UCL Institute of Archaeology

Artefact Analysis

Humans are one of the few animal species to use artefacts, and these culturally-invested objects are one of our main sources of archaeological information. For example, artefact styles can be used to identify analytically useful cultural groupings in the absence of other kinds of evidence, as well as networks of cultural learning and patterns of cultural inheritance. Artefact distributions can indicate trade routes, particular kinds of consumer or producer, the spatial extent of human activity areas such as settlements and cemeteries, or in some cases the influence of political boundaries. Artefacts can also be analysed for their physical properties in ways that may indicate where they have come from and how they were made. Further traces of wear can suggest how an artefact was later used or how it might have been transformed and transported after deposition in the ground. To some extent, we can therefore build up a whole 'biography' behind a particular artefact from the moment that it was created to the point at which it was recovered from the archaeological record.

Research

Projects

• The 'Abiel' Coins of Eastern Arabia
• The Bow Hill Project
• Çatalhöyük
• Ceramic Temper and identity groups
• Coin hoards of the Roman Republic
• Commensality, Cooking, Dining and the Politics of Gastronomy in the Near East
• The Emergence of Craft Specialisation in the Near East
• Examination and Conservation of the 'Ain Ghazal plaster cache
• Exotic Rock Project
• Experimental Archaeometallurgy
• Gresham Ship Project
• John Dwight's Crucibles
  
• Late Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherer Ceramic Production and Distribution
• The Materiality of Administration
• The natron-based glass industries
  
• ORACEAF: The Origins of the Acheulean in East Africa
• Personal Ornaments in the Ancient Near East

Networks

• 5000 Years of pottery from the Sahara Sahel borderlands (external network)
• African Heritage and Archaeology (external network)
• Imperial Logistics: The Making of the Terracotta Army (IoA network)
• Pottery Technology (IoA network)

Centres

• Centre for Museums, Heritage and Material Culture Studies

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People

• Andrew Bevan
• Sarah Byrne
• Ian Freestone
• Margarita Gleba
• Susanna Harris
• Rodney Harrison
• Bill Sillar
• Ulrike Sommer
• Sally Worrell
• Katherine Wright

Degrees

• MA in the Archaeology of the Middle East
• MA in Artefact Studies
• MA in Principles of Conservation
• MA in Egyptian Archaeology
• MA in Urban Archaeology
• MSc in the Technology and Analysis of Archaeological Materials

Courses

undergraduate

• Microscopy and dating of archaeological materials

graduate

• Approaches to artefact studies
• Interpreting Pottery
• Pattern and Process in the Archaeology of the Middle East
• The Archaeology of Complex Urban Sites: analytical and interpretative techniques
• Textile archaeology
• Dendrochronology and tree-ring studies
• Technology in Society: Archaeology and Ethnography in the Andes
• Near Eastern Material Culture I: Neolithic and Early Bronze Age
• Near Eastern Material Cultures II: Middle Bronze Age through the Iron Age
• Social Complexity in Early China: from the Neolithic to the Early Empire

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