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Archaeology systematically collects, evaluates, and analyses data in the pursuit of comprehending past human behaviours and beliefs. Chemistry in particular offers a means to extract significant information from this material record. It has been contributing significantly to our knowledge of the past, from the 18th- and 19th-century wet chemical analyses by such well-known chemists as Klaproth, Berzelius and Kekulé to the development of instrumental methods in the early 20th century, through to recent developments that allow the study of fragile biomolecules like DNA and proteins. The materials from which these data are extracted are often fragmentary and usually altered by a variety of processes, some through their production and others after deposition, meaning that the application of chemistry to archaeology is usually challenging. This chapter provides a historical perspective on the subject and an introduction to the rest of the volume. For those seeking additional information, we offer suggestions for further reading.

In its endeavour to understand human behaviour primarily through a study of the material remains of past societies, archaeology has interacted from its very beginnings with the sciences of physics, chemistry, biology and of the Earth. In truth, it is a test to conjure the name of any scientific discipline which has not at one time or another been of direct use to archaeology.1  Indeed, many would consider archaeology itself, a discipline which involves the systematic collection, evaluation and analysis of data, and which aims to model, test and theorise the nature of past human activity, to be a science. Furthermore, they might argue that it is possible to arrive at an objective understanding of past human behaviour, and in that sense archaeology is no different from other scientific disciplines, given the obvious differences in methodology. However, as Trigger2  (p. 1) has reminded us from a different perspective, archaeologists have a unique challenge:

‘Because archaeologists study the past, they are unable to observe human behaviour directly. Unlike historians, they also lack access to verbally encoded records of the past. Instead they must attempt to infer human behaviour and beliefs from the surviving remains of what people made and used before they can begin, like other social scientists, to explain phenomena.’

There is clearly a difference of emphasis here, and one which is primarily focused on contrasting the methods used (often scientific) against the desired outcomes (largely cultural). Whether or not one regards archaeology of itself as a science, or as a humanities-based discipline which calls upon scientific methods to aid in the collection and interpretation of evidence, there can be little doubt that archaeology and the natural sciences have been intertwined since their very inception in the 17th century. Undoubtedly, archaeology is one of the few disciplines which comprehensively straddles the humanities and the sciences, so famously described by C. P. Snow as ‘the two cultures’.3  Debate now tends to focus on the multifaceted nature of archaeology, drawing unashamedly on a whole range of other disciplines, and not privileging one form of knowledge above any other.4  It is tempting to note that when archaeological chemistry started in the late 18th century (as described below), the world was such that an educated person could be expected to be conversant with all aspects of science, in addition to literature and, especially, the classics. Regrettably this is now much more difficult, and so the essence of good archaeology is open, respectful, meaningful and iterative dialogue across the many disciplinary boundaries involved.5 

Archaeology in the last 300 years has largely been transformed from a pastime of the nobility and the educated upper classes, often simply preoccupied with the embellishment of the contemporary world with treasure recovered from ‘lost civilisations’, into an academic discipline which relies on painstaking and systematic recovery of data followed by careful synthesis and interpretation. (Unfortunately, however, the former preoccupation can still be seen in some media representations of archaeology!) In our view, the fundamental characteristic of archaeology is the creation of an understanding of the many relationships between residues, artefacts, buildings, monuments, landscapes, and past human behaviour. It is this last aspect—the inference of human behaviour from material culture—which distinguishes archaeological from ‘heritage science’, which is more interested in the objects themselves, their preservation, and their potential role in modern society as part of the ‘heritage industry’. From the period of production, use, or modification of materials (whether natural or synthetic) to the time when traces are recovered by archaeologists, the material output of humans is altered by a plethora of physical, chemical and biological processes including those operating after deposition into the archaeological record. A significant part of the evidence may be lost, displaced or altered significantly. Inferring the activities, motivations, ideas and beliefs of our ancestors from such a fragmentary record is a considerable but interesting challenge, and one which shares many characteristics with forensic science, which also seeks to reconstruct events and motives from material remains, albeit usually over a shorter timescale.

However, the development of archaeology has not been one uniform trajectory. There have been, and still are, numerous agendas which encompass the broad range of archaeological thought, and many uncertainties and disagreements concerning the direction of the discipline remain. Collectively, the natural sciences provide archaeology with numerous techniques and approaches to facilitate data analysis and interpretation, enhancing the opportunity to extract more information from the material record of past human activity. Chemistry has as much to offer as any other scientific discipline, if not more.

The sheer diversity of scientific analysis in archaeology renders a simple coherent and comprehensive summary intractable. Tite6  packaged archaeological science rather neatly into the following areas:

  • Physical and chemical dating methods which provide archaeology with absolute and relative chronologies.

  • Artefact studies incorporating (i) provenance, (ii) technology, and (iii) use.

  • Environmental approaches which provide information on past landscapes, climates, flora and fauna as well as the diet, nutrition, health and diseases of people.

  • Mathematical methods as tools for data treatment also encompassing the role of computers in handling, analysing and modelling the vast sources of data.

  • Remote sensing applications comprising a battery of non-destructive techniques for the location and characterisation of buried features at the regional, micro-regional and intra-site levels.

  • Conservation science involving the study of decay processes and the development of new methods of conservation.

Although in this volume we focus specifically on the interaction between chemistry and archaeology, or archaeological chemistry, chemistry is relevant to most if not all of the areas identified by Tite. For example, although many subsurface prospecting techniques rely on (geo-) physical principles of measurement (such as localised variations in electrical resistance and small variations in Earth magnetism), geochemical prospection methods involving the determination of inorganic and biological markers of anthropogenic origin (i.e., chemical species arising as a direct consequence of human action) also have a role to play. However, throughout this book, archaeological chemistry is viewed not as a straightforward application of routine chemical methods to archaeological material, but as a challenging field of enquiry, which requires a deep knowledge of the underlying principles in both archaeology and chemistry in order to make a significant contribution.

It would not be possible to write a history of chemistry without acknowledging the contribution of individuals such as Martin Heinrich Klaproth (1743–1817), Humphry Davy (1778–1829), Jöns Jakob Berzelius (1779–1848), Michael Faraday (1791–1867), Marcelin Berthelot (1827–1907) and Friedrich August von Kekulé (1829–1896). Yet these eminent scientists also figure prominently in the early history of the scientific analysis of antiquities. They appear to have considered the investigation of archaeological artefacts as simply part of the wider scientific exploration of the natural world which characterised the European Renaissance. The contents of the ‘cabinets of curiosities’ created by the aristocracy and, from the 17th century onwards, public museums, must partly have formed the basis for this explosion of interest, together with the development of the techniques of analytical chemistry ‘by the humid method’, i.e., wet chemistry and gravimetric methods of analysis, attributable to Torbern Bergman (1735–1784) at the University of Uppsala, Sweden around 1770.7 

It has become traditional to assign the earliest analysis of archaeological metal to Martin Heinrich Klaproth, citing his detailed record of the gravimetric analysis of six Greek and nine Roman copper alloy coins, as well as a careful description of each coin.8  This paper, entitled Mémoire de numismatique docimastique, was presented at the Royal Academy of Sciences and Belles-Lettres of Berlin on July 9th, 1795, but was not published until 1798 (in a volume dated 1792–3). Further research, however, has suggested that he was not actually the first ‘archaeometallurgist’.9  This honour appears to go to Michel Jean Jérome Dizé (1764–1852), who, in 1790,10  published the analyses of eight copper alloy coins, given to him by M. L'abbé Antoine Mongez (1747–1835). These consisted of five Roman coins (dating to after the Emperor Nero), one Greek (‘de Syracuse’) and two ‘Gaulish’ coins. His analyses were not as comprehensive as those of Klaproth a few years later, however, since they reported only the amount of tin present in the alloy.

Klaproth's scheme for analysing copper, tin, lead and silver in copper coins has been studied by Caley11  (pp. 242–43) and can be summarised as:

‘After the corrosion products had been removed from the surface of the metal to be analysed, a weighed sample was treated with ‘moderately concentrated’ nitric acid and the reaction mixture was allowed to stand overnight … the supernatant liquid was poured off and saved, and any undissolved metal or insoluble residue again treated with nitric acid … If tin was present as shown by the continued presence of a residue insoluble in nitric acid, this was collected on filter paper … … (this) was simply dried in an oven and weighed … a parallel control experiment was made with a known weight of pure tin. It was found from this that 100 parts of dried residue contained 71 parts metallic tin, in other words the gravimetric factor was 0.71.

The filtrate from the separation of the tin was tested for silver by the addition of a saturated solution of sodium chloride to one portion and the introduction of a weighed copper plate into another.

Lead was separated from the solutions … … by evaporation to a small volume. The separated lead sulfate was collected and either weighed as such or reduced to metallic lead in a crucible for direct weighing as metal.

(Copper) was determined as metal from the filtrate from the lead separation by placing in it a clean iron plate. The precipitated copper was then collected, dried and weighed.’

However, it is possible that Dizé may not have been the first, either.7  We get a tantalising hint of the chemical assay of a ‘sword … found in a bog at Cullen, in the County of Tipperary, in Ireland’ in a paper read by Governor Pownall at the Society of Antiquaries (London) on February 10th, 1774.13  Pownall says: ‘That the Society might have a precise and philosophic description of the metal, I applied to the master of the mint; and by his direction Mr Alchorn, his Majestie's assay-maker, made an accurate assay of the metal’. Mr Alchorn reports: ‘It appears to be chiefly copper, interspersed with particles of iron, and perhaps some zinck, but without containing either gold or silver: it seems probable, that the metal was cast in its present state, and afterward reduced to its proper figure by filing. The iron might either have been obtained with the copper from the ore, or added afterwards in the fusion, to give the necessary rigidity of a weapon. But I confess myself unable to determine any thing with certainty.’ We may assume that ‘Mr Alchorn’ is Stanesby Alchorne (1727 or 1733–1800), who was assistant to Joseph Harris, Mint-Master, in 1757, and became the King's assay-master in 1789. Mr Alchorne should perhaps receive the accolade of being the first person we know of to have carried out a chemical assay on an archaeological copper artefact, but the qualitative nature of his report and the lack of detail as to the method actually used, leaves Dizé as the first known archaeometallurgical chemist.

The early history of the chemical analysis of ceramic material in Europe was given impetus by the coincidence of two factors—the arrival in Europe of detailed descriptions of Chinese porcelain manufacture (and, more critically, the appearance of samples of Chinese raw materials) from the beginning of the 18th century, and the perfection of the art of quantitative chemical analysis of mineral substances using gravimetry at the end of the 18th century.12  The royal courts of Europe were desperate to learn the art of porcelain manufacture and, although success was initially achieved by trial and error long before any full analysis was achieved, it is clear that this desire was one of the prime drivers in the development of the chemical analysis of ceramic material. The Bibliographie Céramique of Champfleury14  provides a comprehensive list of all the works published in Europe on European and Oriental ceramics up until that date (1881). The most comprehensive set of early analyses that we know about appear to have been those carried out at the Sèvres factory during the first half of the 19th century under the guidance of Alexandre Brongniart (1779–1847), and reported by him throughout his two volumes entitled Traité des Arts Céramiques.15 

In 1815, Humphry Davy published a paper16  on the examination of ancient pigments collected at Rome and Pompeii. In addition to reviewing evidence for natural pigments, he was also able to identify a synthetic pigment later to be called Egyptian Blue, formed by fusing copper, silica and naturally occurring natron (sodium carbonate). A report by H. Diamond, published in the journal Archaeologia in 184717  includes a section on a Roman pottery glaze studied by Michael Faraday in which the presence of lead in the sample provided the first indications on chemical grounds of the use of lead glaze in antiquity. In addition to his significant contributions to modern chemistry during the first half of the 19th Century, Berzelius became interested in the composition of ancient bronzes.18  Similarly, Kekulé is said to have carried out an analysis of the contents of a bronze urn from a grave in Germany which he suggested to be a crude distillation product of pine wood19  (p. 18). This was around the same time as he proposed the structure of benzene, after his famous vision of ‘whirling serpents’.

As these investigations continued, mostly in isolation from one another, prehistoric archaeology was taking its first steps towards a systematic enquiry into the study and chronology of early materials. In 1819, C. J. Thomsen (1788–1865) opened the new Museum of Northern Antiquities in Copenhagen, where he had arranged the artefacts into successive ages of Stone, Stone and Copper, Bronze, Early Iron and Later Iron.20  This relative chronology was based on comparisons of material-type, decoration and the context of recovery and it marked a major development in the study of ancient materials which gave rise to the basic chronology used in Europe of Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age, still used today (see Trigger,21  pp. 73–79, for a more detailed consideration).

Frequently these early investigations sought to examine ancient metal objects,7,9,11,22,23  initially with a view to understanding their composition and the technology needed to produce the artefacts. By the mid-19th century other more sophisticated questions began to emerge, especially in relation to provenance. At this point, archaeological chemistry moved from mere curiosity to a systematic and problem-orientated study. Between them, Göbel24  and Wocel25  on copper alloys, Damour26  on stone and Helm27  on amber, essentially formulated the concept of ‘provenance studies’ in archaeology as it is used today. This is the notion that some chemical characteristic of the geological raw material(s) provides a ‘fingerprint’ which can be measured in the finished object, and that if an object from a remote source is identified at a particular place, then it is evidence of some sort of direct or indirect contact and/or ‘trade’ between the two places.28  During the 1840s, Karl Christian Traugott Friedeman Göbel (1794–1851), professor of chemistry at the University of Dorpat in Estonia from 1828, began a study of large numbers of copper alloy artefacts from the Baltic region comparing those recovered from excavations with known artefacts and coins of prehistoric, Greek and Roman date.24  Citing Klaproth and Dizé, he concluded that the artefacts were probably Roman in origin because they contained zinc rather than tin. With the work of Göbel, scientific analysis progressed beyond the generation of analytical data on single specimens to, as Harbottle29  (p. 14) has emphasised, ‘establishing a group chemical property’. In 1854, Jan Erazim Wocel (1803–1871), who had been appointed associate professor of archaeology and art history at the University of Prague in 1850, similarly concluded that the presence of zinc in copper alloys indicated contact with Rome, but that copper with tin was ‘Celtic’ metalwork.25  Like Göbel, he also suggested that correlations in chemical composition could be used to provide relative dates of manufacture and use. The French mineralogist Augustin-Alexis Damour (1808–1902) proposed that the geographical source of stone axes could be located by considering the density and chemical composition of a number of rock types, including jade and obsidian found ‘dans les monuments celtiques et chez les tribus sauvages’, as his papers of 1865 and 1866 were entitled.26  He used the elemental analysis of greenstones (Si, Ca, Mg, Fe, Na, Al, Cr, Mn) to distinguish between Chinese jade and New Zealand greenstone, and to provenance ‘Celtic’ tools. More specifically, in 1865, Damour declared that ‘un objet sur lequel la main de l'homme a marqué son travail, et dont la matière est de provenance lointaine ou étrangère à la contrée, on en infère qu'il y a eu transport de l'objet même, ou du moins de la matière dont il est formé’ (Damour,26  p. 313). This sets out the essential supposition of chemical provenance analysis as applied to prehistoric artefacts such as stone tools, and objects made of metal, ceramic, or glass, which has underpinned much of archaeological chemistry ever since. Damour's primary archaeological interest was jade. Some 16 decades later, questions as to the possible source(s) of Neolithic jade axes in prehistoric Europe have been addressed through an international scientific project coordinated by Pierre Pétrequin,30  with results that would no doubt have delighted Damour.

The appearance of the first appendices of chemical analysis and references to them in the text of a major excavation report represents the earliest significant collaboration between archaeologists and chemists. Examples include the analysis of four Assyrian bronzes and a sample of glass in Austen Henry Layard's Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon published in 185331  and Heinrich Schliemann's Mycenae first published in English in 187832  (so important were the English versions of this that William Gladstone, the British Prime Minister, wrote the preface!). The reports in the appendices of both these works were overseen by the metallurgist John Percy (1817–1889), at the Royal School of Mines in London. Between 1861 and 1875, Percy wrote four major works on metallurgy which included significant sections on the early production and use of metals.33–36  These books remain important sources even today, because they contain first-hand descriptions of now lost metallurgical processes. His analysis of metal objects from Mycenae showed the extensive use of native gold and both copper and bronze, the latter used predominantly for weapons. Percy wrote in a letter to Schliemann dated August 10, 1877 that ‘Some of the results are, I think, both novel and important, in a metallurgical as well as archaeological point of view’ (Schliemann,32  p. 367).

The effort made to source amber towards the end of the 19th century by Otto Helm (1826–1902), an apothecary in Gdansk, Poland, from 1854 to 1874, constitutes one of the earliest systematic applications of the natural sciences to archaeology. This work is significant, because his chemical enquiry was advanced with a specific archaeological problem in mind—determining the geographical source of over 2000 amber beads excavated by Schliemann at Mycenae. In the excavation monograph, Schliemann noted that ‘It will, of course, for ever remain a secret to us whether this amber is derived from the coast of the Baltic or from Italy, where it is found in several places, but particularly on the east coast of Sicily’ (Schliemann,32  pp. 203–4). Helm based his approach on the succinic (butanedioic) acid content of Baltic amber [known since the mid-16th century from the studies by Georg Bauer (1494–1555), who is better known to metallurgists as Agricola], but did not undertake a systematic study of fossil resins from other sources in Europe. His motivation lay, at least partly, in disproving the hypothesis of an Italian mineralogist, Giovanni Capellini, who suggested at the Seventh International Congress of Anthropology and Prehistoric Archaeology in Stockholm in 1874 that some of the earliest finds of amber in the south could have been fashioned from Italian fossil resins.37  A full account of the investigations made and the success claimed by Helm along with the eventual shortcomings has been compiled by Curt Beck38  who in the 1960s published, with his co-workers, the results of some 500 analyses using infrared (IR) spectroscopy which demonstrated for the first time successful discrimination between Baltic and non-Baltic European fossil resins.39,40 

The French chemist Pierre Eugène Marcelin Berthelot (1827–1907) was active in the chemical analysis of archaeological material in the late 19th century, investigating some 150 artefacts from Egypt and the Near East, as well as ‘vin antique’.41–43  According to Caley23  (p. 122), Berthelot may have been ‘less interested in the exact composition of ancient materials than in obtaining results of immediate practical value to archaeologists.’ This was coupled with an interest in the corrosion of metals and the degradation of organic materials, which prompted a series of experimental studies based on prolonged contact of metal objects with air and water. Although Berthelot is generally more famous for his work on thermochemistry, and also the demonstration that organic compounds can be made from inorganic starting materials, in his later life he wrote several books on the early history of chemistry, such as Les Origines de l'alchimie.44  He also translated several primary Greek, Syriac and Arabic treatises on alchemy into French.

Towards the end of the 19th century, as archaeological excavation became a more systematic undertaking, the results of chemical analysis became more common in reports, and new suggestions began to appear. As early as 1892, Marie-Adolphe Carnot (1839–1920) suggested that fluorine uptake in long-buried bone might be used to provide an indication of the age of the bone,45  although the feasibility of the method was not tested until the 1940s. The increasing numbers of antiquities in Europe and North America brought about more emphasis on their restoration and conservation. The pioneer in this field was Friedrich Rathgen (1862–1942), who established a laboratory at the State Museum in Berlin and in 1898 published the first book (‘Die Konservierung von Alterthumsfunden’)46  dealing with practical procedures for the conservation of antiquities, including electrolytic removal of corrosion from ancient artefacts and the use of natural consolidants (such as pine resin and gelatin) in the conservation process.

Developments in the examination of archaeological materials in Europe began to be applied to New World artefacts. In Sweden, Gustav Erik Adolf Nordenskiöld (1868–1895) submitted pottery sherds collected at Mesa Verde, Colorado for petrological examination (thin section analysis). The results appeared in his volume Cliff Dwellers of the Mesa Verde published in 1893.47  Although not the first wet chemical investigation of ancient ceramics, a significant piece of work was carried out by Theodore William Richards (1868–1928) at Harvard (the first American to receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry) on Athenian pottery from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and published in the American Chemical Journal in 1895.48  In fact, the date of the earliest chemical analysis of a specifically archaeological ceramic remains somewhat obscure, but, as noted above, is most probably to be found amongst the papers of the Sèvres porcelain factory between 1800 and 1847, under the direction of Alexandre Brongniart, during which time he was Administrateur de la Manufacture.12 

All of the analyses carried out on archaeological material up to the beginning of the 20th century, and in some cases until the mid-20th century, would have been carried out by wet chemical (gravimetric) methods. The 1920s and 1930s saw the addition of instrumental measurement techniques, such as optical emission spectroscopy (OES; see Chapter 2), to the repertoire of the analyst. The first spectrochemical analysis of archaeological material appears to be that of Baodouin in 1921, who analysed two prehistoric copper axes.49  The principal archaeological interest at the time was understanding the level of technology represented by finds of ancient metalwork, especially in terms of alloying, and systematic programmes of analysis were initiated in Britain and Germany leading to substantial analytical reports (e.g., Otto and Witter50 ). As a result of the rapid scientific and technological advances precipitated by the Second World War, the post-war years witnessed a wider range of scientific techniques being deployed in the study of the past. Eventual reconstruction as a result of war damage was preceded by a major expansion of archaeological excavation which produced very large quantities of artefacts. The European post-war tradition of chemical approaches to archaeological metals is typified by two major projects—the Early Mining and Metallurgy Committee of the Royal Anthropological Institute51  and the Stuttgart-based Studien zu den Anfängen der Metallurgie (SAM) project.52,53  Both projects started with the explicit purpose of using chemical analyses to trace copper to its source. Both ended with large datasets, but with little agreement on interpretation. They did, however, result in a series of copper metal classifications (and some assignments to ore sources) which have formed the basis for many subsequent interpretations of the European Bronze Age.

Other materials such as faience beads and ceramics were incorporated into analytical programmes from the 1950s onwards. Faience comprises a core of finely powdered quartz grains cemented by fusion with a small amount of alkali and lime. The core is coated with a glaze of soda-lime and coloured in the range blue to green with copper compounds. Faience was first produced in the Near East although Egyptian faience became very important between the 4th and 2nd millennia BC. During the 2nd millennium BC, faience was distributed across prehistoric Europe and occurred in England and Scotland. In 1956 Stone and Thomas reported on the use of OES to ‘find some trace element, existent only in minute quantities, which might serve to distinguish between the quartz or sand and the alkalis used in the manufacture of faience and glassy faience in Egypt and in specimens found elsewhere in Europe.’ (Stone and Thomas,54  p. 68). This study represented a clear example of the use of chemical criteria to determine whether faience beads recovered from sites in Britain were imported from Egypt or the eastern Mediterranean. For many years, it had generally been assumed that faience manufacture and other technological innovations originated in the east and diffused westwards. Although the initial results suggested that OES could not be used unequivocally, the data were subsequently re-evaluated statistically by Newton and Renfrew55  who suggested a local origin on the basis of the quantities of tin, aluminium and magnesium present in the beads. This was augmented by re-analysis of most of the beads using neutron activation analysis (NAA) by Aspinall et al.56  They confirmed that the tin content of British beads is significantly higher than that found in groups of beads from elsewhere and that a number of other trace elements showed promise. However, the belief in a local origin for the British beads is by no means universally held and only investigations of larger sample groups can hope to resolve the issue. This use of the highly sensitive technique of NAA on archaeological material was by no means the first. Archaeological chemistry is often thought of as being a discipline which has borrowed extensively from techniques in the geo- and bio-sciences, but NAA is one of the few cases in which the archaeological application undoubtedly came first. The idea that nuclear reactions might be used for quantitative chemical analysis was first formulated by radiochemists in the 1930s.57  As a result of the Manhattan Project to develop the nuclear bomb (1942–1945), the 1950s saw the construction in the USA of a number of nuclear reactors with sufficient neutron flux to allow the development of NAA as an analytical tool. The ‘father’ of the nuclear bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967), was the first to recognise the potential of NAA as a tool to distinguish the provenance of archaeological ceramics. In 1954 he suggested such an approach to E. Sayre and R. W. Dodson at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, USA, and the resulting study (on the analysis of Mediterranean pottery) was reported to archaeologists and chemists at Princeton University in 1956.58  Very shortly after this, a group at the Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art, University of Oxford, began using NAA to study the provenance of coins.59  Emeleus and Simpson60  subsequently used NAA to test the applicability of trace element analysis to locate the region of origin of Roman Samian sherds which could not be placed stylistically (see Chapter 4).

The development of radiocarbon dating by Willard Libby (1908–1980) in 1949 paved the way for establishing absolute chronologies throughout the world. This was perhaps the single most important development of science applied to archaeology, and resulted in the (as yet) only Nobel Prize citation which mentions archaeology. Although the impact was not immediate, radiocarbon dating eventually allowed sites to be dated in relation to one another and enabled cultural sequences without calendrical chronologies to be established independent of the necessity for cross-cultural comparisons (based on artefact typologies) with areas dated by historical methods.61 

In Britain, the term ‘archaeometry’ was coined in the early 1950s by Christopher Hawkes in Oxford to describe the increased emphasis on dating, quantification and physico-chemical analysis of archaeological materials. A journal with the same name was launched in 1958 and textbooks by Martin Aitken62  and Mike Tite63  illustrated the full potential of emerging applications. In 1974, the first volume of another periodical dedicated to scientific work in archaeology (the Journal of Archaeological Science) was published.

During the late 1950s and early 1960s, a number of individuals advocated strongly a new and refreshing approach to archaeology, although the roots of this impetus are evident in earlier writings. Progressive thinking in anthropology and the social sciences as well as the explicit use of models by geographers had largely left archaeology lagging behind. This transformation, which became known as the ‘New Archaeology’, represented an explicit effort on the part of a number of archaeologists who emphasised optimistically the potential for explaining past human action rather than simply describing it. Such was the optimism of the early 1960s that it was felt that all human behaviour could be embodied within laws of cultural phenomena. Patterning in ‘material culture’ and the ‘archaeological record’ could be used to explore behavioural correlates regardless of time or place. Not surprisingly, the philosophy of science played a significant role in providing the terminology for statistical and quantitative approaches in archaeology (see Trigger2,21 ). The New Archaeology rejuvenated research into prehistoric trade and exchange. Invasion or diffusion of peoples was no longer viewed as the principal instigator of cultural change; instead, internal processes within society were emphasised. Evidence for ‘contact’ arising from exchange of artefacts and natural materials (as well as the transmission of ideas) was still seen as an important factor. Scientific analysis might therefore be used to evaluate change in economic and social systems. This increased interest in the distribution of materials initiated a ‘golden era’ in archaeometry as a wide range of scientific techniques were deployed in the hope of chemically characterising certain rock types, such as obsidian (see Chapter 3) and marble64  as well as ceramics,65  metals,52,53  glass 66  and natural materials, such as amber.39  These characterisation studies were aimed at ‘the documentation of culture contact on the basis of hard evidence, rather than on supposed similarities of form’ (Renfrew,67  p. 17). The substantial datasets generated by these techniques could now also be subjected to statistical treatment using computers. Although archaeological theory has moved on from ‘New Archaeology’ to Processualism and post-Processualism, characterisation studies remain an important research area in archaeological science, utilising a range of chemical properties incorporating trace element composition, biomarker composition, mineralogy and scientific dating, including isotopic measurements. In his review of chemical characterisation, Harbottle29  (p. 15) reminded practitioners that:

‘ … … with a very few exceptions, you cannot unequivocally source anything. What you can do is characterize the object, or better, groups of similar objects found in a site or archaeological zone by mineralogical, thermoluminescent, density, hardness, chemical, and other tests, and also characterize the equivalent source materials, if they are available, and look for similarities to generate attributions. A careful job of chemical characterization, plus a little numerical taxonomy and some auxiliary archaeological and/or stylistic information, will often do something almost as useful: it will produce groupings of artefacts that make archaeological sense. This, rather than absolute proof of origin, will often necessarily be the goal.’

The geographical source of the materials under investigation included quarries, mines or clay deposits and sites of production where materials are modified or fabricated. If the material remains unaltered during preparation or modification, for example, when flakes of obsidian are removed from a large core of the rock, then the bulk composition of the artefact is unaltered from the source material, although subtle changes may occur (such as in the case of a hydration layer on obsidian—see Chapter 3). However, in the case of synthetic materials such as ceramics, metals and glass, production may bring about significant changes in the composition of the finished artefact with respect to the composition of the raw materials. The whole question of provenance then becomes a complex issue (e.g., Tite,6  pp. 143–144; Cherry and Knapp;68  Wilson and Pollard28 ), especially if mixing, recycling and the time taken for objects to move are taken into account.69 

Until the last three or four decades, archaeology has generally paid more attention to the analysis of inorganic artefacts—natural stone, metal, glass, ceramic material and so on—reflecting an interest in the most obviously durable artefacts in the archaeological record. In recent years, increasing attention has been directed at biological materials: natural products such as waxes and resins, accidental survivals, such as food residues, and, above all, human remains, including bone, protein, lipids, and, most recently of all, DNA. Some of the methodology for this work has been imported not only from chemistry, biochemistry and molecular biology, but also from organic geochemistry, which has grown from a discipline with a principal interest in elucidating the chemical origins of oil and coal into one which studies the short-term alteration and long-term survival of a very wide range of biomolecules (e.g., Engel and Macko70 ). Another related discipline in this quest for ancient biomolecular information is molecular palaeontology. These disciplines are widely recognised as having much to offer each other, particularly in the recovery of genetic information from animals and plants. In terms of specific archaeological interest, the ability to extract DNA has considerable significance.

Few aspects of modern science have moved so quickly as those applying to DNA. The first edition of this book in 1996 referred to the application of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) for amplifying ancient DNA, and referred to the early results of research into the extraction of DNA from a wide range of archaeological samples. However, we now know that ancient DNA is severely damaged and fragmented, and it is generally accepted that much of this early work was probably compromised by contamination. In 2001, Martin Jones provided a revealing snapshot of the then state of the art,71  but by 2011 a new volume surveyed a much wider range of applications and breakthroughs.72  Since then even more remarkable strides forward have been taken, enabled largely by the new analytical capability of ‘next generation sequencing’.73  This has resulted in the sequencing of the nuclear genomes of ancient humans and archaic hominins74  and the recovery of DNA and proteins from a wider range of tissues including dental calculus.75,76  The full archaeological significance of this ‘aDNA revolution’ is yet to be evaluated.

Preservation of a wider range of biomolecules has been demonstrated in a number of archaeological contexts. In particular, proteins other than the structural protein collagen preserved in human bone have been subject to immunological investigation.77–79  The putative survival of protein residues on stone tool surfaces80  (see Chapter 12) hints at the possibility of characterising artefact use and identifying utilisation of specific resources and dietary items, although the specificity and replicability of the approaches used remains contentious.81–84  Certain biomolecules, such as lipids, are more durable than nucleic acids and, although some chemical alteration is to be expected, specific identifications can be made on aged samples85–89  (see also Chapters 7, 11 and 12).

The voluminous literature on bone chemical investigations generated during the last five decades represents one of the significant growth areas of archaeological chemistry90–94  (see Chapter 10). Quantitative analysis of certain trace elements (such as strontium, barium, zinc and lead), originally incorporated into bone mineral, has been used to assess diet, nutrition, health status and pathology. However, the recognition of significant compositional and mineralogical alteration during long-term burial (often labelled diagenesis—a term which, unfortunately, has different meanings in different branches of the historical sciences) has brought about a re-evaluation of bone chemical investigations: the onus of proof is now on the analyst to demonstrate that the trace element data are not geochemical artefacts reflecting more the complex interaction between bone and the burial environment than any dietary or other signal which may have accumulated during life. Undoubtedly, trace element compositions in bone are highly susceptible to a wide range of post-depositional alterations including exchange between ions in the soil solution and bone mineral.91  Attention has now switched largely to dental enamel, which is diagnetically much more resistant, when considering trace elements (or isotope ratios such as strontium and lead). More commonly, therefore, dietary inferences are now made through measurement of the light stable isotope ratios of carbon and nitrogen in bone collagen and the carbon and oxygen isotope composition of bone and dental apatite.

The limitations of the types of sample analysed in archaeological chemistry can be considerable. Typically samples are far from ideal from the analytical point of view—small, fragmentary, and, particularly in the case of biological samples, considerably degraded. Contamination during deposition is another major problem, as is contamination due to storage media, handling, and airborne particles once the sample is recovered (post-excavation). These ubiquitous problems of degradation and contamination make archaeological chemistry a challenging field, and not one which can be regarded as just another routine application of analytical chemistry. Strong parallels have been drawn with forensic science,95,96  in the sense that both disciplines use a wide range of scientific approaches to extract information from the (often non-ideal) material record, with a view to reconstructing activities and intentions in the past.

Although archaeological science has long been recognised by most archaeologists as a fundamental component of the inquiry into past human behaviour and development, the demand for more archaeologically-relevant data from the scientific community has been voiced on many occasions. Scientific analysis should be much more than a descriptive exercise which simply documents the date, morphology or composition of ancient materials. As DeAtley and Bishop97  (p. 371) have pointed out (see also Trigger2 ) no analytical technique has ‘built-in interpretative value for archaeological investigations; the links between physical properties of objects and human behaviour producing the variations in physical states of artefacts must always be evaluated.’ This demand for meaningful scientific data also needs to be viewed against the changing approaches to the study of the past as the discipline of archaeology itself evolves. The historical relationship between scientific approaches and techniques and prevailing theoretical views regarding past human behaviour has been reviewed by Trigger2  (p. 1) who states that ‘archaeologists have asked different questions at different periods. Some of these questions have encouraged close relations with the biological and physical sciences, while other equally important ones have discouraged them.’ During the 1960s, archaeology embraced the sciences, not only the techniques but the terminology of scientific method for explaining human behaviour. During the past five decades, general attitudes in society towards science have been shifting towards a more critical stance, as part of a backlash against the misrepresentation of science as a monolithic and unchanging body of knowledge, which gives a single, unequivocal, correct answer. These attitudes in the past gave rise to an assumption by the general public, and often within the scientific community itself, of the supremacy of scientific over other forms of knowledge.98  Against this backdrop, the contribution of scientific analysis to the study of the past has come under increasing scrutiny.99  Certain approaches to archaeological thinking from the mid-1980s onwards, commonly labelled post-processual, have stressed relativism and subjectivism in interpretation, as well as the ideological and symbolic roles of material culture, to a much greater extent than before. This has often been accompanied by an exposition on the limited contribution that scientific data have to make to this inquiry (see, for example, Hodder;100  Thomas101 ). The central concern is often that scientific studies often proceed in a context devoid of a specific archaeological problem (Yoffee and Sherratt,102  pp. 4–5). A simpler observation would be to say that some scientific studies of archaeological material ultimately conclude that ‘Things are made of stuff!i.e., they perform chemical or isotopic analysis on archaeological material with no relevant or meaningful archaeological research question.5  However, it would be completely misleading to suggest that chronological, compositional or locational data generated by scientific techniques have no role to play in providing foundations for interpretations of past human behaviour. As Cherry and Knapp68  (p. 92) have remarked, scientific analysis could ‘help arbitrate amongst competing cultural hypotheses’, although they could find little evidence for the general adoption of such an approach.

Recent thinking in archaeological materials science, however, has been very happy to embrace theoretical concepts from material culture studies, such as materiality and object biography.98  There is an increasing realisation that technological change is not necessarily driven solely by technological improvement, and that social factors can play an equal if not greater role. Thus, scientific studies of archaeological materials need to take human behaviour into account when looking for explanations. This fits extremely well with discussions of technology in other areas over the last thirty years, such as Science Technology and Society (STS) studies, agency, materiality, and so on. These are based on the realisation that technology is not merely a set of material processes but is also the human decisions and structures that surround them. By giving equal weight to a thorough discussion of chemistry, materials science and the archaeological context, we can produce models of past behaviour that are much stronger than a narrowly-defined ‘scientific’ approach.

It is hoped that the foregoing provides a short historical context to this volume. Indeed we return to this discussion briefly in the final chapter. In the intervening chapters, we have selected a number of themes which exemplify past and current research in archaeological chemistry. The themes presented in this volume (representing only a small component of what is called archaeological science) span many diverse areas of chemistry. There are several reasons for adopting a thematic approach. Firstly, the majority of previous texts in archaeological science have tended to emphasise techniques at the expense of a consideration of those applications which have produced relevant archaeological information. Nowadays, there are so many techniques that such an approach would be unduly laborious. Some of the more relevant techniques of chemical and isotopic analysis are summarised as briefly as possible in Chapter 2. The remaining chapters range in scope, but each includes a discussion of some of the underlying science followed by examples of archaeological applications. Chapter 3 reviews and updates the classic characterisation studies undertaken with the aim of locating the source of the volcanic glass, obsidian. Chapter 4 reviews the structural chemistry of clays, and illustrates the power of chemical studies of ceramics with an example from Roman Britain and Gaul. Chapter 5 discusses the structure and chemistry of archaeological glass, together with a review of some work on the atmospheric corrosion of medieval window glass, and an introduction to isotopic methods of provenancing glass. Two chapters (6 and 9) focus on the chemical study of metals. Chapter 6 considers the chemical analysis of European medieval and later brass objects, including a discussion of the use of this knowledge for the study of brass scientific instruments, and the use of copper alloy analyses to help document the early contact period in North America. Chapter 7 focuses on the chemistry of resins and aims to consider the future role of analytical organic chemistry applied to amorphous deposits surviving on artefact surfaces. Chapter 8 continues the theme of organic chemistry in archaeology, with a consideration of the racemisation of amino acids in bones and teeth, with an example drawn from the once intractable question of dating the arrival of the earliest humans in the New World. Chapter 9 returns to metals, and tackles the controversial field of lead isotope geochemistry, in particular with a critical review of its role in locating the source of metals in the Mediterranean Bronze Age.

The second edition added two further chapters. Chapter 10 reviews the applications of ‘isotope archaeology’ to the study of human bone for purposes of dietary reconstruction, which leads on to questions of health, status and mobility. This is an area of research which has exploded since the 1990s, and is now regarded as an essential—and virtually routine—part of the study of human remains. The second area to be added (Chapter 11) is the study of small proteins biomolecules—primarily lipids—from archaeological contexts. This has also developed rapidly in the last ten years, partly because of advances in the field of biomolecular gas chromatography and mass spectrometry, which affords the potential to identify small biomolecules relatively easily, but also because some of the pioneering work discussed in Chapter 11 has demonstrated that, if one is prepared to look, these proteins do in fact survive in the archaeological record. The most striking application to date has been the elucidation of the role of dairying in the ‘secondary products revolution’—in early Old World agricultural societies, it is not clear from the faunal record whether domesticated animals were reared primarily for meat or milk and cheese, or, in the case of cattle, for ploughing. The identification of milk lipids in Early Neolithic pottery is beginning to unravel this question.

This third edition continues the focus on biomolecules with a new chapter (12) on proteins. Early approaches to identifying the blood protein haemoglobin in residues relied on non-specific chemical reactions. Though immunological tests are highly specific to fresh proteins, significant degradation of higher order structure occurs over archaeological time periods, leading to cross-reactivity. For a brief period, the only point of agreement in the field was that proteins do indeed persist under many conditions, if one is prepared to look. Recent advances in biomolecular mass spectrometry have revolutionised the study of archaeological proteins, making it possible to detect and identify residual proteins often to the species level. These proteomics approaches are now answering long-standing questions about diet—including the development of dairying considered in Chapter 11—but also allowing new avenues to be explored, such as the identification of fragmentary faunal remains to species.

Every reader will probably feel that some heinous crime of omission has been committed. We have, for example, deliberately avoided adding a chapter on ancient DNA. As noted briefly above, this is a field so specialised and fast-moving that we felt we could not do it justice here. This book does not pretend to be a completely balanced review of archaeological chemistry—the size of a single volume precludes any serious attempt to do that. What we have tried to do is present a range of studies which have been important archaeologically, are interesting from a chemical standpoint, and have interested the authors at one time or another.

A comprehensive history of scientific analysis applied to the study of past people and materials is lacking. The papers by Caley11,22,23  remain useful for summaries of the early applications of chemistry to archaeology and the paper by Trigger2  is essential reading. The contributions of Berzelius, Davy, Faraday and others to the development of chemistry are summarised by Hudson.103  Specific studies of the history of archaeological metallurgy and the history of the chemical examination of archaeological ceramics are provided in Pollard7,9  and Pollard,12  respectively. The texts by Renfrew and Bahn104,105  serve as a very useful general introduction, covering the scope and aims of modern archaeology, including many scientific applications. For a more detailed consideration of the development of archaeology, see Trigger.21  Debates on the theory of archaeology can be found in a series of essays.102,106–108 

A collection of scientific studies, largely relating to museum objects, including dating, authenticity, metalwork, ceramics and glass, can be found in the edited volume by Bowman.109  Henderson110  provides an overview of the information derived from scientific studies of a similar range of inorganic archaeological materials. Many conference proceedings (especially those entitled Archaeological Chemistry, latterly produced by the American Chemical Society111–120  and also the published proceedings of the meetings of the International Symposium on Archaeometry (see Pollard121  for a list of meetings and proceedings) and Materials Issues in Art and Archaeology, contain a very wide range of chemical studies in archaeology. Goffer122  gives a broad introduction to archaeological chemistry, covering basic analytical chemistry, the materials used in antiquity, and the decay and restoration of archaeological materials. Other publications include Lambert123  which has eight chapters, each one based on the study of a particular archaeological material, and Pollard et al.,124  which, in addition to case studies, contains more information on the science underlying analytical chemistry as applied to archaeology. Stephen Weiner's book Microarchaeology125  approaches chemical applications to archaeology in a different way, and is particularly valuable for field applications. Price and Burton126  cover a wide range of topics, from a discussion of archaeological materials and analytical techniques, to a chapter on ‘What archaeologists want to know’. The ‘standard works’ on science in archaeology in general include Brothwell and Higgs,127  Ciliberto and Spoto,128  and Brothwell and Pollard.129 

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