The Emergence of Archaeology

passion to the past

stretches back before recorded history

Thutmose IV

ordered excavations of the Spinc in the 15th century BCE

St. Helena

• Ea. 250-330 CE

• conducted excavations to find the “true cross“ near Jerusalem

• feast day is the 18th of august

Granaries of Egypt

• Egyptian pyramid = biblical Jospeh to store grain

• standing process of Christianization of cultural monuments

origins of a profession

• renaissance of Europe (14th-17th century)

  • scientific revolution and the questioning of traditional way of seeing the universe

western worldviews in 1500

• stasis (John Ray)

• Young World (Bishop James Ussher)

• stasis: never changing world

• age of the earth was considered to be young (around 6000 yrs old)

Antiquarianism

• europe

• china

• impacted by the enlightenment (late 16th century) - privileged observation and reason over belief and tradition

• important for recognizing and asking questions about an unknown past

• speculative

• lack of systematic research

historiography

the study of how archaeological knowledge has been written, including its history, theoretical evolution, and the social and cultural contexts in which it was produced

move towards systematic work

Johann Winckelmann (1717-1768)

• stylistic typology of greek sculptures that was chronologically ordered

pompeii and Herculaneum

excavations comissioned by charled of bourbon after discover in 1738

Napoleaon

expedition to egypt

• rosetta stone

  • taken from egypt during the Napoleonic wars

Jean-François Champollion

used Rosetta stone to decipher the hieroglyphic script

mound builder myths

• forgetting of native american past

• myths:

  • a lost tribe of israel

  • Vikings

  • africans

  • welsh

  • atlantis

thomas jefferson

• excavated a mound structure in Virginia

• concluded that it was built by native americans

John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood

exploration of Palenque, Mexico

• late 18th century, anticipating explorations of the Maya area by Stephens and Catherwood in the 19th century

Impact of Geology

• different colors of soil

• people wanted to know how they accumulated

Uniformatatriaism

the process which form geological deposits today are the same as those that formed deposits in the past

deep time

geological concept of deep time - the vast age of the Earth - to the human past, allowing archaeologists to study long-term processes, human- environmental interactions, and the cumulative impact of human actions over centuries and millennia

gradualism

is posits that species evolve through a slow, steady process of gradual change over long periods, rather than through sudden leaps

stratigaphy

the study of distinct layers (strata) of soil, debris, and other materials that accumulate over time at a site

charles lyell

• Principles of Geology (1830-1833)

• fused the idea of biological change to deep time

• expanded the idea of Uniformitarianism

naturalists

studies past human interactions with the natural world, using the methods of natural history

George-Louis Leclerc

• argued for biological change and for an older world that biblical narratives accounted for 

industrial revolution

buildings, machinery, artifacts

discovery of neanderthals

• first fossils found in germany 1856

Jens Worsaae

• first formally trained professionals prehistoric archaeologist

• denmark’s inspector for the conservation of Ancient Monuments (1847)

• first professor of archaeology at the university of Copenhagen (1855)

C.J. Thomsen

• recorded stratigraphic provenience

• three age system (stone, bronze, and iron)

nationalism

after 1800 the material reamins of the past became increasingly used to foment shared national identities

marxism

• historical materialism

• focuses on mode of production and call structures

• infrastructure → superstructure

• introduced late in the US

Académie Celtique

founded by Napoleon in 1804 as oart of the program to promote a unified French identity

evolution theory

uses principles of biological evolution, like variation and selection, to understand cultural changeover time

charles darwin

• proposed a mechanism to explain evolution - natural selection

• on the Origin of Species 1859

• no knowledge of genetics at that time

natural selection

• variation

  • reproductive success (natural selection i.e. enviornment)

    • these individuals increase in a population while others decrease

Galapagos finches

• studied by charles Darwin during his voyage

• finch species on different Galapagos island had different beak shapes and sizes

• each species beak adapted to its food source

  • e.g. seeds, insects, cactus flowers

• birds with beaks best suited for available food survived and reproduced more successfully, their traits became more common in later generations

• biological evolution, human evolution

peppered moth

• in england during the industrial revolution

• light colored moths were more common before pollution; dark colored moths became common after soot darkened trees

• camouflage affected survival, dark moths survived better in polluted areas bc they were less visible to predators

• environmental changes directly influenced which traits were advantageous, population coloration shifted over time

• environmental pressures

implications

• evolution: not progress

• humans: not above others

impact of evolutionary theory

providing a framework understand cultures as dynamic systems that change over time due to factors like environmental pressure, competition, and innovation

unlinear cultural theory

an outdated concept that proposed all societies progress through the same fixed stages, from savagery to barbarism to civilization

three stage system

• savagery

• barbarism

• civilization

ethnocentric

the tendency to interpret past cultures based on the standards and biases of ones own culture

Edward Tylor

• develop theories on cultural evolution, proposing that cultures developed from “primitive“ to “civilized“ states

Lewis Henry Morgan

• savagery (hunting and foraging) → barbarism (subsistence farming) → civilization

Elman Service

• studied the evolution of social and political systems

• band, tribe, chiefdom, state

  • used to categorize societies from the most to least complex

Morton Fried

• work on cultural evolution and political systems

BAE

• Bureau of American Ethnology

• promoted anthropological research particularly in western states such as new mexico and california