Was he the first archaeological scientist?
We think of science as part of what make archaeology modern. But as Gabriel Moshenska explains, early antiquarians also knew the value of technical analysis
Michael Faraday is one of the most famous scientists of all time, renowned for his discoveries and inventions in electromagnetism and chemistry. A man of modest origins and deep religious faith, he dazzled Victorian London with public demonstrations of his scientific discoveries at the Royal Institution. Faraday’s contributions to science and technology are well known, but his achievements in archaeological chemistry have passed relatively unnoticed. While many of us think of archaeological science as a modern invention, the study of ancient artefacts is as old as alchemy. Faraday’s chemical studies of artefacts in the 1830s and 40s, from Roman ceramics to Egyptian mummies, included what is probably the first scientific analysis to be published as part of an excavation report.
Antiquity & chemistry
In the history of modern science and technology, Michael Faraday (1791– 1867) is a titanic figure. His work on electromagnetism led to the electric motor and generator; as a chemist he pioneered studies of electrolysis and the liquefaction of gasses. His discoveries, his passion for public engagement, and his systematic approach to experimentation have brought him enduring fame. Alongside his public reputation he has long been honoured by his fellow scientists: Albert Einstein famously hung a portrait of Faraday on his office wall.
As professor of chemistry at the Royal Institution, Faraday conducted consultancy work for government and industry. He advised on the construction of lighthouses, mine safety, public sanitation, and air and water pollution. He still found time for ground-breaking experiments, sensational public lectures, and analytical work for friends and scientific colleagues. As an intelligent, cultured man, Faraday was drawn to the study of archaeology and the ancient world. This fascination can be seen in his letters, notebooks and publications, from his youthful travels to the peak of his fame. Over the course of his career he returned again and again to the scientific study of archaeological materials.
Faraday was not the first scientist to be associated with archaeology. Archaeological chemists Earle Caley and Mark Pollard have traced this history back to the 18th century and the Age of Enlightenment. France and Germany were strongholds of science during this period, and many of the pioneers were also interested in antiquities. German chemist Martin Heinrich Klaproth (1743–1817) is best known as the discoverer of uranium, but like French chemist Michel Jean Jérôme Dizé (1764–1852) he also analysed ancient Greek and Roman coins and other materials. Most of the chemical studies of ancient artefacts in this period were focused on metals, and in particular the analysis of copper-alloy objects to discover their components such as tin, zinc and arsenic.
Even Faraday’s mentor Humphry Davy (1778–1829) dabbled in archaeological science. Davy’s particular interest was in ancient pigments: he collected samples from frescoes in Pompeii, Herculaneum and Rome, and from traces found in ancient storage
jars. Davy compared his findings to accounts of pigment-making in works of Pliny, Vitruvius and Theophrastus. He later compared his Roman materials s with pigments found in the ruins of the Romano-British villa at Bignor in West Sussex (see features Feb 2000/51 and Sep/Oct 2015/144).
Most early archaeological science was by scholars whose interests spanned antiquity and the natural sciences, conducting analyses for their own interest and amusement.
It was only in the 19th century that the idea of the scientific specialist emerged, with their reports commissioned by antiquarians and archaeologists. Austen Henry Layard’s famous Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh & Babylon
(1853) included an analysis of Assyrian bronzes by chemist TT Philipps. This has been called the first scientific study in an archaeological excavation n report. In fact here, as in so many ny things, Faraday was ahead of his time.
Smell of myrrh
Michael Faraday was the third of four children. His father was a blacksmith, and the family were members of the nonconformist Sandemanian church. At the age of 14 Faraday was apprenticed to a bookbinder, which allowed him to read voraciously. To continue his self-education he joined the City Philosophical Society run by silversmith John Tatum. Members o of the Society, many of t them apprentices like him, t took turns delivering l lectures on scientific s subjects. In 1812 Faraday b began to attend Humphry D Davy’s weekly lectures a at the Royal Institution. H He made copious notes d during these lectures, and u using his binding skills he t turned these notes into a b book, which he presented t to Davy.
Davy was impressed w with Faraday, later r referring to him as his g greatest discovery, and gave h him work at the Royal I Institution. When Davy a and his wife embarked on o a two-year tour of continental c Europe in 1813, Faraday F travelled with them t as Davy’s assistant a and valet. It was on this trip that t Faraday’s fascination with w antiquities took hold: the t group visited the Roman R ruins at Nîmes, and in Florence’s Museo di Storia Naturale they inspected Egyptian mummies, both whole and unwrapped. In his free time Faraday walked miles every day, exploring the cities that they visited. Rome made a particularly strong impression on him, and he visited the Colosseum, Trajan’s baths, the Temple of Minerva Medica, and the Forum. In his letters home, he wrote of his astonishment at the survival of so many ancient tombs, temples, statues, pillars and roads.
Faraday remained at the Royal Institution after Davy’s retirement. In 1825 he was appointed director of the
laboratory, and in 1833 he became the Institution’s first Fullerian professor of chemistry. By this time his reputation in the fields of chemistry and electricity was becoming established, and he was in great demand as a scientific consultant for government and industry. In amongst this work and his own world-changing research, he also found time for archaeology, not least at the Bartlow Hills.
The Bartlow Hills are a group of large Romano-British burial mounds south-east of Cambridge. From 1832, antiquarian John Gage made a series of excavations into them, uncovering burial chambers with metal, glass and organic artefacts. He sent many of these artefacts to Faraday, whose analyses were included in the papers that Gage published in the Society of Antiquaries journal Archaeologia.
Gage was a descendant of gunpowder-plotter Ambrose Rookwood, and served for many years as director of the Society of Antiquaries. One of his aims in excavating the Bartlow Hills was to confirm their date: Gage had proposed a Roman date, but local folklore linked them to the 1016 Battle of Assandun between Cnut and
Edmund Ironside. The first excavations took place in 1832 and among the finds were two sealed glass vessels containing liquid and sediment, along with a small woven basket with a white-coated interior. He sent them to Faraday.
Faraday filtered the liquids that remained in the two vessels, boiled them, then evaporated them leaving only a residue, which he heated and burned. From the liquid in the larger vessel he found sulphate and muriate of soda and traces of ammonia. The residue in the smaller bottle was soft and waxy: Faraday heated some samples, burned and boiled others, and dissolved them with alkali and hot alcohol. He concluded that the material was a fat or oil, saponified over time. The white coating on the small basket was found to be a resinous material that gave a smell of myrrh or frankincense when heated, burned with a white smoky flame, and partially dissolved in alcohol. Faraday’s report
covered four pages of Archaeologia.
He was not the only expert who Gage consulted. The bones found in these first excavations were sent to the Royal College of Surgeons for examination by William Clift, the museum’s keeper and conservator. He identified two individuals: one of indeterminate sex, and one robust male.
In 1835, Gage continued his excavations at the Bartlow Hills, with a large and distinguished audience watching him work. Scientist Reverend William Whewell was present, and composed some verse to remember the day:
Nobles and learnèd clerks, and ladies gay, Who all, in fair assembly ranged, were by, When antiquarian pickaxe broke its way Through Bartlow’s old mysterious tumuli
Again, Gage sent his finds to Faraday, who was particularly interested in a lamp with its wick and fuel intact. He analysed the contents of a sealed glass bottle, finding a plug of asphalt and beneath it a waxy solid substance. Underneath the waxy layer was a liquid that evaporated to a sticky, syrupy residue, which burned like sugar or honey. It is worth noting that Faraday’s analytical methods included tasting and smelling the samples – a common part of science at the time, and to some extent still today.
Mummies & lead glaze
Thomas Pettigrew, a surgeon and antiquarian, was a contemporary of Faraday’s: born just two weeks apart, they were both members of the City Philosophical Society. Pettigrew became a successful society surgeon, and began to devote his leisure time to the study of archaeology. A cofounder of the British Archaeological Association, he is best remembered for his pioneering work on Egyptian mummies. His public unrollings of mummies brought him fame and the nickname “Mummy” Pettigrew.
In 1834 he published A History of Egyptian Mummies which included historical, ethnographic, scientific and medical studies and analyses. Pettigrew deferred to classical sources on mummification including Herodotus, but he was keen to compare them to the physical remains. To reverse engineer the processes of mummification he turned to his old friend Faraday.
In March 1833 Pettigrew unrolled a mummy at the Charing Cross Hospital. On parts of the skin he found small crystals, which he collected and sent to Faraday. In Pettigrew’s book, Faraday’s report is included as a footnote:
The small needle-like crystals are very curious, but too minute in quantity, and too vague as to their origin, to allow of much being made out relative to them… The substance may probably be a result of slow action upon organic (perchance animal) matter, and has, perhaps, been assisted in its formation by heat.
As in his work for Gage, Faraday was just one of the specialists who Pettigrew employed. The same mummy had contained fragments of insect remains, whichwere which were analysed by entomologist FW Hope. Scottish chemist Andrew Ure analysed crystals from another of Pettigrew’s mummies, and found them to be common salt, with traces of soda and lime: possibly the natron salts used to desiccate bodies in the early stages of mummification.
Perhaps Faraday’s most significant contribution to archaeological science came from his analysis of the glaze of a ceramic vessel found on a Roman site in Ewell, Surrey. The excavator was
Hugh Welch Diamond, a pioneer of both psychiatry and archaeological photography. Diamond served as superintendent of the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum, and also as honorary photographer to the Society of Antiquaries. Like Gage and Pettigrew, Diamond had wide-ranging antiquarian interests: all three men were members of the Numismatic Society, they all collected Egyptian antiquities, and they all commissioned reports on their finds from Faraday.
In 1847, a few miles from Diamond’s asylum, workmen uncovered a curious set of pits dug deep into the chalk. In these shafts they found animal bones, oyster shells and a variety of RomanoBritish ceramics. One of the vessels stood out from the others, as Diamond recalled:
One of these Vases is so remarkable able that I am desirous of calling the attention of the Society especially to it. It is of perfect Roman oman form, composed of a thin material, of a bright green colour, with stripes of white or pale yellow laid on it, being perfectly glazed lazed inside and out, apparently the he same as in a piece of modern pottery. Its antiquity, however, is incontestable, and some of the most competent judges have pronounced it to be at least coeval with the other remains. I took it with my own hand from the soil, in which it was firmly impacted, at a depth of about eighteen ghteen feet [5.5m] from the surface, after ter working a long time on the spot.
In his report to the Society y of Antiquaries, Diamond included ded Faraday’s study of the glaze. Unlike in his work for Gage and Pettigrew, tigrew, Faraday gave no details of his smethods, methods, but stated that “There is abundance undance of lead in [the glaze], with silver ver also also, derived perhaps from the vessel itself, or perhaps added as part of the glaze.”
This was the first proof that the Romans had used lead glaze, a technology previously believed to date to the 13th century. Earlier scholars had found no definitive evidence of Roman glazed ceramics, and even a century after Faraday’s death there remained some disputes among archaeologists. Recent research has proved beyond doubt that Faraday was correct. The Romans had indeed pioneered the use of lead glazes.
Left: Hugh Welch Diamond, excavator of a Roman site in Ewell, Surrey
Endless E science
O One of the most famous images of F Faraday shows him hard at work in his la laboratory at the Royal Institution, m mixing chemicals over a furnace, surrounded su by shelves of bottles and e electrical equipment. From this room fl flowed an endless stream of scientific d discoveries, large and small. A few of th the smaller ones, as we have seen, were a archaeology flavoured. Would Mr F Faraday inspect this soil from a burial mound m in Jerusalem? This dust from inside in the Great Pyramid? Would he a advise on lightning conductors for T Trajan’s Column? For several years he w worked with Edward Hawkins, keeper o of antiquities at th the British Museum, to o study the conser conservation of artefacts in including ncluding the Parth Parthenon Marbles. Faraday’swork Faraday’s work d demonstrates an important develop development in the history of archaeology. In the first half of the 19th centurywe century we s see the emergence of a type of pro professional consultant whose an analyses could be incluld included in archaeological repor reports under their own name. These ana analyses added to the archaeological arch findings, and the authority of scien scientists like Faraday gave t them weight and signific significance. Chemistry and other natural sciences have played important roles in archaeology eve ever since.
GabrielMoshenska Gabriel Moshenska i is associate professor in public archaeology at ucl Institute ofArchaeology of Archaeology