Brysbaert/Power of Technology, 4. Archaeometric Approaches to Technologies and Materials

This chapter outlines and explains how an interdisciplinary study of the technology of painted plaster by means of a scientific multivariate analysis, combined with experimental replication, may reveal multiple strands in social relationships influencing and crisscrossing each other. The core of these relationships reflects human action in all its variety and colour, and it is exactly this human ‘way of life’ that we want to understand better in archaeological research. Ultimately, one of the reasons for studying human action is to attempt to answer questions about why people acted the way they did. The point is to explain the social phenomena that are expressed in the material culture under study (see Chapter Two), to understand the processes of interaction between society, culture, artifacts and landscape and, by so doing, to also refine our ways of understanding.