Microarchaeology

Stephen Weiner is Director of the Kimmel Center for Archaeological Science at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. He is the author, with Heinz A. Lowenstam, of On Biomineralization and has published more than 300 scientific journal articles.

• 1. Archaeology, archaeological science and microarchaeology; 2. Information embedded in the microscopic record; 3. Completeness of the archaeological record; 4. Common mineral components of the archaeological record; 5. Biological materials: bones and teeth; 6. Biological materials: phytoliths, diatoms, eggshells, otoliths and mollusk shells; 7. Reconstructing pyrotechnological processes; 8. Biological molecules and macromolecules: protected niches; 9. Ethnoarchaeology of the microscopic record: learning from the present; 10. Absolute dating: assessing the quality of a date; 11. Reading the microscopic record on-site; 12. Infrared spectroscopy in archaeology.

'I found [this book] so engaging and useful that I read it through with extreme care, rereading and highlighting key passages … It is a textbook, hopefully the first one in a new subfield, microarchaeology, that will become a required component of rigorous archaeology training at both the undergraduate and graduate level.' Hector Neff, Geoarchaeology: An International Journal