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What is Archaeology?

What is Archaeology?. Photo from my work at Mammoth Cave National Park. What do you think of when you hear the word: archaeology?. For many of us, we might think of the images movies, books, and video games have given us about archaeology is and what archaeologists do.

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What is Archaeology?

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  1. What is Archaeology? Photo from my work at Mammoth Cave National Park.

  2. What do you think of when you hear the word: archaeology? • For many of us, we might think of the images movies, books, and video games have given us about archaeology is and what archaeologists do. • There are many misconceptions about archaeology.

  3. Archaeologists DO NOT: • Study dinosaurs. • Just look for pretty or valuable objects. • Just pick up artifacts. • Spend all their time just digging. • Buy, sell, or put a price on artifacts.

  4. So what is archaeology? The systematic, scientific recovery and analysis of artifacts in order to answer questions about past human culture and behavior. Photos from my work at Mammoth Cave National Park.

  5. Artifact: Any item resulting from human activity.

  6. Question-based: Archaeologists study artifacts in order to answer questions about how humans lived. Did they have religion? Did they have disease or sickness? What tools did they use? What did they eat? When did they live? Did they hunt or farm? Did they have laws? Where did they live? Who took care of the children? Did they have writing? Did they have art? How large was the group?

  7. Culture: Any learned behavior that is shared with others.

  8. So what is Archaeology? • More simply it is the study of artifacts left behind to learn about people from the past. OR People and their Garbage

  9. Prehistoric Archaeology Before writing. Historical Archaeology Document/writing assisted Classical Archaeology Greek and Roman Biblical Archaeology Underwater Archaeology Shipwrecks or anything else under water. Industrial Archaeology Industrial Revolution and other modern structures Egyptologists, Mayanists, Assyriologists Study of specific civilizations or time periods. Cultural Resource Management Management and assesment of significant cultural resources. Types of Archaeology PowerPoint created by Amy J McCray, 2005, updated 2007.

  10. Archaeologists are like a CSI in a criminal investigation. • They only have the evidence at the scene to understand what happened. • So let’s try being history detectives again. • On your paper take notes about your ideas of who the person in our investigation might be.

  11. Historical Detectives. • A bag has been found. • It contained various items. • We can use these items to discover what the owner is like. • This is inferring USING EVIDENCE FROM ARTIFACTS.

  12. This Is The First Object. • What is it? • Where is it? • Who might this be? • Writing on the back says “Write back soon, love Angelina.” • There was part of a letter with it. Here is what is says…

  13. Dear Patty, Thanks for your letter. My teacher has arranged pen pals for all of the class. I hope one day we can meet each other but it is long way from Mexico City to Chicago. Perhaps we could meet in the middle…..

  14. So, What Do We Know So Far? What clues have we had? Can we start to make assumptions? Who might the owner be?

  15. Here Is The Next Object. • This is a pin /badge. • What is it? • Why would you have one? • What does this tell you about the owner?

  16. What Does This Object Tell Us? • Do you know what it is? • What does this tell us about the person’s character? • Remember we are only making ASSUMPTIONS! • These may not be FACTS!

  17. The Final Item in the Bag is.. • What is this? • IS it what you think it is? • What does it tell us about the owner of the bag? • Does the rest of the information help us to decide what it might be for?

  18. Time to decide..put all the clues together…. Be a historical detective. Describe who the bag belongs to.

  19. Did everyone agree about who owned this bag? • What were some of the alternate explanations that we can think of that could give us another view of the person who owned the bag? • Does this tell us everything about this person?

  20. We all are biased. • Each of us knows about different things, comes from different places, and have different experiences. • These differences create biases that can shade our perspectives of an item, event, person, etc. • Archaeologists, scientists, historians also have to be careful of bias clouding their interpretation of the past. • And sometimes, even when we are trying very hard, we misinterpret what objects are and what they were used for.

  21. Howard Carson discovers an ancient Yank tomb.

  22. The tomb was filled with wonderful things!

  23. Artist reconstruction of the tomb’s contents.

  24. The inner chamber of the tomb contained a white sarcophagus.

  25. Archaeology • Just as in history or even in sports, our perspective of archaeology can be biased because of who we are and what we know. • But this doesn’t mean we can not trust the findings of archaeology. • We accept the version of history that archaeology presents to us until we find evidence that causes us to reexamine what we think we know about the past. Here is one example of changing our ideas about the past.

  26. References • Applegate, Darlene. “Anth 130” In-class notes. Western Kentucky University, Spring 2004. • Google Images. 1 December 2005. <http://www.google.com/imghp?hl=en&tab=wi&q=>

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