This amount of cadmium is rarely, if ever, seen in ancient gold and usually means that the object in question is a modern forgery {or less modern forgery since a lot of gold alloys now do not contain any cadmium additions and practically never in ancient South American forgeries. A more usual level of cadmium in ancient gold is 2-5ppm......this at any rate is the usual range of impurity of Cd in ancient South American gold alloys......is there any possibility of line overlap in PIXE? I am more familiar with XRF than PIXE so perhaps the PIXE specialists can comment further...
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