text: Clay is a very fine-grained geologic material that develops plasticity when wet, but becomes hard, brittle and non–plastic upon drying or firing. It is a very common material, and is the oldest known ceramic. Prehistoric humans discovered the useful properties of clay and used it for making pottery. The chemistry of clay, including its capacity to retain nutrient cations such as potassium and ammonium, is important to soil fertility.
  Because the individual particles in clay are less than  in size, they cannot be characterized by ordinary optical or physical methods. The crystallographic structure of clay minerals became better understood in the 1930s with advancements in the x-ray diffraction (XRD) technique indispensable to deciphering their crystal lattice. Clay particles were found to be predominantly sheet silicate (phyllosilicate) minerals, now grouped together as clay minerals. Their structure is based on flat hexagonal sheets similar to those of the mica group of minerals. Standardization in terminology arose during this period as well, with special attention given to similar words that resulted in confusion, such as sheet and plane.
  Because clay minerals are usually (but not necessarily) ultrafine-grained, special analytical techniques are required for their identification and study. In addition to X-ray crystallography, these include electron diffraction methods, various spectroscopic methods such as Mössbauer spectroscopy, infrared spectroscopy, Raman spectroscopy, and SEM-EDS or automated mineralogy processes. These methods can be augmented by polarized light microscopy, a traditional technique establishing fundamental occurrences or petrologic relationships.