Those interested in (one of) the methods used to determine the origin of archeological finds might find Neutron Activation Analysis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_activation_analysis) interesting.

Basically, fire neutrons into your item, and then look at how it [edit: radioactively] decays to determine the constituent chemical elements.

My one beer-brewing book mentioned that they can trace some pot sherds to a specific region of a specific river using this method. Very cool.