Resources

What is Archaeology?

The popular image of archaeology seems to be of treasure hunters or dusty professors commanding an army of laborers in the excavation of a lost civilization in a strange and exotic land. That sounds exciting, but it is not exactly accurate. Perhaps we should start with what archaeology is not. It is not “Indiana Jones” or “Tomb Raider,” and it is not pot hunting or grave robbing. None of that is science. It is not geology, the study of the earth and its mineral components, and it is not paleontology, the study of plant and animal fossil remains. Although these are also scientific disciplines, and archaeologists do sometimes deal with rocks and fossils, they are not archaeology.

So what is archaeology?

Archaeology is the study of cultures that lived in the past. It is a subfield of anthropology, the study of human cultures. The other subfields are cultural anthropology that studies living cultures, physical anthropology that studies human biology and where humans fit among the living and extinct species of our family tree, and linguistics that studies human language. Archaeology is primarily concerned with reconstructing extinct cultures from the material remains of past human behavior, or the things people made or used and left behind. These remains are called artifacts. Much of what we see around us – computers, clothing, food, books, and buildings – are artifacts. Even natural objects, like a stick of wood or a piece of bone, are artifacts if humans have used them for some purpose.

vase

Look For Patterns

From these artifacts archaeologists build a model of what a culture was like. Archaeologists look for patterns in the artifacts they study that give them clues about how the people who made and used them lived. For instance, the way people made pottery in the southwest changed over time, reflecting their skill, different technologies used to produce it, the ways they used designs and other decorations, and how they used the pottery.

exploring past

Kinds of Archaeology

There are several different kinds of archaeology: prehistoric, historic, classical, and underwater, to name a few. These often overlap. For example, when archaeologists studied the wreck of the Civil War ironclad, the Monitor, they were doing both historic and underwater archaeology. The two main types are prehistoric and historic archaeology. Prehistoric archaeology refers to the study of human prehistory, or the period of human history before written records existed. This comprises most of our human past. The human family can be traced back at least five million years. The first modern humans appeared about fifty thousand years ago. Human did not start writing things down until 5,200 years ago. That leaves many thousands of years of human experience that was not recorded.

cliff side

Historic Archaeology

Historic archaeology studies that portion of the human past that has written records. While it shares many of the techniques used in prehistoric archaeology, written records give historic archaeology an advantage in it research. In Europe, archaeology is not a subfield of anthropology, but oh history. This is because most cultures in the Old World had written languages. But archaeologists in the New World did not have that resource, with the exception of Mesoamerican archaeologists studying the Maya whose hieroglyphic language has only recently been deciphered. Because of this difference, New World archaeologists have more in common with anthropologists than they do with historians in many cases. Classical archaeology may be considered a branch of historic archaeology that studies the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean, including Greece and Rome. Egyptology can also be considered a branch of historic archaeology. In North America, historic archaeologists study colonial sites like Jamestown or Salem, or Civil War sites like the Gettysburg Battlefield.

pompeii

Prehistoric Archaeology

Prehistoric archaeology has similar divisions. There are Paleoindian archaeologists who study the first populations that migrated to the Americas. There are Mesoamerican archaeologists, Southwestern archaeologists, South American archaeologists, and many more, who concentrate on specific cultures and time periods. But when all the various branches are boiled down, they all must rely on evidence from the archaeological record. This means artifacts, the place they were found, and with what they were found. Even in sites for which there are written records, there is a great deal of information left out. For instance, we have the dramatic accounts from the Roman historians about what happened at the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum when Vesuvius erupted, but it was not until archaeologists began to uncover Pompeii and Herculaneum that we really began to understand this catastrophic event and perhaps more importantly, how Romans lived their everyday lives.

What is Archaeology?

The Record of the Past

So how do archaeologists study the past? The record of the past, or archaeological record, is fragmentary at best. Most of the material objects left behind are perishable.

Learn More