We here consider the role of the examination of fabric in pottery studies. Historically, form and decoration have received more attention from archaeologists than the details of the fired clay itself. Since the 1960s a more systematic approach to fabric analysis has come to take one of the central positions in pottery studies. It was seen as one of the means of breaking out of the strait jacket of primarily chronological concerns and expanding the scope of the study into the areas of technology, trade and exchange. These developments cannot be divorced from other shifts in archaeological thinking and practice over the same period.

The methods of fabric analysis have been largely drawn from the geological sciences, for the reasons succinctly given by Peacock: ‘Pottery can be regarded as a metamorphosed sedimentary rock and thus it can be argued that ceramics are best approached in a manner similar to that used in the geological study of the parent raw materials’ (Peacock 1977, 26). However the rise of materials-science applications to ceramics (see pp. 17 and 182–185), most prominently signalled by the use of the scanning electron microscope (SEM) has led to greater scientific study of, for example, glazes and microstructures, while the development of ceramic provenance studies has moved away from geological concerns into areas more in keeping with regional geochemical studies. The considerable growth worldwide in the number of projects applying scientific techniques to pottery fabrics means that the present chapter can only point to the main features of current research and future possibilities. Particular approaches (including scientific techniques) rise to prominence (and fall), and here the question arises of the long-term curation and availability of the established databases (principally thin-section and composition analysis – see also Appendix 2). Also important is the question of ‘quality control’ of scientific data: ‘how do (my) results integrate into previous studies of the same material?’ and ‘will (my) results be usable by a later generation of investigators?’. These are significant matters given (among others) the Internet's role in making widely and easily available publications and actual analysis data arising from such projects. Scientific techniques have had their impact not only in the university research laboratory, but all the way down to the pot-sorter grouping and describing sherds in the finds hut.