Mineralogy and cultural heritage

In recent years there has been an escalation in the number of mineralogical studies involving cultural heritage materials. A number of factors have contributed to this exponential growth, including the shrinking budgets in traditional research fields, which forced the expansion of applications of mineralogical methods to novel research areas. Mineralogy as a discipline is traditionally connected to geology, petrology, and geochemistry, although it also has the strong tendency to embody the methods and techniques of modern crystallography and advanced materials science. Arguably, this makes it ideally suited and well equipped to meet the demanding challenges posed by archaeometric analysis and conservation problems. A few case studies linking mineralogy and archaeometry are discussed.