Archaeology

• 1. Introduction

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  Archaeology begins, oddly enough, with a king who lived 2,500 years ago. Around 550 BC in Ancient Mesopotamia, the ruler Nabonidus dug into the ground searching for the foundation deposits of ancient temples. He found one left by Naram-Sin, an Akkadian ruler who had reigned around 2200 BC. Nabonidus even tried to date the artifact, missing the true age by about 1,500 years. For that effort he is remembered as the first archaeologist.

  The field he unknowingly opened studies human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. That record is made of artifacts, architecture, biofacts, sites, and entire cultural landscapes. It reaches from the first stone tools at Lomekwi in East Africa, made 3.3 million years ago, up to recent decades. Over 99% of the human past left no writing at all. So who first turned curiosity about old objects into a science? How do you read a buried town when no one wrote its story down? And why do the dead, the looted, and the descendant communities now sit at the center of every dig?

• 2. From Antiquarians To Method

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  Richard Colt Hoare, an 18th century antiquary, lived by a blunt motto: "We speak from facts, not theory." That spirit defined antiquarianism, the older multi-disciplinary pursuit that studied ancient artifacts, manuscripts, and historical sites. The word archaeology comes from the Greek arkhaios, meaning ancient, joined to logia, meaning study. Tentative steps toward systematizing it as a science came during the Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries.

  Cyriacus of Ancona, a restlessly itinerant Italian humanist, earned the title pater antiquitatis, father of antiquity. In the fifteenth century he travelled across Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean, recording the Parthenon, Delphi, the Egyptian pyramids, and hieroglyphics in a six-volume diary called Commentaria. Others sharpened the descriptive habit. Flavio Biondo mapped the ruins of ancient Rome in the early 15th century. John Leland and William Camden surveyed the English countryside in the 16th century, drawing and interpreting the monuments they met.

  Not all early instances rose in Europe. In Imperial China during the Song dynasty, between 960 and 1279, Ouyang Xiu and Zhao Mingcheng built the tradition of Chinese epigraphy from ancient bronze inscriptions. In a book published in 1088, Shen Kuo scolded scholars who credited bronze vessels to famous sages rather than artisan commoners. In twelfth-century India, the scholar Kalhana examined manuscripts, inscriptions, coins, and architecture. His Rajatarangini, completed around 1150, ranks among the first historical works of India.

  The vocabulary itself shifted slowly. The Oxford English Dictionary first cites "archaeologist" in 1824. "Archaeology" appears from 1607 meaning ancient history broadly, with its narrow modern sense surfacing only in 1837. Yet Jacob Spon had already offered one of the earliest definitions of archaeologia back in 1685, in the preface to his collection of Roman inscriptions, Miscellanea eruditae antiquitatis.

• 3. The Birth Of Excavation

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  John Aubrey, who lived from 1626 to 1697, walked southern England recording megalithic and other field monuments, among them Stonehenge. He was ahead of his time, even charting the stylistic evolution of handwriting, medieval architecture, costume, and shield shapes. Excavation as a public event arrived elsewhere. The Spanish military engineer Roque Joaquin de Alcubierre dug into Pompeii and Herculaneum, towns buried by ash when Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD 79. Work began at Herculaneum in 1738 and at Pompeii in 1748. Whole towns emerged, complete with utensils and human shapes, and the find stunned Europe.

  Early digging was haphazard. Stratification and context were overlooked entirely. In the mid-18th century the German scholar Johann Joachim Winckelmann settled in Rome, studied its antiquities, and visited the excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum. He was among the first to separate Greek art into periods and styles. He has been called both "The prophet and founding hero of modern archaeology" and the father of art history.

  William Cunnington, who lived from 1754 to 1810, has been called the father of archaeological excavation. From around 1798 he dug in Wiltshire, funded by Sir Richard Colt Hoare, making meticulous records of Neolithic and Bronze Age barrows. The categories he coined are still used today. In 1784 a future U.S. President, Thomas Jefferson, ran his own excavation using the trench method on Native American burial mounds in Virginia. The "Moundbuilders" question prompted his dig. His careful methods led him to conclude that ancestors of the Native Americans of his time could well have raised those mounds.

  Stratigraphy gave the 19th century one of its great achievements. The idea of overlapping strata tracing back to successive periods was borrowed from geologists like William Smith, James Hutton, and Charles Lyell. Jacques Boucher de Perthes and Christian Jurgensen Thomsen began arranging artifacts in chronological order.

• 4. The Fathers Of A Science

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  Augustus Pitt Rivers, an army officer and ethnologist, started digging on his English land in the 1880s and is widely regarded as the first scientific archaeologist. He arranged artifacts by type, and within types by chronology, a system designed to highlight evolutionary trends and crucial for dating. His most important rule was simple. Every artifact, not just the beautiful or unique ones, must be collected and catalogued.

  William Flinders Petrie may also claim the title Father of Archaeology. He believed "the true line of research lies in the noting and comparison of the smallest details." Working in Egypt and later Palestine, he built a system of dating layers from pottery and ceramic finds that transformed the chronology of Egyptology. He was the first to scientifically investigate the Great Pyramid, during the 1880s. He trained a generation of Egyptologists, including Howard Carter, who later found the tomb of the 14th-century BC pharaoh Tutankhamun.

  Heinrich Schliemann, Frank Calvert, and Wilhelm Dorpfeld dug at Hissarlik, the site of ancient Troy, in the 1870s. Their stratigraphic excavation, the first to win wide public popularity, distinguished nine cities layered on one another from prehistory to the Hellenistic period. At Knossos in Crete, Sir Arthur Evans revealed the ancient Minoan civilization. Sir Mortimer Wheeler then carried the discipline forward in the 1920s and 1930s, developing the grid system of excavation. His student Kathleen Kenyon refined it further.

• 5. Reading What Was Never Written

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  Over 99% of human development happened within prehistoric cultures that left no writing. The first stone tools, the Oldowan Industry, date back about 2.5 million years. Without written sources, archaeology is the only way to understand those societies. It illuminates the evolution of humanity during the Paleolithic, when hominins developed from australopithecines in Africa into modern Homo sapiens. It also tracks the control of fire, stone tools, metallurgy, the beginnings of religion, and the creation of agriculture.

  Writing as we know it did not appear until the 4th millennium BC, and only in a few technologically advanced civilizations. Homo sapiens, by contrast, has existed for at least 200,000 years, and other Homo species for millions. Even within literate societies the records mislead. Literacy was often restricted to elites, the clergy or court bureaucracy, whose interests differed sharply from those of ordinary people. Written records carry the biases of a small fraction of any population, so they cannot be trusted as a sole source.

  Historical archaeology studies cultures that did leave writing. In medieval Europe, archaeologists have explored the illicit burial of unbaptized children noted in texts and cemeteries. In downtown New York City, they exhumed the 18th century remains of the African Burial Ground. As remnants of the WWII Siegfried Line were destroyed, emergency digs recorded details of its construction.

• 6. Tools Of The Trade

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  Lidar fires a laser pulse and times the light that bounces back, using the speed of light to calculate distance to an object. It belongs to a family of remote sensing tools, split between passive instruments that detect natural energy and active ones that emit their own. Satellite imagery is passive. A laser altimeter measures the height of its platform above a surface to map topography.

  Drones have changed survey work worldwide, speeding it up and guarding sites from squatters, builders, and miners. In Peru, small drones built three-dimensional models in days and weeks rather than months and years. Some cost as little as 650 pounds. In 2013 they flew over at least six Peruvian sites, including the colonial Andean town Machu Llacta, 4000 metres above sea level, though altitude troubled them in the Andes. Jeffrey Quilter, an archaeologist with Harvard University, explained the reach: "You can go up three metres and photograph a room, 300 metres and photograph a site, or you can go up 3,000 metres and photograph the entire valley." In September 2014, drones weighing about 5 kg mapped the above-ground ruins of the Greek city of Aphrodisias.

  Gordon Willey pioneered regional settlement pattern survey in 1949 in the Viru Valley of coastal Peru. Surface survey combs an area on foot for visible features, while aerial survey reads buried structures through plant growth and shifting shadows. Geophysical survey can be the most effective way to see underground. Magnetometers detect minute deviations in the Earth's magnetic field caused by iron artifacts, kilns, and even ditches and middens, while resistivity meters map features by how they conduct electricity.

  Excavation remains the primary source of data and the most expensive phase. A feature such as a pit or ditch has two parts, the cut and the fill, each given consecutive numbers for recording. Because excavation destroys what it studies, very few sites are dug in their entirety. Post-excavation analysis is usually the most time-consuming part, and final reports for major sites can take years to publish.

• 7. Theories And Specialisms

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  Cultural-historical archaeology was the first theoretical approach, practiced when the field developed in the late 19th century. It aimed to explain why cultures changed and adapted, emphasizing historical particularism. In the 1960s, American archaeologists like Lewis Binford and Kent Flannery rebelled against it, proposing a "New Archaeology" built on hypothesis testing, which became known as processual archaeology. In the 1980s, British archaeologists Michael Shanks, Christopher Tilley, Daniel Miller, and Ian Hodder launched post-processual archaeology, questioning processualism's claims to scientific impartiality and stressing self-critical reflexivity.

  Ethnoarchaeology studies living people to help interpret the archaeological record, first gaining prominence during the processual movement of the 1960s. Experimental archaeology applies the experimental method to processes that create and impact the record. Archaeometry systematizes archaeological measurement, drawing on physics, chemistry, and engineering, often to determine the chemical composition of remains. Digital archaeology applies information technology, building virtual 3D models such as the throne room of an Assyrian palace, and checking whether structures align with astronomical events like the sun's position at a solstice.

  Cultural resource management, also called cultural heritage management in the UK, accounts for most archaeological research in the US and much of western Europe. In the US it grew after the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, which requires federal projects to consider their effects on archaeological sites. In the UK, since 1990, PPG 16 has required planners to weigh archaeology when approving development, with mitigation paid for by the developer. Some of the largest UK projects, including the A14 road scheme and HS2, arose this way. Once dismissed as a backwater for people with "strong backs and weak minds," CRM is now staffed by advanced-degree workers with strong field experience.

• 8. The Dead And The Descendants

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  Kennewick Man crystallized a conflict that runs through American archaeology, between respect for sacred burial sites and the academic benefit of studying them. For years, archaeologists dug Indian burial grounds, removing remains to storage, sometimes archiving them without thorough study. The West views time as linear, while for many natives it is cyclic, and disturbing the past can carry consequences in the present. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 sought a compromise by limiting research institutions' right to possess human remains.

  On the 21st of June 2005, elders from the 10 Algonquian nations near Ottawa gathered on the Kitigan Zibi reservation near Maniwaki, Quebec, to inter ancestral remains and burial goods, some dating back 6,000 years. The remains, excavated from sites including Morrison and the Allumette Islands, had been part of the Canadian Museum of Civilization's collection for decades. Reburied in red cedar and birch bark boxes lined with cedar chips and pelts, nearly 80 boxes now lie beneath an inconspicuous rock mound, beyond further scientific study.

  African diaspora archaeology studies people forcibly transported through the Atlantic, Trans-Saharan, and Indian Ocean slave trades, and their descendants. In the 1990s, anthropologist Michael Blakey directed research at the New York African Burial Ground Project, building a protocol for collaborating with the African-descendant community. The Society of Black Archaeologists formed in 2011, co-founded by Ayana Omilade Flewellen and Justin Dunnavant. Eight days after becoming a republic on the 30th of November 2021, Barbados announced the Newton Enslaved Burial Ground Memorial, with Ghanaian-British architect David Adjaye leading a project to commemorate an estimated 570 West Africans buried in unmarked graves.

  Looting threatens all of this. Many Egyptian pharaohs' tombs were robbed in antiquity, and commercial demand still feeds the illicit antiquities trade. In 1937, W. F. Hodge of the Southwest Museum announced it would no longer accept collections from looted contexts. The first conviction for transporting illegally removed artifacts under the Archaeological Resources Protection Act came in 1992, in Indiana. As glaciers and ice patches melt with rising temperatures, long-buried artifacts and bodies are emerging, opening the new field of glacial archaeology.