2-22-06 What do archaeologists do?

Archaeology is the comparative and holistic study of past culture and behavior, conducted in terms of material things.

Archaeology deals with artifacts and uses them to reach 3 goals:

1. we can take a group of artifacts and define an archaeological culture.
2. find out about these people’s behavior through the things they left behind.
3. explain why human cultures and behaviors have changed over time.

Archaeologists selectively review the archaeological record to focus on three major issues:

1. the origins of culture itself
2. what happened almost 12,000 years ago to cause humans to start domesticating plants and animals
3. why people started to live in cities about 6000 years ago

The major goals of archaeology are:

1. Determining chronology
1. Relative age: determined by sequence of stratification (the law of superposition)
2. Chronometric age (absolute time): determined by condition, style, dating techniques (e.g. radiocarbon)
2. Constructing culture history
1. An ethnographic culture is present, interactive
2. An archaeological culture is created from categorizing and characterizing material remains from archaeological sites. No necessary correlation to an ethnographic culture.
3. Reconstructing past lifeways
1. Focuses on behavior: how artifacts were used, and/or the symbolic aspects they may have had, and what this tells us about human behavior in that time/place. May use ethnographic analogy to reconstruct uses/meanings of artifacts.
2. Interested in reconstructing human social institutions.
4. Understanding culture change
1. How does culture A change to culture B?
2. Ideas may change through diffusion or migration; behaviors may adapt to changes in environment; ideological or socioeconomic conflict may bring about change.

The archaeological record is about material remains: objects (artifacts are objects made by humans). It is determined by four contexts:

1. Spatial context: where objects are placed in relation to one another and the surrounding physical environment.
2. Systemic context: the active use of artifacts
1. Pre-depositional context: how objects were made (and how raw materials for them were acquired), and how they were used and reused.
2. Depositional context: how objects were discarded, lost, abandoned, or disposed of.
3. Archaeological context: burial, deterioration, and exposure are all natural forces that can change the archaeological context. Frozen, anaerobic, or very dry environments can preserve objects. Only in special circumstances (e.g. Pompeii) do we find objects in the same context as they were used and/or discarded.
4. Recovery context: how archaeologists come to observe and recover objects from their archaeological context.
1. Number of episodes: the number of times something is added
2. Rate of episodes: how much time passes in between additions
3. Matrix: the environment