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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 J W Mayer Arizona State University M Menu C2RMF, Paris
Archaeometry is a branch of archaeology that focuses its efforts on the materials of the artefacts. Knowledge of the materials connected with the transformations they have undergone may bring to light the know-how of ancient cultures. How were our ancestors able to take advantage of the natural resources? How did they develop techniques to enhance the qualities of their tools, their weapons, their 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.