A Brief Introducion to Applying Archaeometry to South American Ceramics and their Production

EMILY STOVEL; GUILLERMO A. DE LA FUENTE

Vessels Explored: Applying Archaeometry to South American Ceramics and their Production

BAR Publishing, International Series S2808

Lugar: Oxford, UK; Año: 2016; p. 1 - 2

Archaeology has witnessed an explosion of scientific methods in the last 10 years. Both a boon and a burden,new methods and technologies have made more scientific methods available to more scholars world-wide. Their application can be uneven, however, because of international differences in institutional support and training (Killick 2008, 2014, Killick and Goldberg 2009).The lack of trained reviewers also can hamper rigor in the field as more and more journals and authors publish scientific papers (Killick 2015). Even with these inconsistencies, the most remarkable change in archaeological science throughout the Southern Cone is its regular application as a fundamental part of scholarly investigation. The papers presented here demonstrate that archaeometry plays a constant supportive role in the projects of colleagues in the south, even though they lack regular access to equipment and research funds. There ismore to be done to expand and support this research in South America, but this volume confirms that archaeometry is an important part of forming researchquestions. These papers were brought together as a symposium on ceramic archaeometry during the third Latin American archaeometry congress that took place in Arica in 2011. At that point we decided that more international exposure of Latin American archaeology would help to overcome assumptions about the lack of such work in the region and its superficial use. As such we proposed an English language document to reach a larger community of colleagues. The result is a volume that captures ongoing research in the Southern Cone that involves a wide rangeof archaeometric methods. This constitutes but a small window into the rigorous scientific archaeological work carried out in South American institutions evident in each paper?s bibliography that often involves valuable international and multidisciplinary collaboration. We would like to thank four anonymous reviewers who helped improve the volume substantially.