Archaeology

I

Introduction

Archaeology (Greek arkhaiologia, or “discourse about ancient things”), the study of the human past through the material traces of it that have survived. The term “human past” needs to be stressed, because archaeologists do not, contrary to popular belief, study rocks or the remains of dinosaurs. Those are the realm of geologists and palaeontologists.

Archaeology starts at the point at which the first recognizable artefacts (tools made by humans) appear—on current evidence, that was in East Africa about 2.5 million years ago—and stretches right up to the present day, industrial archaeology, for example, being concerned with the machinery and installations of very recent times (see Industrial Revolution). Although the majority of archaeologists study the remote past (hundreds or thousands of years back in time), increasing numbers are turning to more recent historical periods and even quite modern phenomena.

The fundamental challenge of the archaeologist is to make meaningful sense of the past from what little has survived; in the great majority of sites, only a minute fraction of what originally existed has survived, the size of that fraction depending on the ravages of climate, the kind of soil in which objects were deposited, how quickly they became buried, and whether they underwent any disturbance before or after burial. The age of a site is also a critical factor. At most sites, only durable inorganic objects survive—primarily stone, pottery, and certain metals. In other words, what is known as the archaeological record is a highly incomplete, hugely distorted sample of what once existed.

II

Historical Background

Humans have probably always been curious about the traces left by their predecessors. There are many cases of ancient cultures seeming to have collected or even venerated even more ancient objects. By the Middle Ages, people in Europe were becoming intrigued by what they referred to as “magic crocks”, pots (probably cremation urns) that mysteriously emerged from the ground through erosion or the actions of burrowing animals. At the same time, humanly made flints and polished stone axes were constantly turning up as farmers ploughed their fields. According to popular belief, these were elf-shot or thunderbolts, and in fact they were venerated and collected by peoples as far afield as Africa and India, often being used as amulets or charms. In Europe, many such flints and axes found their way into the “Cabinets of Curiosities”, collections of natural and artificial objects put together by early antiquaries, and the realization slowly dawned in more enlightened minds that these “thunderbolts” and “magic crocks” were in fact the humanly made relics of ancient peoples. At the same time, discoveries of Greek and Roman sculpture were inspiring contemporary artists to study Classical forms, while wealthy families of Europe began to collect and display Classical antiquities (see Greek Art and Architecture; Roman Art and Architecture).

It was in the 16th century that, in north-western Europe, some scholars began to recognize that information about the ancient past could be derived from the study of field monuments; a whole series of antiquaries in Britain, Scandinavia, and elsewhere started to visit and describe ancient monuments. In the 17th and 18th centuries this grew into a more systematic interest, accompanied by increasing numbers of excavations. While most digs were intended merely to retrieve objects from the ground, a few pioneers treated the work like a careful dissection, noting the relationships of artefacts to different layers of soil, and realizing that, in general, objects from upper layers must be more recent than those from layers below.

It was really only in the early to mid-19th century that archaeology took over from antiquarianism, in the sense that it aspired to take a systematic and scientific approach to the vestiges of the human past. This was the period when the great antiquity of humankind was first established, through discoveries in western Europe of stone tools in association with now extinct animals, and eventually became generally accepted. By the end of the 19th century, true archaeology was already a flourishing enterprise, with many of the great figures of the early decades of the discipline hard at work in the field—Flinders Petrie in Egypt, Robert Koldewey at Babylon, Heinrich Schliemann in the Aegean, and General Pitt-Rivers in Britain. For most of these pioneers, archaeology was no longer a treasure hunt but a search for information, and a means of answering specific questions about the past.

Through the 20th century, thanks to the efforts of a succession of major figures (such as Sir Mortimer Wheeler in Britain and India, George Reisner and Leonard Woolley in the Near East, Max Uhle and Alfred Kidder in America, François Bordes and André Leroi-Gourhan in France) archaeology has become a massive, multi-disciplinary undertaking, drawing on the expertise of many fields, from geophysics and aerial photography (see Photographic Techniques), to zoology, botany, chemistry, genetics, and a whole gamut of sciences that can produce dates from archaeological material or from the sediments that enclose it.

There have been two major trends over time. First, excavation has become far slower and more painstaking: instead of cutting through archaeological layers indiscriminately with pickaxes, as in the past, each layer is now carefully shovelled, scraped, or brushed away, and the very soil is sieved so as not to lose any scrap of information that the detritus might hold. The second is that archaeologists are not only unearthing ever larger quantities of material of all kinds but that, thanks to the development of new techniques and scientific analyses, far more can be learnt from this material. Take, for instance, a single potsherd. In the past, a sherd would simply have been classed as a type, based on its shape, material, and decoration, if any. Now, however, a detailed breakdown of its raw materials can be obtained, enabling their source to be pinpointed; one can learn at what temperature it was fired, and with what material it was tempered; the pot can be directly dated by the technique of thermoluminescence, and other methods can be used to analyse the faintest traces of residues on its inner surface, and thus show what it used to contain. In short, as archaeology develops, it is doing much more with far less.

III

Dating Methods

Relative dating and historical dating were the only two methods of establishing the chronology of periods or of artefacts in the more remote past. However, such scientific methods as varve analysis, dendrochronology, and, most recently, radiocarbon dating were developed and used to provide absolute dates, albeit within varying limits of accuracy.

A

Relative Dating

Relative dating, which is based primarily on stratigraphy (the study of how layers or deposits accumulate in chronological sequence), simply involves placing objects, and by extension events and cultural periods, into an isolated historical sequence. For example, it could be shown that the Iron Age followed the Bronze Age, and that the Bronze Age was in turn preceded by the Stone Age; it could not, however, be established when these periods began and ended.

The secondary basis of relative dating is typology—the grouping of objects into types that share the same attributes, be they material, shape, or decoration, or a combination of these. As a dating method, the value of typology rests on two basic concepts: that objects from a given time and place must share a recognizable style, and that changes in style are fairly gradual. Collections of different but contemporaneous objects can also be grouped together in an assemblage, and various assemblages arranged in sequences and compared with those from other areas.

Other relative chronologies are based on the succession of climatic phases (glacials, interglacials, stadials, and interstadials) that occurred during the last ice age. Pollen from deposits also produces sequences of climatic and vegetational change, but these tend to be fairly localized. Faunal dating—based on the presence of the bones of different species of animal—was also an important method, particularly for Pleistocene archaeology (the study of the last ice age), as remains of species indicative of colder or warmer climates appear and disappear from the stratigraphy.