Technique Refresher

What is Archaeology?

Goals, Techniques, Concepts

Antiquarianism

• A term used in the 18th and 19th centuries referring to someone who collected antiquities to fill cabinets of curios, including ancient artifacts

• Although having roots in the history of the classical civilizations of the ancient world, biblical studies, and art history, there was no attempt to understand non-Western peoples or past lifeways

Was Indiana Jones an Archaeologists in the true sense?

Anthropological Archaeology

• Anthropological archaeology differs from Classical Archaeology, which focuses largely on Mediterranean and European civilizations and is more closely linked with history and art history than anthropology, and other approaches (Biblical Archaeology).

• The emphasis is on understanding and explaining human cultural behavior in the broadest sense, including the pasts of non-Western peoples.

Goals of Archaeology

• The broad goal of anthropological archaeology is to understand human cultural diversity through time and across space, particularly the processes of cultural change over relatively long time spans (centuries and millennia)

• ‘Archaeology is concerned with the full range of past human experience – how people organized themselves into social groups and exploited their surroundings; what they ate, made, and believed; how they communicated and why their societies changed’ (Feder 2000)

Specific goals of archaeology:

• Develop cultural chronologies: address questions of what, where, and when things happened in the past

• Reconstruct past lifeways: breathing life into chronologies – address questions of how some human group lived in a specific time and place

• Understand cultural processes that underlie human behavior: address questions of why cultures changed over time

The Stuff of Archaeology • Archaeologists study the tangible, material remains of human

societies – what is called material culture – this is true whether they study a contemporary community, an airline crash site, a crime scene, or an ancient city or village

• Archaeologists study material culture that is no longer being used in the dynamic context of a contemporary society, but in the static context of the archaeological record – the surviving physical remains of past human activities

• The archaeologist seeks to learn about culture from the fragmentary remains – the remnants or fragments– of human activity preserved in the archaeological record; Therefore, issues of preservation, visibility, and post-depositional disturbance loom large.

• Fortunately, human behavior is patterned, governed by guiding norms (culture); hence, there is patterning in the remains it leaves behind: patterning in the archaeological record, across time and space, is the primary concern of the archaeologist

Archaeological Objects

Archaeologists study a variety of material remains left by past human activities, the most common of which are artifacts, an object used or manufactured by humans, and un-modified remains found in archaeological deposits.

Major categories of artifacts of pre-industrial technologies include: stone, ceramics, metals, and

perishable artifacts

Human Skeletal Remains

Human skeletal remains provide another important source of information on, for instance: age, sex, pathologies, stress, general health, diet.

Environmental Archaeology

• Evidence from archaeological sites also includes a variety of “eco-facts,” including carbonized plant remains, phytoliths, and pollen, studied by paleoethnobotanists.

• Burned and unburned animal bones (faunal remains), studied by zooarchaeologists, as well as evidence incorporated in soils, studied through geo-physical and geo-chemical means by pedoarchaeologists

Archaeological Context

• Artifacts and ecofacts are studied not only as objects, but careful by understanding the relationships between artifacts, ecofacts, and other cultural materials in the natural matrix in which they occur

• The associations between things in the archaeological record is referred to as archaeological context, and includes: – Matrix – the natural deposits – Provenience – vertical and horizontal position within in matrix – Association with other finds – relationship between things

Archaeological Sites

• Patterning can be studied at various levels: – regions – sites – activity areas within sites

• The fundamental unit of archaeological analysis is the site: a discrete archaeological deposit representing,

• For instance, an ancient quarry, campsite, village, or town

Archaeological Features

• Intra-site patterning is studied with respect to the distributions of material remains across sites, particularly with respect to specific activity areas and cultural features – non-portable remnants of past human

activities, such as garbage pits, fire hearths, structures, etc.

Archaeological Finds• Accidental Finds: Iceman-1991 Austrian/Italian Alps

• Survey: The first level of an archaeological study involves survey: the identification and preliminary characterization of sites in a predetermined study area or region.

Archaeological Excavation

• More involved investigations involve systematic excavations at individual sites to more fully document spatial patterns and distributions and recover a wide range of cultural remains

Time and Dating

• Archaeologists are not only interested in the distribution of things in space – spatial patterning, but are intimately concerned with how things are positioned in time

• Archaeologists have two primary means through which to date archaeological finds:– relative and absolute dating

Relative Dating

• Relative dating refers to techniques that assign a date to things relative to other things, for instance based on their position within the stratigraphy of an archaeological deposit or relative to artifacts known from other sites and regions, a technique known as cross-dating.

Relative Dating: Stratigraphy

• Based on geological principle of superposition, whereby in layered deposits younger sediments are superimposed over older, deeper, deposits

Relative Dating: Seriation

• Seriation uses the frequency of artifacts through time to estimate age realtively.

Absolute Dating

• Absolute dating involves assigning a specific date (June 6, 1957; AD 1492) to an archaeological find:

• Calendric dating

• Radiocarbon dating

• Potassium argon dating

• dendrochronology

Absolute Dating

• Absolute dating involves assigning a specific date (June 6, 1957; AD 1492) to an archaeological find:

• Calendric dating • Dendrochronology • Radiocarbon dating • Potassium argon dating

Radiocarbon Dating (C14)• A physiochemical method for estimating the

length of time since the death of an organism, based on the decay of unstable carbon-14 isotope

• Developed originally in 1949, radiocarbon dating is based on statistical probability and, in recent decades, has been refined considerably, although all dates must be interpreted critically

Potassium-Argon

• Potassium-argon (40K/40Ar) and argon-argon dating (40Ar/39Ar)

• Ideal for dating early hominid fossils in East Africa.

• They occur in an area that was volcanically active when the fossils were deposited between one and five million years ago.

Meaning of the Archaeological Record

• Moving beyond the logistical concerns of recovering, dating, and analyzing archaeological materials, the archaeologist is faced with the formidable problem of interpretation: giving meaning to the archaeological record

Paleo-Environment

• One of the first steps in archaeological interpretation involves reconstruction of past environments, clues to which often come from geology, palynology, climatology, as well as the archaeological study of ecofacts in sites

Formation Processes

• Archaeologists must also attempt to understand the specific conditions which led to the formation of sites: formation processes

• Consideration must be given to both the cultural and natural factors of deposition and post-depositional disturbance

Analogy: Using modern reconstruction to interpret past behavior

• Ultimately, interpretations of what archaeological finds signify, in terms of past cultural patterns, involves analogy

• The primary source of analogy is the ethnography of living groups

• Two varieties: direct historical (homology) and general analogy

Analogy: Ethnoarchaeology

• The study of contemporary peoples to understand cultural processes that are relevant to understanding past cultures

Historical Approaches: Direct historical analogy and ethnoarchaeology

• Doing ethnography and archaeology on historically related social formations and linking them

• Text-aided interpretation of archaeological deposits (combining documentary and archaeological analyses)

• Often promotes a general view that things must be understood in their sociohistorical context

Cross-cultural Approaches

• Comparative approaches (general analogy) to the study of human societies that seek to reveal commonalities or generalities that exist between cultures

• In archaeology, promotes the view that regularities or generalities between cultures can provide models for understanding past societies: – i.e., hunter-gatherers live in small, mobile

communties