Week Two: From the Field to the Repository

4 pillars of studying humanity

1. diversity in biological characteristics

2. human life in our more recent past

3. modern cultural characteristics

4. parallel developments in language

Long term cultural practices

archaeology focuses on …

Hermeneutics

• the science of interpretation

• back and forth between the details and the whole (continual spiral of finding information)

Archaeology as a science

1. empirical evidence

2. methodology

3. hypothesis testing

4. interdisciplinary approach

5. theoretical frameworks

question, hypothesis, background, collection and analysis, curation and publication

Research design

pedestrian survey, shove tests, LiDAR, Remote sensing, aerial photography

examples of archaeological survey types

Context

• exact position in 3D space where an artifact is found (record exact stratigraphy)

• Principal of superposition

• Crucial for understanding the information about archaeology sites and the culture

provenience

• source, origin or location of an archaeological artifact

Artifact

Anything made or altered by humans found on an archaeological site

Feature

• modifications that past people made to the earth

• human-made but not meant to be moved

Ecofact

other remains from arch sites that are not artifacts (seeds, plant and animal remains)

artifact seriation

• relative dating method in which

  assemblages or artifacts from numerous sites, in the same culture,

  are placed in chronological order