History

The application of analytical chemical knowledge in order to solve archaeological problems in ancient ceramics is a discipline which grew rapidly in its scope and is now in its maturity. But the chemical analysis of pottery is much more than a straightforward application of existing instrumental methods to new questions, because many of the analytical questions are unique to archaeological materials and this discipline requires an understanding of other related disciplines such as geochemistry and material science.

The application of analytical chemistry to archaeological artifacts has a long history since the eighteenth century, with the contributions of Martin Heinrich Klaproth (1743-1817) and Humphry Davy (17781829) to the analysis of glass, ancient coins, and pigments. One of the first analytical examples related to pottery is found in a report by H. Diamond published in 1867 which includes a section on a Roman ceramic glaze studied by Michael Faraday. But it is toward the end of the nineteenth century when the results of chemical analysis became more common in reports; thus the Swedish archaeologist Gustav Nor-denski(3ld submitted pottery sherds found at Mesa Verde (Colorado, USA) to petrological analysis and the results appeared in a volume published in 1893, and the first chemical analysis of ancient ceramics, a research on Athenian pottery, was carried out at Harvard University by Theodore William Richards (1868-1928) and published by the American Chemical Society in 1895. These early analytical researches were undoubtedly of great interest to archaeologists, but they tended to be of rather sporadic nature and were limited in their scope.

The growth of the chemical analysis of archaeological materials in the twentieth century was especially due to the apparition of instrumental analytical techniques and the rapid scientific and technological advances. The intensive application of analytical methods in archaeology became possible only with the development of refined methods of analysis on a microscale, due to the requirements of a nondestructive or quasi-non-destructive material sampling, and with the establishment of new laboratories where chemists worked in close collaboration with scholars and archaeologists.

One of the first instrumental analytical techniques used in the ceramic analysis was neutron activation analysis (NAA), which was applied to the study of ancient Mediterranean ceramics by E. V. Sayre and R. W. Dodson in 1957 and published in the American Journal of Archaeology. In 1960, Nature, the prestigious scientific journal, published the work of E. E. Richards and K. F. Hartley on Romano-British pottery by spectrographic analysis (atomic emission by direct current arc), and the research of V. M. Emeleus and G. Simpson on ancient Roman ceramics by NAA. Since the 1960s, all the different analytical techniques developed until now have been also applied to the elemental analysis of archaeological material in general, and ceramics in particular (see Neutron Activation Analysis).