Designing a ‘yellow brick road’ for the archaeometric analyses of fired and unfired bricks

Unfired and fired bricks were widely used as building materials in Antiquity across many geographically and temporally distant cultures. Studies on archaeological bricks have long focused on bricks from ei-ther an architectural or, where possible, epigraphic point of view. Only recently have bricks attracted the interest of material sciences to investigate aspects such as the origin and processing of raw materi-als, firing conditions and physical-mechanical performance. Archaeometric analyses of bricks are not yet as widespread or developed as those of other materials or artefacts. By reviewing the whole literature available on Neolithic to Byzantine bricks from all over the world, this paper aims to sketch a guide-line for future analyses and emphasise their potential in shedding light on the bricks' life cycle, which in turn can serve as a basis to develop suitable conservation measures and new forms of sustainable architecture.(c) 2022 Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR). Published by Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.