Applications of physical, chemical and biological markers in argentine archaeology: a brief state of the art

MORALES, MARCELO R.; KLIGMANN, DÉBORA M.

Physical, chemical and biological markers in argentine archaeology: theory, methods and applications

British Archaeological Reports, Archaeopress

Lugar: Oxford; Año: 2014; p. 1 - 15

Papers that apply methods and technics of the so-called "Hard Sciences" to solve diverse archaeological problems in Argentine Archaeology have noticeably increased during the last two decades. These studies involve the participation of professionals coming from several fields such as physics, chemistry and biology, as well as of archaeologists technically trained in those disciplines. Papers that apply these kind of approaches can only be found as isolated contributions in Argentine archaeological congresses, symposia, meetings, and even in non-specific publications, because there are no local technical journals such as those internationally available (v.g. Journal of Archaeological Science, Geoarchaeology, Archaeometry, Revue d´Archaeometrie, etc.). For this reason, we organized a Symposium at the "XVII Congreso Nacional de Arqueología Argentina" ("XVII National Congress of Argentine Archaeology", October 2010, Mendoza City, Argentina) seeking to offer a specialist-oriented arena to share new information and discuss methodological and technical issues regarding the application of physical, chemical and biological tools in Archaeology. This book includes some of the papers presented during the development of this symposium, and partially illustrates the state of the art regarding the utilization of these analytical tools in Argentina. It is worth noting that about 80% of the participants were archaeologists specialized in chemical, earth and natural sciences, and also that a high number of them were trained in national and foreign institutions related to those fields of science. We said that this book "partially illustrates" the state of the art, because it neither fully represents the diversity of studies that apply this kind of analytical tools, nor the regional and chronological variability of archaeological problems where they were used. Moreover, topics such as analytical chemistry applied to ceramics, rock art or metallurgy, probably the most developed scientific lines of inquiry in our country, are not included in this volume because they have been the subject matter of particular symposia in the same national congress. In the same way, other less frequently used tools such as remote sensing and GIS, artifact functional analysis, geophysics, radiocarbon dating, soil micromorphology, among others, are also absent in this book. In the following sections of this introductory chapter we briefly summarize and review the analytical tools included in this volume and the case studies in which they were applied. We have also briefly discussed some general theoretical and methodological issues regarding the utilization of physical, chemical and biological markers in Argentine Archaeology.