The Archaeological Bazaar: Scientific Methods for Sale? Or ‘Putting the ‘Arch-’ Back into Archaeometry A. Mark Pollard and Peter Bray
Archaeology and the natural sciences have been intertwined for more than 200 years, but there is still room for improvement in the way the many disciplines which contribute to archaeology interact with each other. This is particularly so when ‘hard sciences’ are used to provide information of fundamental importance to archaeology (such as the provenance of metal objects), but which do not take into account the ‘human dimension’ of how metal may actually have moved around the ancient world. As an example, we highlight the potential impact of very human behaviours such as the mixing and recycling of metals o the process of determining provenance by chemical or isotopic means.
