Local and regional museums often rely on cost-effective handheld equipment to undertake non-destructive pigment assessment. When preserved colourants are only microscopic, however, these methods’ limits may be encountered. This becomes acute with fragile objects, as is often the case for organic materials. Using a reconstructed decorated ostrich eggshell vessel, an elite grave good in 7th–6th C BCE Etruria, this study compares the efficacy of portable X-ray fluorescence spectrometry; handheld Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy; Raman spectroscopy; visible-induced luminescence imaging; multispectral multi-light reflectance analysis; synchrotron radiation X-ray fluorescence; and X-ray absorption near edge structure analysis to distinguish microscopic pigment traces. The portable device results were inconclusive, but Egyptian blue and malachite were positively identified via synchrotron analyses. This outcome supports museums to further develop protocols regarding minimal pigment residue identifications on fragile objects, including assessing risk with external analysis, and informs our understanding of pigments used on organic objects during this period.
=========================================================== LEGENDA =========================================================== Eight-year-old boy finds 1,700-year-old statuette fragment while hiki…