Kringing is the same thing as gaussian process regression, and astronomers use GPs a fair bit. I'm not sure whether they are used more widely.

My favourite forgotten/isolated statistical method is MCMC. These were first used by nuclear physicists at Los Alamos in the 40s/50s, but weren't really recognized more widely until the 80s. This is probably partly because only people working on bombs had access to the computing power before then, but still.