Читать книгу Anthropology For Dummies - Cameron M. Smith - Страница 47

Archaeology studies ancient societies through their material remains, which you may know as artifacts. These artifacts number in the billions and pepper the globe, each a piece to the puzzle of our ancestors’ lives. Every arrowhead, every stone net-weight, every clay pipe-stem and shard of glass, every mud brick and gnawed bone and corroding sword have something to tell about the lives of past human societies, and the archaeologists’ job is to fit the puzzle back together.

Fitting the puzzle back together is a great challenge. Archaeology isn’t that technically difficult or even expensive (compared, to, say, nuclear physics or chemistry), but it takes a long time to do well. Because artifacts are so numerous, and archaeologists are eager to extract as much information from each object as possible, excavations of archaeological sites can take years, even generations.

Archaeological research has many goals but normally adheres to some common principles:

 Establishing chronologies, or sequences of events in the ancient world, such as dating when things first happened (for example, the use of writing, farming, or fire)

 Establishing a spatial understanding of the chronicled events, such as where the first writing, farming, or use of the wheel occurred, and what that can reveal about their invention

 Understanding the evolution of ancient cultures through time so as to better understand why certain societies survived and others collapsed, or answer other large questions, such as what prompted the change from small-scale chiefdoms to large-scale civilizations

Archaeologists establish chronologies by carefully noting the age of artifacts recovered in excavations. They must carry excavations out carefully so they can record the exact position of artifacts; this care is critical to understanding the artifacts’ ages for many reasons (which you can read more about in Chapter 5).

Carefully recording where artifacts are found is another way to achieve spatial understanding. If a stone bowl came from a cave in southern Mexico, you don’t want to confuse it with one found in northern Peru (they’re both from the Western Hemisphere, but they were made by quite different cultures). This obvious logic extends all the way down to the centimeter, such that archaeologists work long hours carefully recovering artifacts with whisk brooms and other delicate instruments.