Disciplines in Archeology

Disciplines in Archaeology

  • Archaeology uses the scientific method: posing questions, forming hypotheses, selecting dig sites using scientific sampling, observing, recording, categorizing, and interpreting findings, and sharing results.

Underwater Archaeology

  • Involves recovering information from submerged artifacts and sites to interpret past human cultures.

  • Heavily influenced by anthropology, history, and multidisciplinary fields like material cultural analysis, geography/GIS, and oceanography.

  • Studies materials at the bottom of bodies of water like lakes, rivers, and oceans including prehistoric and historic artifacts, such as shipwrecks.

  • Famous Shipwrecks:

    1. SS Edmund Fitzgerald

    2. HMHS Britannic

    3. HMS Curacoa

    4. The fleet of Kublai Khan

    5. The Spanish Armada

    6. RMS Titanic

    7. RMS Empress of Ireland

    8. MS Estonia

    9. The Andrea Doria

    10. HMS Victory

  • Irako is the most famous location for wreck diving in the Philippines. In 1944, a Japanese supply fleet was sunk, including freighters, a seaplane tender, and gunboats.

  • Includes submerged hunt camps and portions of ancient cities like Alexandria, Egypt.

Prehistoric Archaeology

  • Deals with civilizations that did not develop writing.

  • Artifacts provide the only clues about their lives such as arrowheads found from the Clovis people which have been dated back to 13,000 years ago.

  • Paleopathology: the study of disease in ancient cultures through fossils, mummified tissue, skeletal remains, and coprolites.

Historic Archaeology

  • Deals with places, things, and issues from the past or present using written records and oral traditions to contextualize cultural material.

  • The Rosetta Stone: discovered in 1799, was crucial for deciphering hieroglyphics and understanding Egyptian history because it contained same decree in hieroglyphic, demotic, and Greek.

  • The Dead Sea Scrolls: collection of 900 documents found near Qumran, West Bank, include texts from the Hebrew Bible and other religious writings that increase our knowledge of the development of Judaism and Christianity.

  • The Copper Scroll: lists dozens of gold and silver caches. The text uses Hebrew and Greek letters chiseled onto metal sheets to describes 64 underground hiding places around Israel.

Industrial Archaeology

  • Studies materials created or used after the Industrial Revolution of the 1700s and 1800s in Western Europe and North America.

  • Ironbridge Gorge in Shropshire, England, is an important site for tracing the area’s economic development from agriculture to manufacturing and trade.

Other Disciplines

  • Ethnoarchaeology: study of how people use and organize objects today to understand past tool use (e.g., studying modern San culture to understand ancient San tools).

  • Environmental Archaeology: understanding environmental conditions that influenced people in the past; also known as human paleoecology (e.g., expansion of Taquara/Itararé people linked to the expansion of the evergreen forest in Brazil).

  • Experimental Archaeology: replicating techniques and processes used to create or use objects in the past (e.g., Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki raft).

  • Forensic Archeology: excavating remains of victims of murder or genocide in conflict areas; supports or questions DNA evidence. The forensic archaeologists helped establish that the Khmer Rouge used starvation and overwork, as well as direct killing, to silence opponents of the regime.

  • Cultural Archaeology: defines past societies and cultural groups based on material culture; aims to distinguish ethnic categories. This form of archaeology focus on how a past societies are different based on their material possessions.

Digging and Excavations

  • Archaeologists use scientific sampling techniques and tools such as brushes, hand shovels, and trowels to excavate dig sites.

  • They document each step with notes, photographs, audio, and video recordings.

  • GPS and GIS are used to map the location of features with precision.

  • Natural processes like floods, volcanic eruptions, and glaciers can preserve materials (e.g., the "Iceman" preserved in an Alpine glacier for over 5,300 years).

  • The ship Vasa was preserved using polyethylene glycol (PEG) by spraying it for 17 years and allowing it to dry for nine years.

Uncovered Artifacts

  • Each step of the process is recorded with photos, drawings, and notes. Cleaned, labeled, and classified. Fragile artifacts are sent to conservators and then to a lab for analysis.

Building Archaeology

  • Study of physical evidence of the human past, examination of buildings to tell a structure's history, its functions, and its fabric.

  • Reconstructs the history of buildings using direct observations, materials, building techniques, continuity/gaps, demolition tracks, and traces of historical periods.

Stratigraphy

  • Tool used to reconstruct the sequence of constructive and destructive actions that produced the handwork how it exists today.

  • Representation technique that is based on the "stratigraphical unit" (S.U.) concept, i.e. a part of the building that was built as a unit, that is the result of a single building action.

Chrono-typology

  • Dating method based on architectural features during historical periods.

Dendrochronology

  • Dating and analysis of annual growth layers, or tree rings, in woody trees and shrubs.

Rectified Photography

  • Method of recording a high level of detail on flat objects while removing effects of distortion.

  • Used for object interpretation, measurement, identifying defects, and creating enhanced visualizations.

Photogrammetry

  • Obtaining information through recording, measuring, and interpreting photographic images.

  • Gathers measurements and data about an object by analyzing the change in position from two different images.

Archeology of the Philippines

  • H. Otley Beyer: Father of Philippine Anthropology

  • Robert Fox: Head in Anthropology- National Museum of the Philippines, discovered Pleistocene Human Fossils (Tabon Cave Complex)

  • Alfredo Evangelista: Master's Degree, University of Chicago under the Fulbright Program

  • F. Landa Jocano: Anthropologist Educator Author.

  • Known Sites: Tabon Cave, Lapuz Lapuz Cave, Singhapala

  • Artifacts Found: Callao Man, Tabon Man, Kabayan Mummies, Yawning Jarlet, Oton Death Mask, Celadon Jar, Calatagan Pot

Archaeological Sites in the Colonial Period

  • Magellan's Cross in Cebu City

  • Santo Nino de Cebu

  • Black Nazarene

  • The Boxer Codex from circa 1950-97; hand drawn paintings

  • Doctrina Christiana by Fray Juan de Plasencia is the earliest printed book in the Philippines

  • The Murillo Map

Colonial Infrastructures and Heritage Sites

  • Spanish settlements were structured around a plaza with major Spanish structures for evangelization and supervision.

  • Fort Santiago: Built in 1593 by Miguel López de Legazpi in Intramuros, Manila; served as a defense fortress.

  • Fort Capul: Designed for defense against Moro raiders, with a lighthouse; the only town in Northern Samar with the Inabaknon language.

  • Ruins of Old Tanauan Church: Located on the lakeshore of Talisay, Batangas; site of the first stone church of Tanauan before relocation in 1754.

  • Cagsawa Ruins: Remnants of the 16th-century Franciscan Cagsawa Church, destroyed by the 1814 Mayon Volcano eruption.

  • City of Vigan: A UNESCO World Heritage Site on the western coast of Luzon, known for its preserved Spanish colonial town with a fusion of Philippine, Oriental, and Spanish styles; contains Calle Crisologo, Plaza Salcedo, Plaza Burgos, and the Vigan Cathedral.

  • Bantay Bell Tower: Nearby Vigan built in 1591 served as a watchtower before being turned into a bell tower.

Heritage Sites during the American Colonial Period

  • The U.S. colonized the Philippines for 48 years (1898-1946)

  • El Fraile Island, 1909-1914, “the concrete battleship” Fort Drum.

  • Malinta Tunnel, 1932-1934, complex on Corregidor Island.

  • Ruins of Corregidor Island was identified as a strategic defense location.

Republic Act No.10066

  • September 19, 1985, ratification of the convention

  • UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the Philippines include:

    1. Baroque Churches in the Philippines

    2. Tubattaha Reefs National Park

    3. Rice Terraces of the Philippine Cordilleras

    4. Historic City of Vigan

    5. Puerto Princesa Subterranean River National Park

    6. Mount Hamiguitan Range Wildlife Sanctuary

  • Baroque Churches in the Philippines:

    1. San Agustin Church Manila

    2. Santa Maria Church, Ilocos Sur

    3. Paoay Church, Ilocos Norte

    4. Miag-ao Church, Iloilo