Any object that comes down to us, handed down through history, can be thought of as a palimpsest of writ-ings inherited from other, more or less distant times. Every building, or part of a building, manifests signs and contains clues that allow us to reconstruct its history: This is what the archeology of architecture, the physical and formal history of the built environment, is based on.While stratigraphical analysis helps to study buildings, forming an orderly sequence of parts and construction activi-ties, only the application of multiple dating methods, both archeological and archeometric, can manage to fix points in the timeline, and allow us to place objects in their true historical context. Dating mortar has for some time been an important goal in the field of archeology, and this is why it was decided it might be useful to bring together, in a monographic section, articles by some of the leading researchers currently con-cerned with this issue, both nationally and internationally. The monographic section affords an overview, albeit only a partial one, of the various different dating methods for mortar, both archeological, such as the chronotypology of types of mortar referred to in the article by Roberto Ricci, and archeometric. Archeometric dating methods refer to the bonding agent (lime and hydraulic lime) via the radiocarbon method, albeit applied with differing procedures – see the articles by Alf Lindroos et al., Giovanni L. Pesce, Rita Vec-chiattini, Fabio Marzaioli et al. and Paola Ricci et al. – or to the aggregate contained in the mortar using the lumi-nescence method, as set out by Petra Urbanova. As well as the aforementioned methodological articles, there are also three articles on application, exemplifying some of the dating methods described: Anna Boato-Rita Vecchiattini, Stefano Roascio-Anna Decri-Simona Scrivano and Jean-Baptiste Javel et al.