Archaeology: Can You Dig It?
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Do you like solving puzzles?
Do you like looking and learning from clues?
What is archaeology?
Archaeology is the study of the past through objects. Most people associate archaeology with the study of the ancient past, but archaeologists can look at materials from any period, to learn how people lived at that time. Even your garbage from yesterday would tell archaeologists a lot about you, your life and the times that you live in.
Archaeology tries to discover what people did, what people ate, what tools people used, where people moved around and traded. Archaeology is about reading the past from material remains. Not everything from the past survives. Wood, cloth, bones and other bit and pieces can rot away in certain kinds of soil. That means that archaeologists have to piece together the past from the remains that have survived.
What do archaeologists do?
Archaeologists are people who are trained to decipher the past. Archaeologists excavate (dig) sites where people used to live to find out more about them. Archaeologists don't just dig willy nilly, they dig in an ordered fashion recording what they find and where they find it (e.g. the context). This will help them to put the puzzle of the past together at the end of an excavation.
Archaeologists know how to read the soil. The ground is made up of different layers of earth. Each layer signals a different time period. By looking at what is in each layer, the archaeologists can build up an historical sequence. The archaeologists can use these layers to help them date finds (i.e. if they find a piece of pottery in a layer above a coin dated to 1716 and below a layer which contains a yoghurt pot with a sell by date of 10/1989, they know that the pottery must be from between those dates). Archaeologists can also date their finds in the lab using radiocarbon dating, dendrochronology (tree ring dating), thermoluminescence dating, etc.
There are lots of different kinds of archaeologists. Some specialise in particular periods (i.e. Pre-historic, Roman, Medieval,etc), some in regions (Egypt, Iraq, England), some in particular kinds of environments (i.e. underwater), others in particular kinds of finds ( animal bones, pottery, coins). Why not Meet the Team and find out what the archaeologists who work for Access Cambridge Archaeology specialise in.
What kind of stuff do they find?
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Archaeologists can find all kinds of stuff. This can range from Egyptian mummies,to Viking swords, to precious jewels, to sacrificed humans, to some one's toilet. Every artefact, no matter how seemingly precious or ordinary is important to an archaeologist. This is because artefacts on their own cannot tell us as much as artefacts in situ (found where they were left). Finding a garbage pit might not sound that exciting, but garbage pits can tell us what people ate, what kind of dishes they used, who they were trading with, and maybe even what kinds of clothes they wore (it depends what the people threw away). A grave, containing a skeleton surrounded by pots might tell us about who the person was when they were alive (age, sex, status, diseases that they suffered from), how they lived (their bones show that they sat in a certain position a lot or that they shot a bow regularly, etc). The pots might hint at what they believed happened to them after they died (i.e. Christians don't tend to be buried with pots, but the person must have believed in some kind of afterlife if they were buried with things they might need there). Why not find out about some of the things that we have found in our Finds Section.
Want to know more?
Check out these links:
Council for British Archaeology