1 - ARCHAEOLOGY AND ANALYTICAL CHEMISTRY

Summary

This chapter aims to place the role of analytical chemistry into its archaeological context. It is a common fallacy that archaeology is about things – objects, monuments, landscapes. It is not: archaeology is about people. In a leading introductory text, Renfrew and Bahn (1996: 17) state that “archaeology is concerned with the full range of past human experience – how people organized themselves into social groups and exploited their surroundings; what they ate, made, and believed; how they communicated and why their societies changed”. In the same volume, archaeology is called “the past tense of cultural anthropology” (Renfrew and Bahn 1996: 11), but it differs from anthropology in one crucial and obvious respect – in archaeology it is impossible to interview the subjects of study, or to observe them directly in their everyday life. Archaeology therefore operates at a very different level of detail when compared to anthropology. Inferences about past societies are made from the material evidence recovered by archaeological excavation – sometimes in the form of surviving artifacts or structures (i.e., the deliberate products of human activity), but also from associated evidence such as insect remains, from which environmental and ecological information can be derived. Sometimes it is the soils and sediments of the archaeological deposit itself – their nature and stratigraphy – which provide the evidence, or add information by providing a context.