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Cultural heritage represents a bridge between the contemporary society and the past populations, and a strong collaboration between archaeologists, art historians and analysts may lead to the decryption of the information hidden in an ancient object. Quantitative elemental compositional data play a key role in solving questions concerning dating, provenance, technology, use and the relationship of ancient cultures with the environment. Nevertheless, the scientific investigation of an artifact should be carried out complying with some important constraints: above all the analyses should be as little destructive as possible and performed directly on the object to preserve its integrity. Laser ablation sampling coupled to inductively coupled plasma–mass spectrometry (LA–ICP–MS) fulfils these requirements exhibiting comparably strong analytical performance in trace element determination. This review intends to show …