning. For those who prefer to go into the substance instead, this paper discusses some preliminary activities necessary to prepare it for the field. In particular, we discuss the optimisation of the primary filter and the calibration of two XRF devices i.e. a hand-held Bruker Tracer 5g and an in-house developed portable spectrometer, by considering two quantitative parameters: the limit of quantification and the relative uncertainty of quantification.

It is a common approach in cultural heritage studies that portable and non-invasive techniques are used. However, when dealing with rock art research this represents further challenges.
Our research carried out in El Alto-Ancasti's Mountain (Catamarca, Argentina), at several archaeological sites, have studied the historical processes of production, uses and transformation of caves and shelters with rock art. From a material approach to rock art, we have sought to understand the history of painting and use of different caves through a methodology that combines different lines of evidence: study of tonalities, overlaps and morphological characteristics of the motifs; spatial studies; and archaeometric analysis. As a result, we have established different chronologies and some social practices associated with rock art in El Alto-Ancasti.
All this highlighted the complex and diverse nature of El Alto-Ancasti’s rock art caves and shelters, and the need to understand their particular histories through new strategies and appropriate methodologies.

We present here the knowledge transfer project that we are currently developing as a result of the collaboration between the University of Cádiz and the Provincial Archaeological Museum. The main objective is the virtual reconstruction of certain archaeological contexts of a Phoenician nature documented in the city of Cádiz, with the aim of making them directly accessible to the general public. Employing an interdisciplinary approach, we begin by taking reliable reconstructive hypotheses from a historical-archaeological point of view and transforming them into scientifically cross-checked 3D environments. Within them are incorporated three-dimensional models of the most representative Phoenician-Punic archaeological pieces that are on display in the Museum s Colonisations Room. Finally, all the information generated by the virtual reconstruction process will be included in the Museum s museography and didactic discourse.

This paper illustrates the preliminary results of an ongoing research concerning new investigative methods and tools useful to formalize transformative processes on built heritage, in a chronological perspective, through the study of surface alteration and degradation pathologies as Stratigraphic Units. This study aims at proposing a new section of the Extended Matrix (EM) method, composed of cutting-edge software solutions for managing and representing information, as a possible bridge between the archaeology of architecture, strictly connected to chronology, and the conservation science field of research, based on the surface analysis. The goal is to allow more accurate comparative analysis for conservative purposes and produce scientific-based reconstructive hypotheses. Present workflow, still being tested, is based on open-source tools, and is designed to be reproducible on any type of artifact according to FAIR principles.

Despite their aesthetic expressivity, realistic images of reconstructed pasts tend to withhold the scientific work of reconstruction and fail to provide scholarly reusable documentation. The contribution examines the operative role of (3D-)representations in the context of archaeological reconstruction. We propose a semiotic framework to look at reconstruction images. A semiotics’ analysis (aesthetic, technical and analytical attributes) of practical examples of reconstruction images from the Notre-Dame de Paris arch reconstruction shows that there is a double effect of compression in the reconstruction and its representation. To alleviate these compressions in discourse and meaning, we focus our effort on the argumentation patterns and the conflict of interpretations as foundations of reconstruction scholarship. If we consider the 3D-reconstruction not in its illustrative image of reconstruction, it becomes an inherent part of the reconstruction data. We demonstrate how the argumentation can tie together the visualizations and the reconstruction. The linking of representation and reconstruction is possible through consistent documentation practice using CIDOC CRM and CIDOC CRMinf to elicit the reasoning and the argumentation in the reconstruction process.