Introduction

The term ‘archaeometry’ was invented in the mid-1950s, by Martin Aitken and Christopher Hawkes at Oxford University, to assign a name to a publication of the Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art. The first issue of Archaeometry was published in 1958, and it is now a well-recognized, international research journal. Today, however, archaeometry represents considerably more than the name of a journal. Archaeometry has become the umbrella term used to describe an interdisciplinary field of archaeological research in which techniques and approaches from the physical, chemical, biological, geological, and statistical sciences are employed to extract more information from the material record of past human activity. The range of research conducted in archaeometry is so broad that any attempt to describe the field in a comprehensive summary is difficult. A number of practitioners have suggested that archaeometry includes the following activities or themes: (1) materials characterization; (2) dating; (3) prospection; (4) conservation; (5) the study of man and his environment; and (6) the handling and modeling of data (Figure 1). Major developments within the field of archaeometry have relied on the development and improvement of new scientific techniques in conjunction with their application to significant archaeological problems. A history of archaeometry in relation to the above-mentioned themes is described.