This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Archaeochemistry applies the tools of chemical analysis, spectroscopy, isotope study and related methods to material recovered by archaeology: the residue left in a vessel, the pigment on a wall or a papyrus, the alloy in a cast object. Where excavation alone can say a jar held something, or that paint was applied to a surface, chemical analysis can say what a residue actually was, what a pigment was made from and where its raw material originated, questions the object's shape alone cannot answer. The field sits within Archaeometry, the broader natural science application of physical and chemical methods to archaeological questions, distinct from purely stylistic or documentary methods of dating and attribution.
Its subject is deliberately broad, not one class of artifact but any archaeological material whose chemistry can be interrogated, organic residues, inorganic pigments, worked metals, each analyzed by the technique suited to it, elemental analysis for metal alloys, chromatography or mass spectrometry for organic residues, and each capable of settling a question no visual inspection could close on its own. A residue analysis can distinguish a wine jar from an oil jar when both look identical empty, a pigment analysis can trace a blue paint to a specific imported mineral rather than a locally available substitute, evidence of a trade route otherwise invisible in the archaeological record.
No single scholar or moment founded the field as a settled discipline, its method developed cumulatively across the twentieth century as chemical instrumentation became available to archaeological questions, part of the wider natural sciences rather than the humanities, and it remains, at its core, a way of making an artifact answer a question its shape alone cannot.