New technology, or at least new uses...

One of the things that never cease to fascinate me in regards to archaeology is this wild, delightfully weird mix of the old and the new. You dig up something (or it is preserved some other way), and there you are, analysing the craft skills of some person long dead and probably forgotten. (Most people are, after all, a few hundred years into the future.) Here, it helps if you know a bit about natural materials, traditional tools and traditional, old-fashioned crafts methods. And then the new stuff comes in, where the archaeologists use the new technologies in order to learn more about the old ones. DNA analyses, protein analyses, strontium isotope analyses. The good old radiocarbon-dating, let's not forget that, but with refined methods these days and using calibration curves made in collaboration with dendrochronology. Electron microscopy, in a number of different flavours. When it comes to finding out what was once there instead of the ubiquitous archaeological brown in textiles, HPLC (the high-pressure liquid chromatography) is not the only thing these days to try and find out more about dyes applied long, long ago.

It's a delight, really. Even though there's still limits, obviously - you have to have to know about the possibilities, have to have the opportunity for the research, and need the possibility and the permission of the caretakers to take samples of your piece, or, with the non-destructive methods, it needs to be either brought to the lab for analysis or the tool has to be brought to the object. In all cases, a combination of time, knowledge, money, effort, and support is necessary, coming from different people involved. Realistically, that means there is much less cutting-edge, new-fangled stuff and most recent methods research done than there could be, in an ideal world.

It's still great. Every little bit of new tech for old stuff never stops to delight me. It's even better when there's names involved that I know (and thus people that I know). Like in this (already a few years old) article about looking at textile residue on a metal brooch. It was published in a physics journal, and it's open access, so you can join me in my delight.