Journal of Radioanalytical and Nuclear Chemistry August 2018, Volume 317, Issue 2, pp 1151–1163 DOI: 10.1007/s10967-018-5990-2 1 Benchmarking PGAA, in-beam NAA, reactor-NAA, and handheld XRF spectrometry for the element analysis of archeological bronzes Boglárka Maróti 1 , Zsolt Révay 2 , László Szentmiklósi 1 , Krzysztof Kleszcz 2,3 , Dénes Párkányi 1 , Tamás Belgya 1 1 Nuclear Analysis and Radiography Department, Centre for Energy Research, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Konkoly-Thege Miklós street 29-33, 1121 Budapest, Hungary. E-mail: maroti.boglarka@energia.mta.hu 2 Forschungsneutronenquelle Heinz Maier-Leibnitz (FRM II), Technische Universität München, Lichtenberg str. 1., 85747 Garching, Germany Abstract Novel detection strategies were developed to improve the PGAA methodology in the analysis of bronze and brass objects. Instrumental neutron activation analysis and X-ray fluorescence were also involved in this study for comparison. The approach was tested on a set of IRMM-certified copper alloys. Reference values for the concentrations of four major additive components (As, Zn, Sn, and Pb) were compared with the results obtained by the involved methods. The bias observed between the reference Sn values and the initial PGAA results was successfully addressed by considering the interference of this line with low intensity copper prompt gamma peaks. In this report results are presented, and the analytical merits are compared. Keywords PGAA, In-beam activation analysis, INAA, XRF, IRMM BCR-691, certified reference copper alloys