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Abstract
The materials and practices of chymical procedures have become key sources of information among science historians, opening up channels for cross-disciplinary dialogue. This is especially true with regard to material culture-based disciplines such as archaeology whose bottom-up approach offers significant contributions to the new historiography of science. Parallel to this trend, some archaeological scientists who specialise in reconstructing past technologies have begun to address questions concerning the production and circulation of scientific knowledge, and have focused as well on the contributions of artists/artisans to the development of natural philosophical theories. This essay charts the history of this archaeology of alchemy and chemistry and its development as a sub-discipline of archaeological science. By mapping this history, from an initial period with a focus on metallurgy to current trends, it demonstrates how the archaeology of alchemy and chemistry both mirrors and, at the same time, feeds the broadening scope of the historiography of science. After surveying the most relevant works and highlighting the key contributions that archaeologists have brought to a discourse related to the creation of scientific knowledge, the essay also offers a series of ideas related to materials awaiting comprehensive study that will further strengthen methodological synergies across disciplines.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Prof Frank James (UCL) for inviting me to speak at the 2022 SHAC meeting on “Archaeology, Conservation Science and the History of Chemistry,” as my contribution became the basis of the present article. My gratitude also goes to Dr Heinrich Wunderlich (Landesamt für Denkmalpflege und Archäologie Sachsen-Anhalt) and Dr Bettina Stoll-Tucker (Abteilungsleiterin Landesmuseum) for providing permission to publish the photo of the Wittenberg laboratory apparatus, as well as to Dr Brian Callingham who kindly showed me the cabinet of Prof Vigani at Queens’ College, Cambridge.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 On this note, an edited collection was recently published on-line by Ambix which contains essays that, in different ways, make use of material sources to address a variety of questions around chemical knowledge. See Veronesi, Umberto, ed., “Archaeology, Conservation Science and the History of Chemistry,” Ambix online collection: https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/yamb20/collections/archaeology-conservation-history-of-chemistry (accessed 1 November 2022).
2 For a programmatic introduction to this discipline see Marcos Martinón-Torres, “The Archaeology of Alchemy and Chemistry in the Early Modern World: An Afterthought,” Archaeology International 15 (2012): 33–36.
3 For the general attention towards materials and practices see Pamela H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Pamela H. Smith, Amy R. W. Meyers and Harold J. Cook, eds. Ways of Making and Knowing: The Material Culture of Empirical Knowledge (Ann Arbour, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2014); Sven Dupré, ed. Laboratories of Art, Alchemy and Art Technology from Antiquity to the 18th Century (Cham: Springer, 2014); Matteo Valleriani, ed. The Structures of Practical Knowledge (Cham: Springer, 2017); Lissa Roberts, Simon Schaffer, and Peter Dear, eds., The Mindful Hand. Inquiry and Invention from the Late Renaissance to Early Industrialization (Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Science, 2007); Ursula Klein and E. C. Spary, eds., Materials and Expertise in Early Modern Europe: Between Market and Laboratory (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Pamela Long, Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400–1600 (Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press, 2011).
4 The term chymistry is here employed in its broadest sense, following the practice established by William Newman and Lawrence M. Principe in William Newman and Lawrence M. Principe, “Alchemy vs. Chemistry: The Etymological Origins of a Historiographic Mistake,” Early Science and Medicine 3, no.1 (1998): 32–65.
5 On the use of historical recipes and procedures as a way to reconstruct systems of knowledge-making see Elaine Leong, “Brewing Ale and Boiling Water in 1651,” in Valleriani, ed., The Structures of Practical Knowledge, 55–75; Elaine Leong, Recipes and Everyday Knowledge. Medicine, Science, and the Household in Early Modern England (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2018); contributions in “Learning by the Book: Manual and Handbooks in the History of Science,” in BJHS Themes 5, ed. E., Leong, A. Creager and M. Grote (2020) and in “Rethinking Performative Methods in the History of Science,” ed. M. Hendriksen, special issue, Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 43, no. 3 (2020): 307–456.
6 Tara Nummedal, “Words and Works in the History of Alchemy,” Isis 102 (2011): 330–37 (on 332). More examples of historians acknowledging the need to include archaeology among historiographic sources include Jennifer Rampling, “The Future of the History of Chemistry,” Ambix 6 (2017): 295–300; Simon Werrett, “Matter and Facts. Material Culture and the History of Science,” in Material Evidence. Learning from Archaeological Practice, eds., Robert Chapman and Alison Wylie (London: Routledge, 2014), 339–52; Robert G. Anderson, “The Archaeology of Chemistry,” in Instruments and Experimentation in the History of Chemistry, eds. Frederic L. Holmes and Trevor H. Levere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 5–34.
7 Earlier examples include the remains of glass distillation apparatus from various sites presented in Stephen Moorhouse et al., “Medieval Distilling Apparatus of Glass and Pottery”, Post-Medieval Archaeology 16, No.1 (1972): 79–88.
8 W. Sokup, Sigrid von Osten and H. Mayer, “Alembics, Philas, Crucibles: A 16th-Century Docimastic Laboratory Excavated in Austria”, Ambix 40, No.1 (1993): 25; Sigrid von Osten, Das Alchemistenlaboratorium Oberstockstall. Ein Fundkomplex des 16. Jahrhunderts aus Niederösterreich (Innsbruck: Universitätsverlag Wagner, 1998).
9 Thilo Rehren, “Alchemy and fire assay. An analytical approach”, Historical Metallurgy 30 (1996): 136-142.
10 See, for instance Thilo Rehren, “Metal analysis in the Middle Ages”; in Material Culture in Medieval Europe, ed. Guy de Boe and F. Verhaeghe (Zellik: Instituut voor het Archeologisch Patrimonium, 1997), 9–15; Thilo Rehren and K. Eckstein, “The Development of Analytical Cupellation in the Middle Ages,” Archaeometry 98 (2002): 445–48.
11 Anderson, “The Archaeology of Chemistry,” 5
12 Marcos Martinón-Torres and Thilo Rehren, “Post-Medieval Crucible Production and Distribution: A Study of Materials and Materialities,” Archaeometry 51 (2009): 49–74; Marcos Martinón-Torres, “Chymistry and Crucibles in the Renaissance Laboratory: An Archaeometric and Historical Study,” (PhD thesis, University College London, 2005).
13 On the archaeology of fire assay see Marcos Martinón-Torres and Thilo Rehren, “Alchemy, Chemistry and Metallurgy in Renaissance Europe: A Wider Context for Fire-assay Remains,” Historical Metallurgy 39 (2005): 14–28; Marcos Martinón-Torres and Thilo Rehren, “Trials and Errors in Search of Mineral Wealth: Metallurgical Experiments in Early Colonial Jamestown”, Rittenhouse: The Journal of the American Scientific Instrument Enterprise 21, No. 66 (2007): 82–97; Umberto Veronesi, et al., “Testing the New World: Early Modern Chemistry and Mineral Prospection at Colonial Jamestown (1607–1610),” Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences 11 (2019): 6851–64.
14 Aude Mongiatti “Assaying and Smelting Noble Metals in Sixteenth-century Austria: A Comparative Analytical Study” (PhD thesis, University College London, 2009). See also Aude Mongiatti, Marcos Martinón-Torres and Thilo Rehren, “Testing Ores for Gold and Silver in Renaissance Austria: New Techniques, New Discoveries” in Proceedings of the 36th International Symposium on Archaeometry, ed. Jean François Moureau, et al., (Quebec: Universite de Laval, 2009), 37–49.
15 On the concept of trading zones as those early modern arenas that promoted contact between individuals from different social strata and contributed to the mutual exchanges between them see Long, Artisan/Practitioners.
16 For an overview of the uses of zinc since antiquity see Paul T. Craddock, “Zinc in Classical Antiquity,” in 2000 Years of Brass and Zinc, ed. Craddock, (London: British Museum Research Publications, 1998) 1–6.; Paul T. Craddock and K. Eckstein, “Production of Brass in Antiquity by Direct Reduction,” in Mining and Metal Production through the Ages, eds. Craddock and J. Lang (London: British Museum Publications, 2003), 216‒30.
17 Examples on philosophical curiosity around zinc are the many entries in Robert Boyle’s experimental work diaries (in particular numbers 21, 34 and 38). See http://www.livesandletters.ac.uk/wd/index.html (accessed 1 December 2022). For other early modern authors and zinc see Christopher Packe, trans., The Works of the Highly Experienced and Famous Chymist, John Rudolph Glauber (London: Thomas Milbourn, 1689), 319–32.
18 Thilo Rehren and Marcos Martinón-Torres, “Naturam ars imitata: European Brassmaking between Craft and Science,” in Martinón-Torres and Rehren, eds., Archaeology, History and Science, 167–88. On the confusion around zinc's nature see Monique de Ruette, “From conterfei and speauter to Zinc: The Development of the Understanding of the Nature of Zinc and Brass in Post-medieval Europe,” British Museum Occasional Papers 109 (London: The British Museum, 1995), 195–203.
19 Marco Beretta, The Alchemy of Glass: Counterfeit, Imitation and Transmutation in Ancient Glassmaking (Sagamore Beach: Science History Publications, 2009).
20 On the role of glass in the early days of alchemy see Matteo Martelli, The Four Books of Pseudo-Democritus (Leeds: Routledge, 2014).
21 On glass and alchemy see Marco Beretta, ed., When Glass Matters: Studies in the History of Science and Art From Graeco-Roman Antiquity to Early Modern Era (Florence: Leo Olschki, 2004); Marco Beretta, “Glassmaking Goes Public: The Cultural Background to Antonio Neri's l'Arte Vetraria (1612),” Technology and Culture 58 (2017): 1046–70; Michael Bycroft and Sven Dupré, Gems in the Early Modern World: Materials, Knowledge, and Global Trade, 1450–1800 (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); Sven Dupré, “The Art of Glassmaking and the Nature of Stones: The Role of Imitation in Anselm De Boodt's Classification of Stones,” in Steinformen: Materialität, Qualität, Imitation, De Gruyter, ed. Iris Wenderholm, Maurice Saß, and Isabella Augart (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), 207–20; Thijs Hagendijk, Márcia Vilarigues, and Sven Dupré, “Materials, Furnaces, and Texts: How to Write about Making Glass Colours in the Seventeenth Century,” Ambix 67 (2020): 323–45
22 Thilo Rehren and Ian C. Freestone, “Ancient Glass: From Kaleidoscope to Crystal Ball,” Journal of Archaeological Science 56 (2015): 233–41; Koen Janssens, ed., Modern Methods for Analysing Archaeological and Historical Glass (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2013); Hugh Tait, 5000 Years of Glass (London: The British Museum Press, 2012).
23 Christopher Booth, “The Stalled Development of the Still: Material Evidence for Changes in Distilling Practice in Britain”, Post-Medieval Archaeology 50, No.2 (2016): 419–26.
24 R.W. Sokup, “Crucibles, Cupels, Cucurbits: Recent Results of Research on Paracelsian Alchemy in Austria around 1600”, in Chymists and Chymistry: Studies in the History of Alchemy and Early Modern Chemistry, ed. Lawrence Principe (Sagamore Beach, MA: Watson Publishing Int, 2007); von Osten, Das Alchemistenlaboratorium Oberstockstall.
25 Umberto Veronesi and Marcos Martinón-Torres, “Glass and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe: An Analytical Study of Glassware from the Oberstockstall Laboratory in Austria,” Angewandte Chemie International Edition 57 (2018): 7346–50; Umberto Veronesi, “Of Copying, Mixing and Recycling: The Glass Distillation Apparatus of a 16th-century Alchemical Laboratory and its Material History”, Centaurus: Journal of the European Society for the History of Science (forthcoming).
26 Contemporary sources mention heat resistance and glass clarity as the most desirable properties of distillation vessels, citing Venice and Bohemia as preferred producers. See Joel Klein, “Alchemical Histories, Chymical Education, and Chymical Medicine in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-century Wittenberg,” Tagungen des Landesmuseums für Vorgeschichte Halle 15 (2016): 293–302; Anderson, “The Archaeology of Chemistry,” 14; Cyril Stanley Smith and Marta Teach Gnudi, The Pirotechnia of Vannoccio Biringuccio: The Classic Sixteenth Century Treatise on Metallurgy (New York: Dover Publication inc., 2015), 183; Rudolf Glauber, A Description of New Philosophical Furnaces, or a New Art of Distilling, Divided into Five Parts (London: Richard Coats, 1651), 2.
27 Umberto Veronesi, Thilo Rehren, and Marcos Martinón-Torres, “The Philosophers and the Crucibles: New Data on the 17th–18th Century Remains from the Old Ashmolean Laboratory, Oxford,” Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 35 (2021).
28 Lead crystal was invented in England in 1684, the year after the Old Ashmolean Museum was founded. On the importance of lead crystal see Christine MacLeod, “Accident or Design? George Ravenscroft's Patent and the Invention of Lead-crystal Glass,” Technology and Culture 28 (1987): 776–803; David Dungworth and Colin Brain, “Seventeenth-and Eighteenth-century English Lead Glass,” in Janssens, ed., Modern Methods for Analysing Archaeological and Historical Glass, 573–82.
29 In 1662 the Royal Society sponsored the English translation of the treatise L’Arte Vetraria, by Antonio Neri, see Michael Cable, The World's Most Famous Book on Glassmaking: The Art of Glass by Antonio Neri, Translated into English by Christopher Merrett (London:Society of Glass Technology, 2006). The curiosity around glass is mirrored in the meetings of the Royal Society where glass is a relatively frequent theme, see Thomas Birch, The History of the Royal-Society of London for the Improving of Natural Knowledge (London: A. Millar, 1756) as Also in the fascination that natural philosophers such as Robert Boyle demonstrate towards a profession that he believed worth “to be made English,” see Michael Hunter and Edward B. Davis, The Works of Robert Boyle, Vol. 6 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1999), 476. In Germany, Johann Kunckel also translates the book, commenting at length on the many recipes and significantly extending Neri's work, see Sven Dupré, “Doing it Wrong: the Translation of Artisanal Knowledge and the Codification of Error,” in Valleriani, ed., The Structures of Practical Knowledge, 167–88; Thijs Hagendijk et al, “Materials, Furnaces and Texts”). A similar interest in the properties of glass had characterised Medici Florence, particularly in the 16th and 17th centuries, when chymical work on glass had become a major focus of the court laboratory at the Casino di San Marco, see Beretta, “Glassmaking Goes Public”.
30 Zinc distillation was finally patented in Europe around the same time as the experiments of the Old Ashmolean, by William Champion of Bristol in the 1830s, see David J. Etheridge and David Dungworth, William Champion's Warmley brass and Zinc Works, Warmley, South Gloucestershire: Archaeological Investigations and Recording 1994–2011 (Bristol: Avon Archaeological Unit Limited, 2012).
31 Notable works include Marabel Riesmeier, et al., “Recipes of Ancient Egyptian Kohls More Diverse than Previously Thought” Nature: Scientific Reports 12, No. 5932 (2022): 1–10; Josefina Pérez-Arantegui, et al., “Characterization of an Ancient ‘Chemical’ Preparation: Pigments and Drugs in Medieval Islamic Spain”, Journal of Archaeological Science 38 (2011): 3350–57; Francesca Caterina Izzo, Giulia Carolina Lodi and Maria Luisa Vázquez de Ágredos Pascual, “New Insights into the Composition of Historical Remedies and Pharmaceutical FormulatiotheThe Identification of Natural Resins and Balsams by Gas Chromatographic-mass Spectrometric Investigations,” Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences 13, No.2 (2021): 1–17. For the discovery of a collection of pharmacy-related materials see Vello Mass and Erki Russow, “A Delivery for a Pharmacy? Exceptional Collection of Early Modern Age Finds from the Sea Bed of the Tallinn Bay,” Archaeological Fieldwork in Estonia (2015): 211–24.
32 Umberto Veronesi and Stefan Hanß, “The Lute of Wisdom: Alchemy, Medicine and the Body in the Material Renaissance”, Nuncius 38, No. 1 (2023): 1–31.
33 For an overview of recipes for lutum sapientiae see Nicolas Thomas, “De la recette à la pratique: l’exemple du lutum sapientiae des alchimists,” in Craft Treatises and Handbooks: The Dissemination of Technical Knowledge in the Middle Ages, ed. Ricardo Córdoba de la Llave (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 249–70. This work shows that the number of ingredients traditionally used for the lute is huge and that many mirror alchemical beliefs and the maker's worldviews.
34 Leong, Recipes and Everyday Knowledge.
35 Nummedal, “Words and Works”, 332.
36 The archaeological approach to the history of high-temperature laboratories has been the subject of the author's PhD dissertation, see Umberto Veronesi “Archaeology and the alchemical laboratory: Exploring early modern chymical practices at colonial Jamestown (Virginia) and the Old Ashmolean Museum (Oxford)” (PhD thesis, University College London, 2021).
37 Tara Nummedal suggests we talk about early modern alchemies rather than alchemy and writes that “what practitioners understood to be ‘alchemy’ included a variety of practices, skills and knowledge bases”, and therefore “the only appropriate definition of alchemy is one that encompasses all of these activities and ideas”: Tara Nummedal, Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 14.
38 On the laboratory and its role as a trading zone between the worlds of making and knowing see Ursula Klein, “The Laboratory Challenge: Some Revisions of the Standard View of Early Modern Experimentation,” Isis 99 (2008): 769–82; Pamela Smith, “Laboratories,” in The Cambridge History of Science, eds. Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) vol. 3, 290–305; David Saunders, Marika Spring, and Andrew Meek, eds., The Renaissance Workshop (London: Archetype Publications, 2013); Dupré, Laboratories of Art, Alchemy and Art Technology.
39 On the finds from Wittenberg see Klein, “Alchemical Histories” and H.G. Stephan, “Gläsernes und keramisches laborgerät, trinkgläser und gebrauchskeramik des Wittenberger alchimistenfundes: aspekte der zeitlichen, kultur- und wissenschaftsgeschichtlichen einordnung”, Tagungen des Landesmuseums für Vorgeschichte Halle 15 (2016): 109–26.
40 Veronesi, “Of Copying, Mixing and Recycling”.
41 Thomas Norton's passage, in verses, reads “Durior species (vitri) vocatur freton / Ex vitriorum fracturis id evenit,” see Jean-Jacques Manget, Bibliotheca Chemica Curiosa, seu Rerum ad Alchemiam Pertinentium Thesaurus Instructissimus (Geneva: Sumpt. Chouet, G. de Tournes, Cramer, Perachon, Ritter, & S. de Tournes, 1702), 307. The same passage, in the English translation, is also reported in Anderson, “The Archaeology of Chemistry,” 13.
42 This information has been provided as a personal communication by Dr. Christian-Heinrich Wunderlich, who leads the team that restored the glassware at the Landesamt für Denkmalpflege und Archäologie – Sachsen-Anhalt. Dr Wunderlich also performed the analysis of the residues stuck to the distillation vessels, as well as to other pieces of the laboratory apparatus, and reconstructed Paracelsian practices at the site. For the results see Christian-Heinrich Wunderlich Keine “Alchimei böser Buben.’ Spagyrische Arzneiproduktion in Renaissance und Barock am Beispiel der Laborfunde von Wittenberg und Huysburg,” Tagungen des Landesmuseums für Vorgeschichte Halle 15 (2016): 59–89.
43 Beretta, The Alchemy of Glass, 125–64.
44 There are numerous articles on the technology of Byzantine and Islamic mosaic tesserae in the archaeological science literature and a comprehensive list is out of the scope of this essay. For a recent example of what questions such studies address and what methods they use see Nadine Schibille, “Origins and Manufacture of the Glass Mosaic Tesserae from the Great Umayyad Mosque in Damascus”, Journal of Archaeological Science 147 (2022) and references therein.
45 Chloe Duckworth, “Imitation, Artificiality and Creation: The Colour and Perception of the Earliest Glass in New Kingdom Egypt,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 22, No. 3 (2012): 309–27; Andrew J. Shortland, Lapis Lazuli From the Kiln (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2012) and M. Walton, et al., “Analysis of Late Bronze Age Glass Axes from Nippur – A New Cobalt Colourant”, Archaeometry 54, No. 5 (2012): 835–52.
46 On the discovery of Kunckel's laboratory and the evidence of his glass experiments see Gerhard Schultze, “Kunckels Glaslaboratorium auf der Pfaueninsel - Bericht über chemische Untersuchungen an einigen Fundobjekten”, Medizinhistorisches Journal 11 (1976): 149–56; H. Günter Rau, “Johann Kunckel, Geheimer Kammerdiener des Großen Kurfürsten, und sein Glaslaboratorium auf der Pfaueninsel in Berlin”, Medizinhistorisches Journal 11 (1976): 129–48; and Hagendijk et al, “Materials, Furnaces and Texts”.
47 Dedo Von Kerssenbrock-Krosigk, ed. Glass of the Alchemists: Lead Crystal-Gold Ruby, 1650–1750 (Corning, N.Y.: Corning Museum of Glass, 2008).
48 To get a sense of how rich and varied the collection is, see the digital museum on Brandenburg glass, with images of the glass recovered from Kunckel's laboratory on Pfauneninsel: https://themator.museum-digital.de/ausgabe/showthema.php?m_tid = 690&tid = 712&ver = standalone (accessed 1 December 2022).
49 On Dwight's process see Mike S. Tite, M Bimson and Ian C. Freestone, “A Technological Study of Fulham Stoneware,” in Proceedings of the 24th International Archaeometry Symposium, ed. Jaqueline S. Olin (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1986), 95–104.
50 On John Dwight's Fulham pottery see Chris Green, John Dwight's Fulham Pottery: Excavations 1971–1979 (London: English Heritage, 1999); On his specific work on porcelain see Morgan Wesley, “Igne refutata: Thermal Analysis in the Laboratory Practices of John Dwight and Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus,” in Laboratories of Art, Alchemy and Art Technology, ed. Sven Dupré, 181.
51 On this topic see, for instance, Cesare Pastorino, “The Philosopher and the Craftsman. Francis Bacon's Notion of Experiment and its Debt to Early Stuart Inventors”, Isis 108, No. 4 (2017): 749–68; Pamela Smith, The Business of Alchemy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Numnmedal, Alchemy and Authority.
52 On the concept of hybrid experts see Ursula Klein, “Hybrid Experts,” in Valleriani, ed., The Structures of Practical Knowledge,, 287–306.
53 Johann Kunckel, Ars Vitraria Experimentalis, Oder Vollkommene Glasmacher-Kunst (Frankfurt und Leipzig, 1679).
54 Dwight's notebooks have been published in Green, John Dwight's Fulham Pottery. On Faraday's experiments with optical glasses see “Journal of the Glass Committee,” Manuscripts of Michael Faraday (1791–1867), RS MS 364, Royal Society, London.
55 On John Vigani and his collection of materia medica see: Leslie James Moger Coleby, “John Francis Vigani: First Professor of Chemistry in the University of Cambridge”, Annals of Science 8, No.1 (1952): 46–60; Anita Guerrini, “Chemistry Teaching at Oxford and Cambridge ca. 1700”, in Alchemy and Chemistry in 16th and 17th century, ed. Piyo Rattansi and Antonio Clericuzio (Dordrecht: Kluver Academic Publishers, 1994), 183–99.
56 A detailed description of the content of each drawer can be on the Queens’ College webpage: https://www.queens.cam.ac.uk/visiting-the-college/history/college-facts/the-buildings/viganis-cabinet#:~:text=Vigani's%20Cabinet%2C%20in%20Queens’%20College,in%20the%20University%20of%20Cambridge (accessed 1 December 2022).
57 See, for instance: Gundel Steigenberger and Christoph Herm, “Natural Resins and Balsams from an Eighteenth-century Pharmaceutical Collection Analysed by Gas Chromatography/Mass Spectrometry”, Annalytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry 410 (2011): 1771–84.
58 See, for instance the Making and Knowing Project at Columbia University: https://www.makingandknowing.org/ (accessed 1 December 2022); ARTECHNE: Technique in the Arts 1500–1950 at the University of Utrecht: https://artechne.wp.hum.uu.nl/ (accessed 1 December 2022) and Alchemeast at Università di Bologna: https://alchemeast.eu/ (accessed December 2022).
59 On the topic of moving across disciplinary boundaries see: Thilo Rehren, “Crossing Boundaries” in Sharing Archaeology, ed. Peter Stone and Zhao Hui (New York, NY: Routledge 2014), 36–46.
60 Veronesi and Hanß, “The Lute of Wisdom”.
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Umberto Veronesi
Dr Umberto Veronesi is an archaeologist and heritage scientist specialising in the study of pre-modern technologies. He uses scientific techniques as a way to inform historical research and his work has focused on early modern laboratories and the material culture of chymistry. Umberto is currently a research fellow at the research unit VICARTE – Glass and Ceramics for the Arts, in Lisbon, and his most recent research involves the analysis and replication of the pigments used in Portuguese decorated tiles. Email: [email protected]