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Archaeometallurgy is a highly multidisciplinary activity which requires many different intellctual and practical inputs, from the physical sciences, the humanities and social sciences, as well as craft and industrial knowledge and experience. There is even room for metallurgists! Indeed, while I generally support what David Killick and Gill Juelff have said they, as well as Paul Budd, have perhaps too much discounted the contribution to archaeometallurgical experience of recent industrial metallurgy which, after all, is the end result of the past developments we are exploring. I say recent rather than current because the way in which the materials sciences and industries have changed in the 35 years since I first started work in metallurgy is so radical that the sense of continuity may in fact be being broken (another topic for debate?). In that time, albeit briefly in some cases, I have worked on the basics (in the steel industry), on metal as a means of exchange (the Royal Mint) and in the current equivalent of prestige metalwork (rockets). The experience I gained has been invaluable and some has probaly been of more practical use than much of my academic instruction. I would go further and say that when I am looking for anthropological or ethnographic analogies for something I am studying in antiquity I can often find something helpful within the traditional metal processing industries of the last couple of centuries. If you share experience with the people on the foundry or workshop floor, (even in Europe and not just those parts which speak English), and talk about where they see how they fit in their society as well as practical matters to do with metal, you will get ideas and knowledge which are as valuable as those that David and Gill have acquired in other continents. I think the barriers come much more from the nature of the academic environment than the particular routes taken in the development of metal production, processing and use in different cultures and societies. We really should get out more. Yours, Peter Northovr ------------------- Dr Peter Northover, Materials Science-Based Archaeology Group, Dept. of Materials, University of Oxford, Begbroke Business and Science Park, Sandy Lane, Yarnton, Oxford, OX5 1PF Tel. 01865 283721; Fax. 01865 841943; Mobile 07785 501745 [log in to unmask] * This e-mail message was sent with Execmail V5.1 *