NEW BOOK: THE ARCHAEOLOGIST'S LABORATORY

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V23 2020 INDEX E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 23, Number 33, August 16, 2020, Article 5

Ted Banning has published an updated edition of his textbook The Archaeologist's Laboratory, incorporating additional numismatic material to educate students. Here's the information from the publisher's site. Ted kindly forwarded additional images. -Editor

The Archaeologist's Laboratory book cover

This second edition of the classic textbook, The Archaeologist’s Laboratory, is a substantially revised work that offers updated information on the archaeological work that follows fieldwork, such as the processing and analysis of artifacts and other evidence. An overarching theme of this edition is the quality and validity of archaeological arguments and the data we use to support them. The book introduces many of the laboratory activities that archaeologists carry out and the ways we can present research results, including graphs and artifact illustrations.

The Archaeologist's Laboratory Fig 13.13

Part I introduces general topics concerning measurement error, data quality, research design, typology, probability and databases. It also includes data presentation, basic artifact conservation, and laboratory safety. Part II offers brief surveys of the analysis of lithics and ground stone, pottery, metal artifacts, bone and shell artifacts, animal and plant remains, and sediments, as well as dating by stratigraphy, seriation and chronometric methods. It concludes with a chapter on archaeological illustration and publication.

A new feature of the book is illustration of concepts through case studies from around the world and from the Palaeolithic to historical archaeology.The text is appropriate for senior undergraduate students and will also serve as a useful reference for graduate students and professional archaeologists.

About the Author
Ted Banning is a Canadian archaeologist and professor of Anthropology at University of Toronto. His research focuses on the Neolithic of the Near East, but his other interests include the theory and methods of archaeological survey and landscape archaeology, the spatial organization of ancient built environments, and the spatial and statistical analysis of microrefuse —tiny fragments of lithics, pottery, ground stone, shell, bone, and other materials in archaeological sediments. For more than three decades, he has directed field projects in northern Jordan, and previously served on the staff of excavations at the Pre-Pottery Neolithic site of ‘Ain Ghazal, Jordan, at Tell al-Maskhuta, Egypt, and on surveys in southern Jordan and northeastern Egypt. He also has side interests in historical archaeology and numismatics, and especially the early history of numismatists and antiquarians in Canada. He is author of Archaeological Survey (Springer 2002), a member of the Society of American Archaeology and American Institute of Archaeology, and Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London.

"The second edition has some numismatic angles in a couple of the chapters. Chapter 13, on metal artifacts, has a description of how ancient and mediaeval coins were struck, a case study on Neolithic copper beads from Switzerland that are probably a form of primitive money, and case studies on the spatial distributions of Gallic coins in England and Roman coins in the western Empire. There are also brief descriptions of hoard analysis, sourcing early Greek silver coins by their lead isotopes, and the identification of the denominations in Greek coins by periodicity in their weight distributions.

Chapter 18, on seriation (a method for ordering artifacts in time), outlines the origins of this method in early numismatics and has a brief section on die linking. These are new to this edition. The old 2000 edition had no chapter on metal artifacts and the seriation chapter didn't include die linking."