Study on distribution of radionuclides in soil and pottery samples of archaeological sites of eastern India

The present study reports the first data on NORM distribution in soil and pottery samples collected from excavated sites of Erenda (Trench A1) and Bahiri (Trench YB1) located in East Medinipur, West Bengal, India. Collected potteries include grey-wares, red-wares, black-wares and black-red-wares. It was observed that ²³⁸U and ⁴⁰K activities of the pottery samples are higher than that of the soil samples, which might be an indication of their different origin. ²³²Th activity is uniform along the depth and has similar distribution in both soil and pottery samples of Erenda and Bahiri.