The Early History of Chemistry in the Service of Archaeology (Caley, Journal of Chemical Education, 1967)

Earle R. Caley's The Early History of Chemistry in the Service of Archaeology, published in the Journal of Chemical Education by the American Chemical Society in 1967, is Caley's own retrospective account of how chemical analysis came to be applied to archaeological material, tracing a gradual accumulation of method from Marcelin Berthelot's late nineteenth century surveys of ancient metals through Caley's own postwar analytical work, rather than crediting the field's founding to a single scholar or year. Caley was himself a working archaeochemist writing the closest thing the field has to its own founding history. Its strength is that Caley writes as a practitioner describing his own field's actual development rather than as an outside historian reconstructing it secondhand. Its limit is that a retrospective by a senior figure in a field naturally centers the lineage of work that figure knew best, so a claim about archaeochemistry's origin outside the Western tradition Caley surveys needs a source addressing that separately.