The Manchester Archaeometry Program

This website contains an archive of data generated by the archaeometry program at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom between 1970 and 2000. Much of the data was concerns pottery from the Meditteranean, Middle-East, Western Europe, and Northern Africa. The data was provided to the Archaeometry Laboratory at the Missouri University Research Reactor in 2005 by the late Dr. G.W.A. Newton, former director of the archaeometry program at Manchester. It was Dr. Newton's hope that this data would be made freely available to archaeologists and archaeometrists worldwide.

A summary of the work conducted at Manchester appears in volume 49 of Archaeometry, the abstract and citation the following article:

Newton, G.W.A.
2007   INAA of Archaeological Samples at the University of Manchester. Archaeometry 49(2): 289-299.

"INAA at Manchester began almost by chance and amid scepticism with a request for help from the University Department of Archaeology in the early 1970s. Over the years the method of selecting pottery to be sampled was refined from the simple assumption that sherds found at a site were typical of those made there to a greater focus on kiln sites and wasters. An important element in the Manchester's approach was that this was a teaching department: in the quarter-century that the lab practised INAA over 6,000 samples were analysed in a wide range of projects by post-doctoral researchers, Ph.D. students and even final-year undergraduates. Although there were sometimes problems of comprehension on both sides, close collaboration with archaeologists encouraged methodological comparisons, and often INAA was seen as an additional weapon in the archaeologists' arsenal as much as a developing scientific technique. The University's place as the inventor of the computer encouraged the development of statistical programs, which in turn facilitated ready collaboration and exchange of information with other labs such as those at Bonn and Berkeley."

Description of the Manchester NAA Data

The data available here are drawn from analyses of ceramic artifacts from Austria, Bohemia (Czech Republic), Britain, Crete, Cyprus, Egypt, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iraq, Italy, the Levant, the Mediterranean, Moravia (Czech Republic), North Africa, Spain, Turkey, and several shipwrecks in the Mediterranean. Several other datasets dealing with non-ceramic artifact types can be found here.

This page was created and is maintained by Matthew T. Boulanger of the MURR Archaeometry Laboratory, with assistance from Dr. Jonathon Tomlinson and Dr. A.J.N.W. Prag, Robert J. Speakman, and Dr. Michael D. Glascock. Special thanks are extended to Drs. Tomlinson and Prag for their much-needed assistance in compiling and arranging these data. All errors, technical problems, and comments may be directed to the webmaster.