50 years of North America archaeometallurgy in 15 minutes

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Archaeometallurgy, Eurasia and Beyond: Papers in Honor of Vince Pigott" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

From about 1973 through the early 1990’s the University of Pennsylvania group of Maddin, Muhly, Pigott and Stech were among the world leaders in archaeometallurgy. In this presentation I try to situate their work within a brief history of his topic in North America. With two notable exceptions (the consultant William Rostoker and the archaeologist Izumi Shimada) archaeometallurgy in North America nucleated around a few interested faculty in Departments of Materials Science. Two distinctive features of North American archaeometallurgy have been: (1) a productive alliance between Materials Science and Anthropology, and; (2) pioneering work in regions like Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and South-East Asia that were then ignored by European archaeometallurgists. Unfortunately, academic Departments of Anthropology in North America never showed much interest, a neglect that I attribute largely to the scarcity of metals in the North American archaeological record before 1500 AD. Very few of the authors of the many excellent PhD dissertations in archaeometallurgy ever found academic jobs, and the materials scientists who did such stellar work were almost never replaced with like-minded scientists. Archaeometallurgy is now almost extinct in North America, in sharp contrast to Europe.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Archaeometallurgy, Eurasia and Beyond: Papers in Honor of Vince Pigott

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51282