Martin Aitken

Martin Jim Aitken ( born March 11, 1922 in Stamford ( Lincolnshire ) ) is a British physicist, known for work in Archaeometry.

Life and work

Aitken was 1942-1946 radar officer in the Royal Air Force and went on to study physics at Oxford University with a master's degree in 1948 (where he first at the Clarendon Laboratory in nuclear physics dealt ) and the doctorate ( D.Phil ) in 1954. in 1957 he was Deputy Director of the research Laboratory for Archaeology and History of Art was at Oxford, which was founded in 1955 and its first director Edward Thomas Hall ( Teddy Hall ). Aitken was from 1985 Professor of Archaeometry in Oxford. In 1991 he retired from active laboratory work, but remained scientifically active.

In 1958 he was a founding editor of the journal Archaeometry.

In the 1950s he was a pioneer in the localization of archaeological sites with magnetometers.

He is ( the early 1960s ) as one of the inventors of the Thermolumineszenzdatierung ( TL), which is often used in archeology. First, the method was applied to the dating of ceramics - the liberated when re- heating amount of light was a measure of the combustion time. But other archaeological materials that were burned ( such as stones or Flint) were so dated in the 1970s, what new techniques required. From the late 1970s it was recognized that sediments offshore completed by sunlight, could be dated on the same principle ( Wintle, David Huntley of Simon Frazer University, 1979, and before in Russia). This realization became the method of OSL ( Optically Stimulated Luminscence ) Dating further developed by Huntley and other mid-1980s. The OSL dating was also early applied in Aitken's laboratory in Oxford and further developed.

In 1983 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society. In 1992 he received the Award Gemant of the American Institute of Physics. In 1997 he received the Pomerance Science Medal of the Archaeological Institute of America.

Others

There is a named after Martin Aitken price ( Martin Aitken Prize for best oral presentation ), the last on the international Lumineszenztagung 2011 in Torun (Poland ) was awarded for the best presentation.

Writings

• Physics and Archaeology. Interscience, New York, 1961 ( 2nd edition. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1974, ISBN 0-19-851922-2 ).
• Thermoluminescence dating. Academic Press, London ua 1985, ISBN 0-12-046380-6.
• Luminescence dating. A guide for non Specialists. In: Archaeometry. Vol 31, No. 2, 1989 ISSN 0365-6004, pp. 147-159, doi: 10.1111/j.1475-4754.1989.tb01010.x.
• Science -based dating in archeology. Longman, New York, NY / London, 1990, ISBN 0-582-49309-9.
• As editor with RE Taylor: Chronometric dating in archeology ( = Advances in archaeological and museum science vol 2. ). Plenum Press, New York, NY, inter alia, 1997, ISBN 0-306-45715-6.
• An introduction to optical dating. The dating of Quaternary sediments by the use of photon stimulated luminescence. Oxford University Press, Oxford 1998, inter alia, ISBN 0-19-854092-2.