Cultural heritage materials : structural and spectroscopic evidence for ancient technologies
Résumé
For decades, identification of ancient artefacts and diagnosis of their conservation/restoration state have been established by scholars on the basis of their perceptions, mostly the visual appearance (appearance of the paste and decor design for ceramics, crack network for painting, typology for potteries and metal ware,...), touch (metal object patina,) or the ringing tone and the weight of porcelain and pottery manufactures. These instant methods remain widely used by historians, archaeologists and art market experts. Early work used routine analytical techniques; however special procedures and instruments are now being developed or adapted to analyse ancient materials. This gives rise to a blooming activity at the interface between art, archaeology and solid state science. The increasing development of instruments (e.g. able to determine the elemental and mineral compositions of the material) and the decreasing size of the sampling batch, now including sampling-free techniques, the extensive use of electronic microscopy replacing the optical probes, led to a new research field : archaeometry.