Intro to Archaeology
Archaeology: An Adventure in Anthropology, History, and Science
Archaeology. The word brings to mind all sorts of romantic images, but in fact archaeology is a very modern scientific discipline. Archaeology is a subdiscipline of anthropology. Anthropologists study human culture. Archaeologists do too, but they focus on people who lived in the past. Archaeologists study the artifacts and materials people leave behind. Because archaeologists study things rather than written history, they can study the whole range of human activity from the first members of our species, to the first civilizations, right on up to the modern period.
Archaeologists are not interested in simply finding interesting or pretty objects. Instead they excavate sites to answer difficult questions about the intangible aspects of human life. Archaeologists want to understand how people lived in the past. How did people provide food, clothing, and shelter for their families? What types of religions were practiced? How was a society organized? Why did people settle in a particular place? What was the political situation? These questions can’t be answered just by looking at an artifact. In fact, excavation is only a small part of archaeology and is sometimes not even necessary to study an archaeological site. And since excavating a site destroys it forever, archaeologists are obliged to collect every bit of data they possibly can so that future scholars and students can benefit from the excavations.