Research Article | OPEN ACCESS
Compositional Analysis of Ancient Bricks at Site 2211, Candi Pengkalan Bujang, Kedah
1Zuliskandar Ramli, 1Nik Hassan Shuhaimi Nik Abd. Rahman, 1Abdul Latif Samian, 2Adnan Jusoh, 2Yunus Sauman and 3Othman Mohd Yatim
1Institute of the Malay World and Civilisation (ATMA), Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
2Department of History, Faculty of Humanities, Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris
3Academy of Malay Studies, Universiti Malaya
Research Journal of Applied Sciences, Engineering and Technology 2013 16:3027-3033
Received: January 09, 2013 | Accepted: January 31, 2013 | Published: September 10, 2013
Abstract
Archaeological research at Candi Pengkalan Bujang (Site 2211) which is located at Pengkalan Bujang, Kedah was conducted in 2008 and was carried out by researchers from the National University of Malaysia (UKM). The site is believed to be a new site because based on the Quaritch-Wales report, the site based on its location is not in the report that was published by Quaritch-Wales. Based on its orientation of northeast-southwest, which is the same orientation as Candi Pengkalan Bujang (Site 22), hence this Candi or temple was of the Buddhist religion and was constructed between the 11th century to the 13th century AD. Composition analysis of bricks at this site was conducted to determine whether the source of the raw material is local, namely clay or otherwise. The technique used is the X-Ray Diffraction (XRD) technique to determine the mineral phases of the bricks and also the X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF) technique to determine the major element and trace element content of the bricks. The mineral content found in the ancient bricks of Candi Pengkalan Bujang (Site 2211) consists of quartz, microcline, muscovite and minor minerals such as albite and geothite. Major element and trace element content also show that the raw materials used were derived from the basin of the Muda River, Bujang River and the surrounding areas of Kota sub-district. Indirectly, this study proves that local raw material was used to produce bricks at this site.
Keywords:
Pengkalan Bujang, X-Ray Diffraction (XRD), X-ray Fluorescence (XRF), Ancient bricks, Muda River, Bujang River, Bujang Valley,
Competing interests
The authors have no competing interests.
Open Access Policy
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
Copyright
The authors have no competing interests.
|
|
 |
ISSN (Online): 2040-7467
ISSN (Print): 2040-7459 |
 |
| Information |
|
|
|
|
| Sales & Services |
|
|
|
|
