Introduction

In the digital age, what paper or Web-based resources are available from previous archaeometric studies on pottery? Many resources for archaeological science applications to pottery are now available via the Internet and are relatively easy for researchers to find directly or by digital communication with others engaged in the advancement of ceramic science. The following includes a short review of current databases of compositional analyses and thin-section data on ceramics, in both paper and Web-based form. The fast-changing nature of archaeometric research and of the Internet means that here we can only give an indication of the kind of resources currently available.

Databases of Compositional Analyses

Databases of compositional analyses have been around since the beginnings of ceramic provenance studies using chemical analyses of the body fabric of pottery. In particular, large databases were generated by the laboratories undertaking neutron activation analyses, and stored on local information systems. In time, these resources have become more available via the Internet. At the same time, it has become much easier to communicate with the researchers involved, many of whom have been amenable to sharing data not publicly available. An issue of the journal Archaeometry (Speakman and Glascock 2007) was devoted to celebrating fifty years of neutron activation analysis in archaeology and summarises programs undertaken at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, New York; the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; Michigan; Toronto (Slowpoke); University of Sofia, Bulgaria; British Museum, London; Hebrew University, Jerusalem; University of Manchester; ‘Demokritos’, Athens; Smithsonian Institution and NIST, Washington; University of Missouri Research Reactor; University of Bonn; Institute of Nuclear Techniques, Budapest University of Technology; Instituto Technológico e Nuclear (ITN), Portugal ; Texas A&M University; and the Argentine National Atomic Energy Commission.