Archaeometry

Archaeometry applies laboratory physics and chemistry directly to physical remains: ice cores that trap centuries of atmospheric pollution, isotope analysis that sources a raw material (obsidian, glass, cobalt, amber) to its geological origin, radiocarbon and tree-ring (dendrochronology) dating, wear-physics studies of worn objects, and 3D scanning.

Because these methods produce a physical measurement independent of any text, they let conjectures be tested against nature itself rather than against another document. Ice-core money supply and Wear-rate velocity both read a physical trace -- lead pollution trapped in ice, the wear pattern on a worn object -- as a proxy for an economic quantity like money supply or velocity of use. Tin percolation collapse and Obsidian regime shifts both trace a sourced material, tin and obsidian, through a trade network using isotope fingerprinting, testing whether that network collapsed the way a physical percolation model predicts -- a sudden, threshold-driven failure rather than a slow decline.