Archaeology

B

Archaeology of Early and Classical Civilizations

At their height, ancient civilizations centered on magnificent cities with large buildings and tombs. Some of these cities also had roads and human-made waterways. Archaeologists who study this period of the human past investigate how sufficient political and economic power developed to create and maintain early civilizations, and what factors led to the decline of such large and powerful societies.

Archaeologists who study ancient civilizations also often concentrate on particular regions. Egyptologists, for instance, study the civilization of ancient Egypt. Generations of Egyptologists have studied the numerous finds from the well-preserved tomb of the pharaoh Tutankhamun. This tomb is located in the Valley of the Kings at Thebes and was found by British archaeologist Howard Carter in 1922. Other archaeologists have recorded architectural details, paintings, and inscriptions from the many other tombs in the Valley of the Kings. These works are in danger of eroding in Egypt’s harsh desert environment. Egyptological research projects also study numerous other important sites along the Nile River valley—including the city of Memphis and the Old Kingdom mortuary complex of Giza—as well as north to the Mediterranean Sea, east to the Sinai Peninsula, and south into the Nubian Desert.

Classical archaeology examines ancient Greek and Roman civilization. During the late 1800s German-born American archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann conducted expeditions in Greece and Asia Minor, near the coasts of the Aegean Sea. Schliemann first excavated in Hisarlık, in what is now Turkey, revealing what he claimed were several distinct periods of the great city of Troy, which is described in the Iliad, an epic tale by Homer. Schliemann also excavated in Mycenae, Greece, searching for the tomb of the Greek leader Agamemnon, who campaigned against Troy in the Trojan War. Schliemann conducted quick excavations, destroyed large portions of his sites, which earned him the suspicion and anger of the Ottoman government.

Many other archaeologists followed Schliemann, conducting more methodical and scientific excavations of lands surrounding the Aegean. Recent archaeology of the classic civilizations of Europe has concentrated on the lives of common citizens. American archaeologist David Soren, for example, led a research team in the 1980s in southwestern Cyprus. Soren and his team reconstructed the events of a powerful earthquake that struck the Roman port of Kourion in ad 365. Soren’s team uncovered collapsed buildings in which entire families had been buried in their sleep.

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C

Historical Archaeology

Historical archaeology examines past cultures that used some form of writing. Although writing was invented thousands of years ago in some parts of the world, many historical archaeologists study only the past few hundred years. Historical archaeologists use written documents as part of their research, and they may work in collaboration with historians. This kind of archaeology first developed in North America and England. It continues to thrive in both of those places but is also practiced in many other parts of the world. Historical archaeologists have studied a wide variety of subjects, such as relations among settlers and Native Americans in colonial North America, Spanish religious missions in the southern United States, medieval villages in England, and early factories of the Industrial Revolution in Europe and North America.

D

Underwater Archaeology

Underwater archaeology uses special methods to study shipwrecks and other archaeological sites that lie beneath water. Archaeologists who work under water rely on sophisticated diving and excavating equipment and employ special techniques to preserve perishable materials that have been submerged for long periods. In an extensive underwater archaeological project from 1983 to 1994, a team led by American archaeologist George Bass and Turkish archaeologist Cemal Pulak recovered the cargo of a heavily laden Bronze Age ship at Uluburun, off the southern coast of Turkey. The ship, which was wrecked in a storm around 1310 bc, carried enough copper and tin ingots to forge weapons for a military regiment of several hundred people.

E

Other Fields

Some archaeologists learn skills from other disciplines to form specialized fields of study. For instance, experts in zooarchaeology study animal bones found in and around human habitations, from which much can be learned about human subsistence methods. Archaeologists who specialize in paleoethnobotany study the plants used by ancient people for food, medicine, and other purposes. Some archaeologists also have expertise in such subjects as radiocarbon dating methods or the techniques used in ancient metallurgy (the making of metals from mineral ores).

Another archaeological specialty, geoarchaeology, determines what ancient environments and landscapes were like. Geoarchaeologists use many sources of information and specialized techniques to learn about environmental conditions of the past. For example, they learn about past global and regional temperature changes by examining changes in the composition of the air, water, and sediments in large cores of the earth taken from the deep-sea bottom or the polar ice caps.

Some geoarchaeologists also have expertise in zooarchaeology or paleoethnobotany. They may use this expertise to examine millions of tiny fossil pollen grains preserved in old layers of sediment. By noting the differences in the fossils, geoarchaeologists can chart how the earth’s vegetation changed over time.

The bones of some animals, including rodents and many invertebrates, can also provide clues about ancient climates. For example, in the 1950s and 1960s American archaeologist Hallam Movius gathered such data from the Abri Pataud rockshelter of the late Ice Age in the Dordogne Valley of southwestern France. His research showed how hunter-gatherer bands living there 18,000 years ago adapted to constantly changing climatic conditions, which alternated between bitter cold and warmer periods.

Archaeologists working with botanists have also learned about prolonged drought cycles that affected the Anasazi Pueblo peoples of the North American Southwest. Because of the effects of such drought cycles on food production, these peoples abandoned large towns and dispersed into small villages about 700 years ago. Since the 1960s, American tree-ring expert Jeffrey Dean has examined wooden beams from ancient pueblos (dense villages of adobe and stone houses). Dean has used dendochronology (the study of annual growth ring sequences in tree trunks) to determine when droughts occurred and how long they lasted.

IV

The Goals of Archaeology

Modern archaeological studies have three major goals: (1) chronology, (2) reconstruction, and (3) explanation. Chronologies establish the age of excavated materials. Reconstructions are models of what past human campsites, settlements, or cities—and their environments—might have looked like, and how they might have functioned. Explanations are scientific theories about what people living in the past thought and did.

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