Crime and Justice Atlas
Things this atlas does not know. Each entry is a question that specialists
have posed and not settled, recorded with what would actually resolve it and which
expertise the answer needs.
These are kept deliberately, rather than quietly omitted. An atlas that shows
only what it is sure of implies a confidence it has not earned, and the gaps are often where
the interesting work is. Several sit exactly where two fields fail to meet: identifying the
hyssop of the Hebrew Bible needs a botanist and a philologist of Biblical Hebrew, and neither
one settles it alone.
Grouped by the kind of thing the question is about, so you can go straight to the entity type you work on.
Filter By Specialty 99 fields, 1 selected
Showing 2 of 608 questions, filtered to 1 specialty.
Periodic Elements 1
Gallium
Did Lecoq de Boisbaudran name gallium after himself as well as after France?
Open Gallium
Why It Is Open The discoverer gave the patriotic reason, that he had named the element for Gallia, the Latin name for France. The coincidence that gallus is Latin for a rooster, and that his own surname, Lecoq, is French for the rooster, was pointed out at once and has been repeated ever since. Whether the second reading was intended, quietly enjoyed, or only ever imagined by other people cannot be settled from the naming announcement, which offers the patriotic reason alone.
What Would Settle It A statement of intent in Lecoq de Boisbaudran's own correspondence or working papers. Failing that, the question concerns a private intention and may simply not be answerable.
Expertise Needed History of chemistry, and French archival work on the Lecoq de Boisbaudran papers.
Question posed in
Periodic Table: Gallium, Royal Society of Chemistry, History section of the gallium entry.
Scholarly Disciplines 1
Archaeochemistry
When Did Archaeochemistry Become a Field of Its Own, Rather Than Chemistry Applied Occasionally to Archaeology, and Who First Named It So?
Open Archaeochemistry
Why It Is Open Chemical analysis of archaeological material goes back to the French chemist Marcelin Berthelot's survey of about 150 Egyptian and Near Eastern artifacts in the late nineteenth century, and continued through Earle Caley's American work from the late 1930s onward, but nobody appears to have fixed a single moment when the practice became a named field rather than a recurring collaboration between two older disciplines. Caley's own retrospective papers describe a history rather than announce a founding.
What Would Settle It A dedicated historiographic study of archaeological chemistry's own institutional history, comparable to the histories that exist for archaeometry (dated to the 1958 founding of the Oxford Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art) or radiocarbon dating (dated to Willard Libby's 1949 paper). No such study of archaeochemistry specifically has been identified; one would need to trace when practitioners first identified as archaeochemists rather than as chemists who occasionally worked on archaeological material.
Expertise Needed History of chemistry and history of archaeology, tracing when chemical analysis of archaeological material stopped being an occasional collaboration and became a named, self-identified subfield.
Question posed in
The Early History of Chemistry in the Service of Archaeology (Caley, Journal of Chemical Education, 1967), Earle R. Caley.