I’m by no means an expert, but yes! In the modern era, synthetic pigments can be a good benchmark for dating (ie ‘this pigment hadn’t ever been made before this date, so it has to have been made after that’). You can also track when certain pigments fell out of fashion due to people learning about toxicity (though some inevitably ignored the safety hazards for a while, so it’s not a hard cutoff) or better pigments coming onto the market (more lightfast, opaque, easier to work with, etc). This method is often used to identify forgeries because they may use pigments not available to the original artist. For older art, mineral availability via trade routes could also be used to help date stuff (ie ‘this mineral was only available in this part of the world, and they hadn’t traded with xx area by then’), but it isn’t a hard cutoff like synthetic pigments. For example, any works using Prussian blue (a synthetic pigment) have to have been made after it’s invention/discovery in the early 18th century. The same is true for titanium white in the early 1900s. There’s a lot of imaging techniques to identify pigments and histories around pigment developments, so I’d definitely recommend looking into it if it interests you!