Chapter 1
What Archaeology Is
In This Chapter
Defining archaeology
Distinguishing the different types of archaeological evidence
Understanding the site-formation processes
Checking out the players and developments on the road to modern archaeology
Archaeology is exciting adventure and romantic intrigue as well as amazing scientific investigation. That’s how you see it in movies and the news, and even if the excavation is downtown under the sidewalk or in the middle of some farmer’s field, that adventure is still there because you’re trying to make the unknown known. The dig unearths not only neat artifacts from ancient times but also the often-dramatic stories of how past humans got along in the world — maybe with some lessons for the present day.
Because confusion and misconceptions about the nature of archaeology are everywhere, in this chapter I define archaeology and show you how it really is detective work on a big scale. Here you discover how archaeological sites are formed, how modern archaeology developed, and even how you yourself probably do archaeology all the time without realizing it!
So What Is Archaeology Anyway?
A simple definition: Archaeology is finding out about past human behavior by studying the material evidence left behind.
Archaeology doesn’t necessarily look at the people themselves, but always examines their stuff. Archaeology is very distinctive among all the social sciences (studies of humans and their behavior) for its unique method: studying people not by watching or reading about or talking to them but by analyzing what material things they left behind. Material things means people’s possessions, residues, and anything else visible or tangible — from the tiniest seed bead or corn kernel to the tallest pyramid, from the most nondescript kitchen garbage to the most beautiful gold craftwork. Today it also means people’s hair and DNA as well as dark stains and other features in the soil left from burying, building, and so on.
The method: It’s detective work
Archaeology is exactly like detective work — in fact, it is detective work! Most police or private detectives use all the methods archaeologists use:
Carefully measuring, recording, and photographing the evidence at the (crime) scene.
Using painstakingly accurate techniques to recover, process, and analyze the evidence.
Getting background information on all the people, places, and times involved.
Interviewing knowledgeable people about what happened and what other evidence they may have or know about.
Using techniques from other sciences like physics and chemistry to learn more about the evidence.
Stopping for coffee and doughnuts (or a cold beer) at a little place close by to see what else you can find out.
Compiling all the information to describe what happened.
Stating your case and arguing it, sometimes involving other experts, politicians, journalists, and the public.
Continuing to investigate if you can’t tie up all the loose ends.
Everyone does archaeology sometimes
Archaeological knowledge is about us. You can do the archaeology of the far distant past or the very recent past. Everyone does some archaeology, probably nearly every day. For example, you may know by the car in the driveway who is home, or by the things thrown around the living room what the roommate or kids have been doing in there. Parents, especially, do a lot of archaeology (“Did you brush your teeth before bed?” “Sure, Mom. Always, Mom.” “Then why is the toothbrush still dry?”).
The goal: Understand people
When you do archaeology, you don’t dig just to get some cool artifact (that’s treasure hunting or looting). You don’t really want the finds for yourself, anyway — they go into collections or museum exhibits for all to enjoy and study further, if desired. No, you want to understand past people through what they left on and in the ground (or elsewhere). You examine the once-lost traces of the past for several good reasons. The goals of archaeology are to
Study the human past across space and time.
Reconstruct past human behavior and ways of life.
Understand past cultural systems (social, economic, political, religious) and how they changed through time.
Help conserve the fragile material record of past peoples and interpret this heritage for people today.
Bring the story of the human past to the public for enjoyment, education, and even practical use.
The Nature of Archaeological Evidence
Anything made by humans is an artifact, including a thought, a song, or a smile. In archaeology, artifacts are human-made material objects — you have to be able to see or measure them and retrieve information from them.
Your materials are all the physical items you dig up or otherwise obtain from the archaeological sites, and your data are all the bits of information you retrieve from the dig, the sites, and all the physical remains. So you may wash, sort, and identify your archaeological materials in the laboratory. Then when you list each type of artifact and ecofact (more on these in the following sections) on a table, you create data. The same is true for all the information you record as you excavate a feature or make a map — these are more data, as are all your notes, files, photos, and other information. The following sections describe some categories of these material remains.
Artifacts
Any object made by humans is an artifact. Usually you think of ancient ceramic pots or arrowheads, and indeed these items are everywhere at archaeological sites. But a temple or palace is an artifact too — one made up of individual artifacts such as bricks or stone blocks. A stone used to hammer and chip other stone to make the arrowhead is also an artifact; even though it’s not deliberately shaped, it’s covered with grinding and chipping marks and thus modified by human activity. Finally, the flakes of stone chipped while making stone tools are also artifacts, though they may or may not have been discarded. Most often, artifacts are portable objects excavated and brought back to a laboratory for study.
Ecofacts
Ecofact is a term archaeologists invented to classify natural objects used by humans without modification. Animal bones left from dinner or pollen from gathered plants are ecofacts. But if a bone has been modified to become a harpoon point, that modification makes it an artifact. Even phosphates or other chemicals in the soil are ecofacts showing that people threw their organic waste on the ground.
Features
Anything that’s made by humans but is too big to bring back (intact) to the laboratory is a feature. Features can be garbage pits, hearths, post holes or postmolds (where poles were once in the ground), graves, roads, drip lines from roofs of old buildings, building foundations, storage pits, clusters of artifacts, and even footprints. Technically you can cut out a block of soil around a feature such as a footprint and bring it back to study under better conditions in the lab, but most features have to be excavated (or studied and then preserved) where they’re first uncovered.
Sites
Archaeological sites are places where human habitation or other activity took place and where artifacts, features, and ecofacts are all found. You can have sites of different sizes, shapes, and time periods, from a small stone quarry where bits of chipped rock are lying around to the ruins of a big palace where bits of the quarried stone blocks are left lying around. Depending upon what’s preserved, a site can be small or large, shallow or deep.
Components and boundaries
When people of one time period use a place that people of an earlier time already used, they add another component to a site. A multicomponent site at a prime location such as a shoreline can have cultural deposits going back thousands of years, one component overlying the next. The ideal site has a nice, culturally sterile layer between each component so you can tell them apart. In reality it seldom works out like this. Later people come in and dig into the site and mix the older stuff with their stuff and never even think of how the archaeologist of the future is going to figure it all out!
Not all sites are visible. Sometimes you do archaeological survey to locate sites, including using special techniques if remains are buried or underwat...
