Professor Martin Aitken
Pioneer of archaeometry who developed new methods of finding and dating ancient remains
PROFESSOR MARTIN AITKEN, who has died aged 95, was a pioneer of archaeometry, a term he coined with the archaeologist Christopher Hawkes to describe the application of physics and mathematics to archaeology.
In 1957 he was appointed deputy director of the Research Laboratory for Archaeology at Oxford University, founded two years earlier by Hawkes and the physicist Lord Cherwell. There, with the laboratory’s director Edward Hall, he began to apply magnetic methods to the dating and location of archaeological remains using a proton free precession magnetometer – a version of a device that had been tested by the Army for the detection of plastic mines. The science involved was based on a prediction that buried pottery kilns, and other features, would cause a slight disturbance in the earth’s magnetic field at ground level.
In 1958, at the invitation of the archaeologist Graham Webster, Aitken undertook the first archaeological proton magnetometer survey, on the Roman city of Durobrivae, near Water Newton, Cambridgeshire, detecting a kiln among other features. At the Bronze Age site of Enkommi in Cyprus, he and local archaeologists used the magnetometer to plot an ancient road system. Also in 1958, the Oxford laboratory published the first volume of the journal Archaeometry, a leading vehicle for the publication of scientific research in archaeology, of which Aitken was an editor until 1989. His first book, Physics and Archaeology, was published in 1961.
Magnetometry is now a standard technique in archaeology and in 1962 Aitken established a series of conferences in Oxford, which became the bi-annual International Symposia on Archaeometry and Archaeological Prospection. As well as proton magnetometers, he also developed the use of fluxgate magnetic gradiometers for the detection of buried remains and was involved (with Derek Walton) in the development of the first SQUID cryogenic magnetometer (a device capable of measuring extremely subtle magnetic fields) to be used in Britain.
From the 1960s Aitken developed a technique known as thermoluminescence dating (TL), which is used to work out the date of ceramic materials such as pottery, brick and tiles found in the ground. The method utilises the fact that a ceramic contains flaws in its crystalline structure in which electrons get trapped, causing the ceramic to take on an electric charge which builds up over the years it is buried in the ground. When the ceramic is heated, it emits the stored energy as light, which can be measured to date the sample.
Much of the early work on TL dating was on ceramics which could not be dated using radiocarbon. In 1971, with colleagues, Aitken proved, using TL dating, that examples of Anatolian pottery in some of the world’s leading museums, supposedly from the prehistoric cemetery of Hacilar, were not 7,000-8,000 yrs old but modern forgeries.
Aitken further developed the method by using blue/green light or infrared radiation instead of heat. This optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating has become one of the most powerful methods for the dating of sediments in both archaeological and environmental contexts.
Aitken published a book on thermoluminescence dating in 1985 and an introduction to optical dating in 1998. His best-known book, Science-based Dating in Archaeology (1990), has become the standard undergraduate text on the subject
Martin Jim Aitken was born on March 11 1922 and educated at Stamford School, Lincolnshire. He went up to Wadham College, Oxford, to read Physics, but his studies were interrupted by the Second World War, in which he served as a technical radar officer in Ceylon and Burma.
After taking his degree and a Dphil, he undertook research in nuclear physics at the Clarendon Laboratory in Oxford, before joining the Research Laboratory for Archaeology. He became a Fellow of Linacre College in 1965 and Professor of Archaeometry in 1985, retiring in 1989.
As well as his books on archaeometry, Aitken published more than 150 scientific papers. An affable, approachable man, he won the Gemant Award from the American Institute of Physics, and the Pomerance Award for Scientific Contributions to Archaeology of the Archaeological Institute of America. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1983.
He married Joan Killick, with whom he had four daughters and a son. In retirement he and his wife moved to a small stone house near Clermont Ferrand in France.
Martin Aitken, born March 11 1922, died June 15 2017