Key Pages
Joukowsky Institute Workplace |Changes [Oct 27, 2009]
Artifact Images
Introduction to Materials and Archaeological Sciences
Archaeological practice has always borrowed the theories and methods of other disciplines (biology, geology, history, anthropology, philosophy, etc.) to provide fresh and fascinating categories of data and sources of interpretation. Such methods have been indispensable in recreating and understanding all aspects of past human life.
Bruce Trigger states that "if the goal of a science is to understand its specific subject matter, that of archaeologists must be to understand material culture" (A History of Archaeological Thought 2007: 506); to attain such a goal, archaeologists must move beyond examining the extrinsic/macroscopic features of archaeological materials (such as form, style, and decoration) and examine the intrinsic/microscopic nature of materials (structure, properties, and processing).
Engineering and materials science studies provide powerful insight into the deep interconnection between the structure (subatomic, atomic, microscopic, macroscopic), properties (mechanical, electrical, thermal, magnetic, optical, deteriorative), and processing (performance) of materials--applying this kind of information to the analysis of archaeological material-human relationships can be greatly beneficial to the discipline.
One of the many important applications of materials science investigations (both chemical and physical) is to elucidate ancient manufacturing techniques and technologies--such as the high-temperature industries of ceramic, metal, and glass. This is a highly important archaeological problem, as production is often an ephemeral activity: raw materials and waste products are rarely present (due to reuse or recycling) or recognized in the archaeological record, and production facilities and equipment (furnaces, crucibles, tuyères, etc.) were designed with skill and specific purposes, but were not actually designed or intended by their users to last for long periods.
In addition, written records of the recipes and technical processes used by ancient manufacturers are all but absent, either because an oral tradition was in place among craftsmen or because such treatises were recorded on paper, parchment, papyrus or other materials susceptible to deterioration and decomposition. Materials science offers the opportunity to understand archaeological artifacts and their relationship to the craftspeople who produced and used them and the environments in which they were produced, by viewing production processes from the inside-out.
