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Towards a new archaeometry

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2003 Meas. Sci. Technol. 14

(http://iopscience.iop.org/0957-0233/14/9/001)

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INSTITUTE OF PHYSICS PUBLISHING MEASUREMENT SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

EDITORIAL

Towards a new archaeometry

Guest Editors Archaeometry is a branch of archaeology that focuses its efforts on the materials
of the artefacts. Knowledge of the materials connected with the transformations
J W Mayer they have undergone may bring to light the know-how of ancient cultures. How
Arizona State University were our ancestors able to take advantage of the natural resources? How did they
M Menu develop techniques to enhance the qualities of their tools, their weapons, their
C2RMF, Paris ornaments. . . .
From the beginning, the development of archaeology has been closely
associated with the physical and chemical sciences. After a pioneering phase,
with enthusiastic and active people working more or less in isolation,
collaboration is now more effective and researchers are keen to employ the most
powerful and most advanced methods in order to better understand the
development of technologies over time. If a history of archaeology is written one
day it will show, unsurprisingly, that progress has been linked to the general
development of science. Chemists and physicists were active throughout the 19th
century: Berthelot, Moissan etc. The development of carbon-14 dating is due to
Professor Willard F Libby, who received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1960
for his discovery. The development of materials science in the 1970s enabled the
study of matter on the micrometric scale, and today the nanometric range can be
probed with ion beams, electron beams, neutron beams and electromagnetic
beams. So one can get answers to questions that one could not imagine addressing
in the early times of archaeology: dating, provenance studies, rediscoveries of
ancient techniques, understanding the behaviour of our ancestors etc.
This new field of archaeometry is also valuable for its benefits to the economy
and society. Human civilizations wish to hand down the knowledge accumulated
over centuries and millennia; artefacts have to be conserved in museums with great
care and also are used for education. Here again science is necessary to advise on
ways in which to preserve the various relics from our ancestors for the future. Our
ancestors were as inventive as we are now and the human imagination is so broad
that every natural resource was tested, transformed, mixed. While studying an
archaeological settlement, we encounter a variety of scientific problems. As
conservators, we may be afraid of the complexity of modern-day art since artists
use any kind of material, any kind of support; we have to bear in mind that, in the
past, the story was not very different. The cooperation of many types of scientists
is necessary in order to analyse, in as much detail as possible, the materials of the
different artefacts, so as to explain their physical properties, to deduce the
intentions of the artists and craftsmen and to begin to understand the various ways
of life in the past. Finally, a comprehensive study of the artefacts must consider
their conservation today, but also aims to understand how they have survived
centuries of burial in archaeological sediments. In a reverse engineering process,
the archaeological artefacts may be extremely useful as reference materials for the
storage of nuclear wastes, for instance, by understanding long-term conservation.
So archaeometry is too broad to get a comprehensive overview. The articles in
this Special Feature look at recent developments in the archaeometric domain,
focusing on specific questions in archaeology, such as dating, provenancing and
technologies. Finally, one should emphasize that there is no longer a single
analytical technique or a single method suitable for explaining the complexity of
the problems. This is obvious because the objects are heterogeneous, even in the
case of analysing the techniques of a painter or of characterizing natural organic
substances.