L’archeometria della ceramica in Italia: storia degli studi, risultati e prospettive della ricerca

This article reviews Italian research in the field of archaeometrical analyses applied to pre- and proto-historic ceramics from the early studies conducted in the second half of the 1950s until the present. We focus specifically on the rela-tions between palaeoethnology and experimental disciplines, on the methodologies applied over the years and on the resulting interpretative models. In Italy in particular a significant diversification of research approaches in this sector is evident only from the 1990s, much later than in other European countries, alongside an increasing interest in this discipline and an awareness of methodological issues. To this end we briefly summarize the results of some archaeometrical studies with some examples grouped by theme, in order to highlight their enormous potential, without proposing a general survey or discussing their implications for historical reconstructions.