Archeology

what is Archeology

Archeology is a study of culture of past and of periods of history by examining the remains of buildings,artifacts and objects found in the ground are the evidance of past societies to how they lived.Archeology often thought carefully about a branch of Sociocultural Anthropology.Archaeologists examine material remains in order to deduce patterns of cultural practices and past human behavior. Ethnoarchaeology is a type of archaeology that studies the practices and material remains of living human groups in order to gain a better understanding of the evidence left behind by past human groups, who are presumed to have lived in similar ways.

Archaeology has been used by nation-states to create particular visions of the past.Since its early development, various specific sub-disciplines of archaeology have developed, including maritime archaeology, feminist archaeology and archaeoastronomy, and numerous different scientific techniques have been developed to aid archaeological investigation. today, archaeologists face many problems, such as dealing with pseudoarchaeology, the looting of artifacts,a lack of public interest, and opposition to the digging in ground for look human remains.

Archaeology is the only academic discipline and profession that has an ancestry in treasure hunting. Nineteenth-century archaeology often consisted of a hasty search for lost cities or gold-laden royal burials. It was a time of high adventure and, it must be admitted, a great deal of unbridled looting. The damage to the past was incalculable – royal tombs torn apart, temples ravaged, entire city mounds reduced to dust. Fortunately, treasure hunting gave way gradually to scientific excavation and, eventually, to the highly sophisticated science we know today. The specialized science of today is a product not only of modern scientific innovation but also of the work of flamboyant pioneers who did indeed find lost civilizations in remote lands.

The Beginnings of Archeology

People have speculated about human origins and the remote past for centuries. As early as the eighth century B.C., the Greek writer Hesiod wrote that humanity had passed through five great ages of history. The earliest was an Age of Gold, when “people dwelt in ease,” the last an Age of War, when everyone worked terribly hard and experienced great sorrow. In the sixth century B.C., the Babylonian monarch Nabonidus dug deep into ancient city mounds near the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. His workmen uncovered the foundations of the temple of the goddess Ishtar at Agade near Babylon. The find, says an ancient tablet, “made the king’s heart glad and caused his countenance to brighten.”

In later centuries, the Greeks and Romans were intensely curious about their primitive ancestors, about Scythian “barbarians” living on the northern plains who drank from cups made from human skulls, and about the Britons far to the northwest who painted themselves blue. Classical writers wrote of the long-term continuity of human life. “Thus the sum of things is ever being renewed,” wrote the Roman poet Lucretius in the first century B.C. “Some races increase, others diminish, and in a short space the generations of living creatures are changed and like runners hand on the torch of life” (De Rerum Natura II: 75).

The history of archaeology really begins in the European Renaissance, which saw quickened intellectual curiosity not only about the world beyond the narrow confines of Europe but also about the Classical civilizations. People of leisure and wealth began to follow the path of Renaissance scholars, traveling widely in Greece and Italy, studying antiquities, and collecting examples of Roman art. The same travelers were not above undertaking illicit excavation to recover statuary from ancient temples and Roman villas. Soon the cabinets of wealthy collectors (antiquarians) bulged with fine art objects, and the study of Classical lands became a major scholarly preoccupation.

Many antiquarians were not wealthy enough to travel to Classical lands, so they stayed at home and searched for antiquities right in their own backyards. Stonehenge on the uplands of southern England was the most famous curiosity, a place where “stones of wonderful size have been erected after the manner of doorways” .

The antiquarians indulged their insatiable curiosity by digging into burial mounds and river gravels, recovering all manner of prehistoric finds – clay vessels, stone axes and adzes, bronze implements, even occasional gold ornaments. Their digging methods were brutally crude, usually little more than a hasty pit sunk into the center of a mound to recover a skeleton and its grave goods as quickly as possible. Some fast-moving diggers would open two or three mounds a day. The accounts of their excavations frequently include complaints that a delicate find “crumbled to dust before their eyes” – hardly surprising, considering the crude digging methods they employed.

Until well into the nineteenth century, archaeology was little more than a glorified treasure hunt, even a sport. Not only that, but also the archaeological record of prehistoric times was a complete jumble of stone and metal tools and clay vessels. “All that has come down to us … is wrapped in a thick fog,” complained one Danish scholar in 1806.

The three ages

Although some eighteenth-century collectors were content to display their finds in cabinets, others puzzled over the people who had made these artifacts. Were they hunter-gatherers and farmers, like the American Indians, or little more than animals? Had they developed more complex societies as time passed? What was needed was some way of classifying and dating the past. The first breakthrough came in 1816, when Danish archaeologist Christian Jurgensen Thomsen opened the National Museum of Antiquities in Copenhagen to the public. For years, scholars had talked of three ages – a Stone Age when people had no metals, a Bronze Age, and an Iron Age. A man with a passion for order, Thomsen took the confusing jumble of artifacts in his museum and laid them out in different rooms. In one gallery he displayed implements of the Stone Age, “when little or nothing at all was known of metals.” In another he showed those with stone and bronze but no iron, and in a third, grave finds belonging to the Iron Age.

African Phoenicians?

None other than Charles Darwin proclaimed that Africa was the cradle of humankind. Sub-Saharan Africa is indeed well known for the spectacular fossil discoveries of the Leakey family, Don Johanson, Tim White, and others. But there was far more, often discovered in places that did not feature in news headlines. Nineteenth-century African explorers found traces of ancient life in the form of rock paintings in caves and rock shelters, which were clearly linked to the ancestors of modern San hunter-gatherers of eastern and southern Africa (see Figure 9.11 on p. 232). There were other discoveries, too, notably those of a German geologist, Karl Mauch, who stumbled across the overgrown Great Zimbabwe ruins in 1871, far north of the Limpopo River, the northern frontier of South Africa (Figure 1.9). Despite the Africans living near the site, Mauch proclaimed that he had found the long-lost palace of the biblical Queen of Sheba. Mauch’s claims and those of later travelers caused great excitement in white settler circles. If Zimbabwe was indeed built by long-forgotten Phoenicians, then their colonization of African lands was justified. Controversy surrounded Zimbabwe from the beginning, with white settlers pitted against archaeologists. After years of debate, another pioneer woman archaeologist, Gertrude Caton-Thompson, settled the issue in 1929. She proved conclusively with dated imports of Chinese porcelain that Zimbabwe was about eight centuries old and entirely the work of Africans. A no-nonsense excavator, Caton-Thompson filed letters from Phoenician theorists under the category “Insane.”

Early American Archaeology

From the moment Christopher Columbus landed in the Bahamas in 1492, people speculated about the origins of the American Indians. In 1589, a Jesuit missionary named José de Acosta first proposed the general theory of their origins that provides the basis for modern thinking on the subject. He believed it was entirely possible that “small groups of savage hunters driven from their homelands by starvation or some other hardship” had taken an overland route through Asia to their present homelands with only “short stretches of navigation.” He wrote this a century and a half before Vitus Bering sailed through the Bering Strait in 1728. Controversies over the routes taken by the first Americans and the date of their arrival continue to this day. While some scholars speculated about Indian origins, others marveled at the great diversity of Native American populations. Some, like the Eskimo of the far north, were hunter-gatherers; others lived in large villages or, like the Aztec of Mexico and the Inka of Peru, in sophisticated civilizations. How could one account for this diversity, and why were some societies more complex than others? These questions still preoccupy archaeologists.

The Development of Modern Scientific Archaeology

The development of scientific archaeology and the discovery of the prehistoric past rank among the outstanding achievements of nineteenth- and twentieth-century science. The process of development began with the establishment of the antiquity of humankind and the development of the three-age system for subdividing prehistory. The crude excavations of Layard and Schliemann are part of the story, as are the pioneer efforts of Cushing and Bandelier to work from the present back into the past. But the technologically sophisticated archaeology of today can be said to stem from four major developments: the invention of modern scientific excavation techniques, the use of multidisciplinary approaches to study relationships between people and their environments, the increasing impact of science on archaeology, and the refinement of archaeological theory since the 1960s

Scientic Method

Archaeology is an integral part of history and of anthropology, the study of living peoples, but the high-tech methods of the sciences have had an ever-increasing impact on the field. Pollen analysis was one early contributor, as was aerial photography, which gave archaeologists an overhead view of the past . Perhaps the great revolution came in the 1950s, when radiocarbon dating revolutionized prehistoric chronologies, providing the first secure timescale for the last 40,000 years . Since then, the impact of science on archaeology has been universal, in everything from computers, to sophisticated ways of searching for archaeological sites through rain-forest canopies, to methods for studying prehistoric diets through the carbon isotope content of human bones. The marriage between archaeology and other sciences is now so close that both the methods and theoretical approaches of many disciplines have affected the ways archaeologists go about their work

Anthropology, archeology and history

Archaeology is an integral part of history and of anthropology, the study of living peoples, but the high-tech methods of the sciences have had an ever-increasing impact on the field. Pollen analysis was one early contributor, as was aerial photography, which gave archaeologists an overhead view of the past. Perhaps the great revolution came in the 1950s, when radiocarbon dating revolutionized prehistoric chronologies, providing the first secure timescale for the last 40,000 years. Since then, the impact of science on archaeology has been universal, in everything from computers, to sophisticated ways of searching for archaeological sites through rain-forest canopies, to methods for studying prehistoric diets through the carbon isotope content of human bones. The marriage between archaeology and other sciences is now so close that both the methods and theoretical approaches of many disciplines have affected the ways archaeologists go about their work

This enormous field is divided into four major subdisciplines. Physical (or biological) anthropology involves the study of human biological evolution and the variations among different living populations. Physical anthropologists also study the behavior of living nonhuman primates such as the chimpanzee and the gorilla, research that can suggest explanations for behavior among very early humans. Cultural (or social) anthropology deals with the analysis of human social life both past and present. It is primarily the study of human culture and how culture adapts to the environment. Among cultural anthropologists, ethnographers describe the culture, technology, and economics of living and extinct societies, and ethnologists engage in comparative studies of societies, a process that involves attempts to reconstruct general principles of human behavior. Social anthropologists analyze social organization, ways in which people organize themselves. Finally, linguistic anthropologists study human languages, a field of research that is sometimes important to the study of the past.

Archaeology and cultural anthropology are part of the same discipline. However, archaeologists typically study past societies, which usually means that they cannot speak to their informants. Excavations and site surveys yield the material remains of human behavior in the past – stone tools, pot fragments, broken animal bones, and so on – all manufactured or modified by deliberate actions possibly centuries, even millennia, ago. The archaeologist then links these material remains to actual human behavior by developing theoretical models to explain such behavior and cultural change over long periods of time. As we have said, archaeology is a unique way of studying human cultural change from the time of the earliest human beings 2.5 million years ago up to the present.

By studying ancient societies, archaeologists are also studying human history on a broad and long canvas, but with a difference. They use the material remains of the past to reconstruct the past, whereas historians use documents of all kinds. History reconstructed by archaeologists tends to be more anonymous, for archaeological chronologies rarely rival those of historians and can only occasionally pinpoint someone’s lifetime.

The Goals of Archaeology

The archaeologist has one primary and overriding priority: to preserve and conserve the material remains of the past for future generations, called stewardship. Archaeological sites and their contents are a unique record of our forebears in every part of the world. Unlike trees, this archive of the past, the archaeological record, is finite. Once disturbed or excavated, the record is gone forever. Conserving this priceless asset is our greatest responsibility to the past, whether as professional archaeologists or laypeople.

Multidisciplinary Perspectives

Archaeology is becoming ever more multidisciplinary in its perspective and in its research. More and more, a researcher working on, say, an early agricultural settlement draws on a diverse range of tools, not just the methods of archaeology unaided. Genetics alone is changing the face of human prehistory. We think that future archaeological theory will be driven by this broad, multidisciplinary perspective. The result: an increasingly eclectic body of archaeological theory.

Anthropology Career Opportunities

This is not a good time to become an academic archaeologist, for jobs are rare and the competition intense. But it is certainly an excellent moment to consider a career in government or the private sector, both of which effectively administer or carry out most archaeology in North America.

Academic Archaeology

This field is shrinking. A generation ago, almost all archaeologists were faculty members at academic institutions or worked in museums or research institutions. Purely academic archaeology still dominates both undergraduate and graduate training, and there are many people who enter graduate school with the resolute ambition of becoming a “traditional” research scholar. But growth in academic positions is now very slow. Some programs are even shrinking. /p>

as CRM projects, much of it mandated by law. This means that most (but certainly not all) academic archaeology in American universities is carried out overseas, most commonly in Europe, Mesoamerica, or the Andes. Over the years, this means that there is intense competition for the rare vacant academic jobs in well-trodden areas such as Mesoamerica, and even more applicants for academic positions in North American archaeology.

A recent study of American archaeologists found that only about 35 percent worked in academia, and the number is diminishing every year. The moral is simple: If you want to become an academic archaeologist, beware of overspecializing or of working in too-crowded fields, and have other qualifications such as CRM or computer skills at your disposal.

Museum jobs are rare, especially those that are purely research positions. A career in museum work is rewarding but hard to come by, and requires specialized training in conservation, exhibits, curation, or some other aspect of collections care in addition to academic training.

Cultural Resource Management and Public Archaeology

These offer almost open-ended opportunities to those who are seeking a career managing and saving the archaeological record. Time was when academic archaeologists looked down on their CRM colleagues and considered them second-rate intellectual citizens. The reverse has been true, too, for we have met CRM archaeologists who consider academics tweed-suited dilettantes! All this is nonsense, of course, for all archaeologists are concerned with careful stewardship of the human past. Some of the greatest opportunities in archaeology during the next century lie in the public archaeology arena and in the private sector, where the challenges are far greater than the traditional academic concerns. Adapting to this reality will lead to many changes in undergraduate and graduate curricula in coming years

So You Want to Become an Archaeologist?

If you are interested in public archaeology or CRM, you have the choice of working either in government or for some form of organization engaged in CRM activity, which can be either a nonprofit group, perhaps attached to a museum, college, or university, or a for-profit company operating entirely in the private sector. The latter come in many forms and sizes, with larger companies offering the best opportunities and career potential, especially for entry-level archaeologists. Most public archaeology activity operates through government, although a few private-sector firms also specialize in this work. If you choose to work in the public sector, you can find opportunities in many federal government agencies, among them the National Park Service and the Bureau of Land Management. Many archaeologists work for state archaeological surveys and other such organizations. Historical societies, such as that in Ohio, often employ archaeologists. Whichever career track you choose, you will need a sound background in academic archaeology and fieldwork experience, as well as suitable degrees, to follow a career in these areas. Although you may receive some background training in CRM or public archaeology during your undergraduate or graduate career, much of your training will come on the job or through specialized courses taken as part of your work. Whatever your interests in professional archaeology, we strongly advise you to obtain a background and experience in CRM fieldwork and laboratory work as part of your training.

Academic Qualifications and Graduate School

An undergraduate degree in archaeology qualifies you to work as a gofer on a CRM excavation or an academic dig and little else, except for giving you a better knowledge than most people have of the human past – not something to denigrate as a source of enlightenment and enjoyment in later life. Many people work on CRM projects for a number of years and live in motels – they even have their own informal newsletter!

Any form of permanent position in archaeology requires a minimum of an M.A. (Master of Arts), which will qualify you for many government and private-sector positions. All academic positions at research universities and, increasingly, teaching posts require a Ph.D

Typically, an M.A. in archaeology requires two years of course work and some form of field- or data-based paper and, at some institutions, an oral examination. The M.A. may have a specialized slant, such as CRM or historic preservation, but most are general degrees, which prepare you to teach at some two- or four-year colleges and universities and open you to many CRM or government opportunities. The advantage of the M.A. degree is that it gives you a broad background in archaeology, which is essential for any professional. It is the qualification of choice for many government and CRM or public archaeology positions.

The Ph.D. is a specialized research degree, which qualifies you as a faculty member to teach at a research university and at many institutions that stress teaching and not research. This is the professional “ticket” for academic archaeologists and is certainly desirable for someone entering government or the private sector, where complex research projects abound and management decisions are often needed. The typical Ph.D. program requires at least two years of seminar, course, and field training, followed by comprehensive examinations (written and often oral), M.A. papers, then a formal research proposal and a period of intensive fieldwork that, in written form, constitutes the Ph.D. dissertation. The average doctoral program takes about seven years to complete and turns you into a highly specialized professional with some teaching and research experience. If you would like to complete your research somewhat faster, consider studying in the UK, where an M.A. typically takes one year and you can complete a Ph.D. – which usually has no taught component – in three years. But after these years, you then have to find a job in a highly competitive marketplace. Yes, it is a daunting prospect to face seven years or more of genteel poverty, but the intellectual and personal rewards are considerable for someone with a true passion for archaeology and academic research.