E. T. Hall, an archaeologist and art historian who devised scientific tools used to unmask the fraudulent Piltdown Man and to try to determine the Shroud of Turin's age, died Aug. 11 in Oxford, England. He was 77.
Dr. Hall was a principal architect of archaeometry, the discipline that uses carbon-dating techniques to estimate closely the exact age and origin of an artifact or work of art, no matter how brittle or delicate. His methods, first employed in the 1950's, greatly refined earlier ones and became standard procedure for forensic scientists.
Teddy Hall, as he was known, started with a love of gadgetry, which led him to create new contraptions adopted from physics and chemistry. From these grew the instruments he later introduced to the analysis of artworks and archaeological finds.
He first came to public notice in the 1950's with the revelation that Piltdown Man, once believed to represent the ''missing link,'' was an elaborate hoax whose authorship has never been firmly established. When a skull and jawbone were dug by a workman from a gravel pit on Piltdown Common in southern England in 1912, a reconstruction of the head seemed to represent a new sort of manlike creature and a bridge in the evolution of humans from apes.
That proposition gained currency in Britain but met skepticism in Europe, where anthropologists were finding enough Neanderthal fossils to dispute the Piltdown claim.
In 1953, Dr. Hall's use of X-ray fluorescence exposed the process by which the bones had been fossilized and made to look like a human skull; the jaw later turned out to be the doctored bones of an orangutan. Several notables have been named as possible perpetrators of the fraud, but Dr. Hall suspected the amateur scientist who had collected the ''fossils,'' Charles Dawson.
His feat prompted Oxford University in 1954 to establish its Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art, which he led until his retirement in 1989 as director and professor emeritus of archaeological sciences. The laboratory attracted a distinguished staff.
In 1988 his team was one of three asked by the Roman Catholic Church to use their skills and instruments to date the Turin shroud, an antique piece of linen venerated as the burial shroud of Jesus. Questions about it had been raised for centuries.
The three laboratories, working independently with small patches of material, came up with the answer that the shroud was woven in a later era -- between 1260 and 1390. The Church made that finding public, but to many it remains a sacred relic.
Edward Thomas Hall was born in London and was educated at Eton and Oxford University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1953. He was a trustee of the British Museum and Britain's National Gallery.
In 1957 he married Jennifer Louise de la Harpe; they had two sons.