kareina: (Default)
kareina ([personal profile] kareina) wrote2023-11-06 10:40 am

looping around has finally brought me somewhere

Remember when I said months ago that I was drawing the line, and would do no further data processing for this thesis, and the unprocessed samples wouldn't get done?  Yah, right.

I realised that while I didn't have a budget to get my hands on any artefacts from Swedish museums to analyse them to test my provanincing technique, I do have (in addition to the two artefact bits that my friend in Denmark sent me from Hedeby), one piece of medieval building stone from Nidaros Cathedral, which they sent me in 2018 along with the samples from the various quarries they use. At the time they let me know that the stone probably came from one of the two quarries nearest the Cathedral itself, one of which is only two km away from the Cathedral, but has been built over with an apartment complex, so no further quarrying is being done there (and so I don't have a sample that is known to come from there), and the other of which is about 14 km away, and they did send me a sample that is known to come from that location.

Consulting the geologic map, and it turns out that both of those quarries are from the same rock unit in the Trondheim Nappe Complex. There are a handful of other quarries from which I have samples that also come from the Trondheim Nappe Complex, but from different rock units. In theory the rocks from the same rock unit will have a shared temperature and pressure history as they formed, but the ones from other rock units will be a bit (or a lot) different.  My approach to provancing relies on both the "these are the same" part, and "those are different" parts.  

So when I sat down to write up the chapter on the test cases I realised that to do it justice I really need to be able to compare all of the maps made from samples in the same nappe complex as my "unknown", which meant doing a fast version of the data processing, just to get images, and enough of a sense of what minerals have what trace elements,  This sill took all week, because five of them hadn't been done yet (but this is way faster than then 3 to 5 days per map needed to do the full processing wherein I am fully confident in the results). But it was worth the delay (yes, even with the submission deadline looming overhead), as now I can confirm that yes, the sample that might come from one of two quarries in the same rock unit does have the same trace element accessory mineral signature as the one that does come from one of them, and they are both very different from all of the other quarries in the same nappe complex.  (If I ever have a budget to do more analyses I want to go to Trondheim, find that apartment complex, and see if I can get a bit of rock from the hill under it, just to see if both quarries have the same signature (I suspect that they do, being from the same rock unit, and since the craftspeople at the Cathedral restoration workshop can't tell them apart when working on them), or if my "unknown" can be shown to come from the same quarry as it matches.

After I got the figures made (see the two links above), and finished the associated writing yesterday I thought to go to bed at a reasonable hour (with respect to Keldor's work schedule, my schedule doesn't care when I do stuff), but when I didn't fall asleep after resting an hour, I hopped back up and sat down at the computer, and copied the list of research questions I posed in chapter 1 into the conclusions chapter, and answered all of them.  So now that is done, and I got to bed at 04:00, where I slept for 4.5 hours (not counting the little time I was awake to talk with Keldor and then say goodbye, when he left at 05:30).

Now I have "only" to move the discussion stuff I had previously written in the final chapter to the earlier relevant chapters, so that the data and the discussions for each topic are together, so I can let the conclusions chapter stand alone as the bare list of questions and answers, and fill in the various highlighted holes that say "write this", which are scattered here and there in the document, and then clean it up, prune out redundant text and make certain that it flows well enough to make sense.  On time to turn it in on the 24th, before we depart for Glotta Gillet in the Shire of Gyllengran. Sounds doable, right?