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    Archaeometry

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    This document introduces the field of archaeometry, which uses scientific techniques to study ancient materials and artifacts. It discusses how archaeometry has progressed alongside developments in chemistry, physics, and materials science. The collaboration of many scientific fields is needed to fully analyze artifacts and understand ancient ways of life. Archaeometry benefits both archaeology and society by helping to preserve artifacts for education and handing down ancient knowledge. It can also provide insights into long-term preservation by studying how artifacts have survived over centuries. The articles in this special issue focus on specific archaeological questions like dating, origin analysis, and ancient technologies.

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    Archaeometry

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    85 views2 pages
    This document introduces the field of archaeometry, which uses scientific techniques to study ancient materials and artifacts. It discusses how archaeometry has progressed alongside developments in chemistry, physics, and materials science. The collaboration of many scientific fields is needed to fully analyze artifacts and understand ancient ways of life. Archaeometry benefits both archaeology and society by helping to preserve artifacts for education and handing down ancient knowledge. It can also provide insights into long-term preservation by studying how artifacts have survived over centuries. The articles in this special issue focus on specific archaeological questions like dating, origin analysis, and ancient technologies.

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    This document introduces the field of archaeometry, which uses scientific techniques to study ancient materials and artifacts. It discusses how archaeometry has progressed alongside developments in chemistry, physics, and materials science. The collaboration of many scientific fields is needed to fully analyze artifacts and understand ancient ways of life. Archaeometry benefits both archaeology and society by helping to preserve artifacts for education and handing down ancient knowledge. It can also provide insights into long-term preservation by studying how artifacts have survived over centuries. The articles in this special issue focus on specific archaeological questions like dating, origin analysis, and ancient technologies.

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    85 views2 pages

    Archaeometry

    Uploaded by

    lopanec
    This document introduces the field of archaeometry, which uses scientific techniques to study ancient materials and artifacts. It discusses how archaeometry has progressed alongside developments in chemistry, physics, and materials science. The collaboration of many scientific fields is needed to fully analyze artifacts and understand ancient ways of life. Archaeometry benefits both archaeology and society by helping to preserve artifacts for education and handing down ancient knowledge. It can also provide insights into long-term preservation by studying how artifacts have survived over centuries. The articles in this special issue focus on specific archaeological questions like dating, origin analysis, and ancient technologies.

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    Home Search Collections Journals About Contact us My IOPscience

    Towards a new archaeometry

    This article has been downloaded from IOPscience. Please scroll down to see the full text article.

    2003 Meas. Sci. Technol. 14

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

    View the table of contents for this issue, or go to the journal homepage for more

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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.

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