Applications of Physical, Chemical and Biological Markers in Argentine Archaeology: a brief state of the art

MARCELO MORALES; DÉBORA KLIGMANN

Physical, Chemical and Biological Markers in Argentine Archaeology: Theory, Methods and Applications

Archaeopress

Lugar: Oxford; Año: 2014; p. 1 - 15

Even though the beginning of archaeological studies dates back to very old times, the use and applications of disciplines such as physics, chemistry, geology, and biology in archaeology have rapidly increased during the last sixty years worldwide. Papers that apply methods and techniques of the so-called ?hard sciences? to solve diverse archaeological problems in argentine archaeology have become more popular during the last two decades. These studies involve the participation of professionals coming from several fields such as physics, chemistry, geology and biology, as well as of archaeologists technically trained in those disciplines. For this reason, we organized a Symposium at the ?XVII Congreso Nacional de Arqueología Argentina? (?XVII National Meeting 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 at that symposium, and partially illustrates the state of the art regarding the utilization of these analytical markers in Argentina. After succinctly mentioning some general theoretical and methodological issues regarding the title of this book, in the following sections of this introductory chapter we briefly summarize and review the analytical markers mentioned in this volume and the case studies in which they were applied.