By Yuan Ren For Mailonline
Published: 17:23 GMT, 8 February 2019 | Updated: 17:57 GMT, 8 February 2019
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The mystery of the cargo of a ship that sank 800 years ago may finally be solved after archaeologists zapped its contents with an 'x-ray gun'.
Scientists in the US have been using new handheld portable X-ray fluorescence detector on ceramic bowls from the wreck to identify where they came from.
With no written records on the ship, which sank off the coast of Indonesia, little information was known about where it was coming from or went.
With their new gadget, scientists from the Field Museum in Chicago were able to pinpoint more precisely where the ceramics were made in southeastern China.
Scientists zap shipwrecked ceramics from 80-years-ago with 'x-ray' gun to determine its origin in China. The handheld gun means objects no longer need to be put in an X-ray machine
Scientists now know that the ceramics came from 2,000 miles (3,200 km) from where the ship sank, which is about the distance from New York to Las Vegas.
Wenpeng Xu, the study's lead author from the University of Illinois at Chicago, said: 'It's amazing that we can pinpoint the production area of materials from an 800-year-old shipwreck.'
Traditionally, archaeological artefacts would have been put through X-ray machines to determine their composite makeup.
There are no written records on the ship, which disappeared off the coast of the islands of Java and Sumatra.
But there are an estimated 7,500 pieces of cargo recovered from the wreck.
Archaeologists studied 60 ceramic pieces from the mysterious shipwreck of porcelain bowls and boxes covered in a bluish-white glaze called qingbai.
Based on this style, scientists knew that it came from southeastern China, but were far from pinpointing the location since many kilns from there produced similar-aesthetics.
Little was known about the ship as there were no written records but it is now thought that the ship sank 2,000 miles from where its cargo was
