Art at Oxford University, which began publication in 1958. Yet archaeometry is now more than just the name of a journal; it is a field of study. Indeed, the discipline of archaeometry was practiced for many years before it was actually named. In a historical review on scientific measurement in archaeology, Stuart Fleming (1982), of the Museum Applied Center for Archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania, places the origin of archaeometry in the late 1920s when an astronomer, andrew ellicot douglass, from the University of Arizona pioneered the dating technique of dendrochronology.

Although the journal was not initially explicit about what archaeometry was, its articles were restricted to the hard sciences, i.e., they were based in physics and chemistry. To understand the history of archaeometry is to understand the major developments within the hard sciences in answering archaeological questions. Archaeological geology, for instance, has a long history. In the early nineteenth century, charles lyell’s Principles of Geology gave time depth to the world, which early European archaeologists used to incorporate their models of human antiquity and theories of evolution. Geology thus gave the means for associating flint tools with fossil mammals and the relative dating of the ice ages.

Occasional examples of the application of chemistry and physics in answering questions about the past can be found throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, yet the true development of archaeometry can be traced to later in the twentieth century and is intertwined with two developments. The first concerns archaeologists’ seeking answers to specific problems that were a product of the theoretical developments within the discipline. The second is tied to advances in science and technology. Two approaches are presented here: the use of characterization studies in identifying trade and exchange and the use of dating techniques in determining time depth. The post– World War II developments in nuclear science have been crucial in both instances.

Characterization Studies

Advances in science and technology have made the sourcing and characterization of many archaeological materials that provide evidence for the physical identification of their movement easily available. These advances have gone hand in hand with a shift in archaeological theory in which archaeologists began to see the usefulness of using trade and exchange in modeling the distribution of materials over space and in explaining changes in societies over time.

The identification of traded archaeological material is not a recent phenomenon. Perhaps the most famous early study was by Anna Shepard, who in the 1930s and 1940s postulated the exchange of pottery over wide areas of the U.S. Southwest by analyzing mineral inclusions in thin sections to pinpoint the origins of such minerals (Shepard 1965). Chemical techniques to identify the elemental composition of archaeological materials as a means of characterization are also not new. Neutron activation analysis was applied to coins from the Louvre in 1952, and in 1957, oriental ceramics were analyzed using the nondestructive methods of X-ray fluorescence spectrometry (XRF) and X-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis (Young and Whitmore 1957). Access to these techniques, however, was restricted and costly.

A major advance in the chemical analysis of archaeological material came from the initiative of Robert Oppenheimer. On 8 March 1956, he assembled a group of archaeologists and chemists at the Institute of Advanced Studies, Princeton, to discuss the possibility of applying methods of nuclear research to the study of archaeology (Sayre and Dodson 1957). As a result of this meeting, work was undertaken at two laboratories, the Brookhaven National Laboratory in the United States and the Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art in Oxford, England. Techniques deployed included neutron activation analysis (NAA) and spectrographic methods.

Those studies were reasonably successful in being able to separate pottery wares from Asia Minor, greece, and italy or different factories of Samian ware, and the studies laid the foundations for chemical analyses in the next three decades, in which thousands of analyses using varying techniques were carried out on many types of objects including pottery, stone (obsidian,