Mineralogical Sciences and Archaeology

Abstract

During the last decade, the archaeometric community has matured, both in quantity and in quality. This is evidenced by the high impact-factor values reached by the most important archaeometric journals, comparable to those of some outstanding mineralogical and petrographical journals. In this community, the number of geoscientists, mostly mineralogists, has also increased, because they are intrinsically dealing with complex systems such as the natural geological materials utilized to produce artifacts. Ceramics, glassy materials, metal objects, and lithic tools have stored during their production a lot of information about the history they underwent. Geoscientists, probably more than chemists and physicists, are able to decipher this information in the same way they reconstruct the geological history of rocks through the study of chemical and physical properties of minerals. The reconstruction of the “history” of artifacts (in the field of art and archaeology) implies the identification and provenance of raw materials and the definition of various aspects of production technology. Mineralogy is well equipped to face the methodological and …