Chinese Terracotta Army Covered in Egg

Study of Chinese terracotta army, is a collection of 7,000 soldier and horse figures in the mausoleum of the country’s first emperor, was completely cover with beaten egg when it was constructed, according to German and Italian chemists who have analyzed samples from several of the figurines. According to the research team, the egg served as [...]

Most Developing subject in India- Archaeology

Archaeology specialist from both overseas and those that are teaching in the country’s universities are now frazzled that archaeology was a extremely dedicated and developing subject whose innovations and findings had to be added by readings in other associated faculties. They were discussing at an important seminar took place at K P Jayaswal Research Institute here [...]

Anglo-Saxon burial suggests pagan cult

British archaeologists have excavated a woman’s body adorned with jewelry and laid on a special bed in a site in Yorkshire. The woman’s body was buried in a grave at the center of an Anglo-Saxon cemetery.   Her jewelry includes a huge shield-shaped pendant, mounted by central blue gemstone; the pendant has scalloped-shaped carving with 11 [...]

Clay Tablet mystery deciphered

The mystery of clay tablet at the British Museum was deciphered by British scientists Today. It was believed that a huge asteroid hit the Köfels in the Austrian Alps about 5000 years ago which was the cause of the puzzling land shape. There was no proof that the asteroid was the cause for the mysterious land [...]

50th Year of Archaeology at Leicester

Academics and other old graduates of the School of Archaeology are been invited to mark 50 years of education at the University of Leicester. This year, as the University of Leicester rejoices 50 years since it established its Royal Charter, the globally commended School of Archaeology and Ancient History as well celebrates 50 years of [...]

Stonehenge - A Ritual Battle Place

LONDON: Stonehenge, which is the prehistoric monument built in several construction phases spanning at least 3000 years, was the site where Stone Age battles were fought to death, a leading archaeologist, Dennis Price has claimed. Dennis who is a Stonehenge expert and former archaeologist with Wessex Archaeology, said that he thinks a skeleton discovered in [...]

‘Nehemiah’s Wall’ Found Says Israeli Archaeologist

According to the Bible’s Book of Nehemiah, the Nehemiah’s Wall has been discovered in the ancient city of Jerusalem after a very long time by a team of archaeologists in Israel, when they were actually trying to save a tower that was in danger of collapsing. The leader of the excavation Eilat Mazar, from the [...]

Archaeology is the study of the past by finding the remains left behind by people who lived in the past. Archaeologists try to work out what the remains mean. These can include old coins, tools, houses, and even people's garbage.

To find the old remains, archaeologists often dig holes to find things that are buried. This is called fieldwork. Old things become buried over time because of things that happened later. People's garbage can pile up on top or soil can be pushed down a hill to cover older things.

Sometimes archaeologists find the bones of dead people and the things they used or the houses they lived in. Archaeologists think it is important to understand the past. Everybody uses the past to say who they are today and where they come from.

There are many kinds of archaeologists, they work in different places. Some archaeologists study old Egypt, others study old Greece or the Vikings. Archaeologists study every civilization we know about especially ones where there is no history to read. They study hominids that lived 3 000 000 years ago in Africa but also study places from the World War II.

A small group of archaeologists study human remains hidden under water. They search for sunken ships or cities that have been lost under the sea.

Stonehenge is a famous place in archaeology. Some other famous places are Angkor Watt, Machu Picchu and Great Zimbabwe. Places that archaeologists study are called sites. In most countries, governments protect important sites so that people today can visit them.

Sometimes new sites are found when new buildings are constructed. Archaeologists dig up and study these sites so that they are not lost.

Theory Of Archaeology

There is no single theory of archaeology, and even definitions are disputed. Until the mid-20th century and the introduction of technology, there was a general consensus that archaeology was closely related to both history and anthropology. Since then, elements of other disciplines such as physics, chemistry, biology, metallurgy, engineering, medicine, etc, have found an overlap, resulting in a need to revisit the fundamental ideas behind archaeology.

The first major phase in the history of archaeological theory is commonly referred to as cultural, or culture history. The product of cultural history was to group sites into distinct "cultures", to determine the geographic spread and time span of these cultures, and to reconstruct the interactions and flow of ideas between them. Cultural history, as the name suggests, was closely allied with the science of history. Cultural historians employed the normative model of culture, the principle that each culture is a set of norms governing human behaviour. Thus, cultures can be distinguished by patterns of craftsmanship; for instance, if one excavated sherd of pottery is decorated with a triangular pattern, and another sherd with a chequered pattern, they likely belong to different cultures. Such an approach naturally leads to a view of the past as a collection of different populations, classified by their differences and by their influences on each other. Changes in behaviour could be explained by diffusion whereby new ideas moved, through social and economic ties, from one culture to another.

The Australian archaeologist Vere Gordon Childe was one of the first to explore and expand this concept of the relationships between cultures especially in the context of prehistoric Europe. By the 1920s sufficient archaeological material had been excavated and studied to suggest that diffusionism was not the only mechanism through which change occurred. Influenced by the political upheaval of the inter-war period Childe then argued that revolutions had wrought major changes in past societies. He conjectured a Neolithic Revolution, which inspired people to settle and farm rather than hunt nomadically. This would have led to considerable changes in social organisation, which Childe argued led to a second Urban Revolution that created the first cities. Such macro-scale thinking was in itself revolutionary and Childe's ideas are still widely admired and respected.

In the 1960s, a number of young, primarily American archaeologists, such as Lewis Binford, rebelled against the paradigms of cultural history. They proposed a "New Archaeology", which would be more "scientific" and "anthropological". They came to see culture as a set of behavioural processes and traditions. (In time, this view gave rise to the term processual archaeology). Processualists borrowed from the exact sciences the idea of hypothesis testing and the scientific method. They believed that an archaeologist should develop one or more hypotheses about a culture under study, and conduct excavations with the intention of testing these hypotheses against fresh evidence. They had also become frustrated with the older generation's teachings through which cultures had taken precedence over the people being studied themselves. It was becoming clear, largely through the evidence of anthropology, that ethnic groups and their development were not always entirely congruent with the cultures in the archaeological record.

Archaeological Theory

In the 1980s, a new movement arose led by the British archaeologists Michael Shanks, Christopher Tilley Daniel Miller and Ian Hodder. It questioned processualism's appeals to science and impartiality by claiming that every archaeologist is in fact biased by his or her personal experience and background, and thus truly scientific archaeological work is difficult or impossible. This is especially true in archaeology where experiments (excavations) cannot possibly be repeatable by others as the scientific method dictates. Exponents of this relativistic method, called post-processual archaeology, analysed not only the material remains they excavated, but also themselves, their attitudes and opinions. The different approaches to archaeological evidence which every person brings to his or her interpretation result in different constructs of the past for each individual. The benefit of this approach has been recognised in such fields as visitor interpretation, cultural resource management and ethics in archaeology as well as fieldwork. It has also been seen to have parallels with culture history. Processualists critique it, however, as without scientfic merit. Even if you can't perfectly replicate digs, one should try to follow science as rigorously as possible, they say.

Post-processualism provided an umbrella for all those who decried the processual model of culture, which many feminist and neo-Marxist archaeologists for example believed treated people as mindless automatons and ignored their individuality.

This divergence of archaeological theory has not progressed identically in all parts of the world where archaeology is conducted. Australian archaeologists have embraced post-processualism, while those in the United States freely combine it with older approaches and methods.

Systems Theory In Archaeology

Systems theory is not native to archaeology. It originated with the work of Ludwig von Bertalanffy who attempted to construct a theory that would explain the interactions of different variables in a variety of systems, no matter what those variables actually represented. It was thought that any system could be thought of as a group of interacting parts and the relative influence of these parts followed rules which, once formulated could be used to describe the system no matter what the actual components were (Trigger, 1989:303). This theoretical framework was at one point thought to be the Rosetta Stone for Processualist archaeologists. For years they had floundered trying to find a set of theories that could be used to explain, not just describe, cultural change over time in a scientific manner.

Binford stated the problem in New Perspectives in Archaeology, identifying the Low Range Theory, the Middle Range Theory, and the Upper Range Theory. The Low Range Theory could be used to explain a specific aspect of a specific culture, such as the Archaeology of Mesoamerican Agriculture. A Middle Range Theory could describe any cultural system outside of its specific cultural context, for example, the archaeology of Agriculture. An Upper Range Theory can explain any cultural system, independent of any specifics and regardless of the nature of the variables. At the time Binford thought the Middle Range Theory may be as far as Archaeologists could ever go, but in the mid-1970s some believed that Systems Theory offered the definitive Upper Range Theory.

Archaeologist Kent Flannery did some very important and pioneering work in this field in his paper Archaeological Systems Theory and Early Mesoamerica (Flannery, 1968). Systems theory allowed archaeologists to treat the archaeological record in a completely new way. No longer did it matter what you were looking at, because you were all breaking it down to its elemental system components. Culture may be subjective, but as long as you treat it mathematically the same way as you treat a retreating glacier then unless you attack the model of Systems Theory in general then your results were undeniably objective. In other words the problem of cultural bias no longer had any meaning, unless it was a problem with Systems Theory itself. Culture was now just another natural system that could be explained in mathematical terms.

Unfortunately archaeologists found it was rarely possible to use Systems Theory in a rigorously mathematical way. While it provided a wonderful framework for describing interactions in terms of types of feedback within the system, it was rarely possible to put the quantitative values that Systems Theory requires for full use, as Flannery himself admits (Flannery, 1968:85) The result was that in the long run Systems Theory was less useful in explaining change as it was in describing it (Trigger, 1989:308). Systems Theory also eventually went on to show that predictions that a high amount of cultural regularities would be found were certainly overly optimistic during the early stages of Processual Archaeology (Trigger, 1989:312). Ironically enough this is exactly the opposite of what Processual archaeologists were hoping it would be able to do with Systems Theory. However it was not completely a disappointment and Systems Theory is still used to describe how variables inside a cultural system can interact.

If nothing else the use of Systems Theory was an important early step in the rise of the New Archaeology. It was a call against the Culture-Historical methods of the "old timers". It was "proof" that archaeology could be done scientifically and objectively and that information about past lifeways could be discovered, and that the pitfalls that seemed so overwhelming could, perhaps, be sidestepped as long as archaeologists were rigorous enough.

An Archaeology is a Multidisciplinary Science

Prehistoric research is detective job on a large scale, carried out in the field for the most part. A number of specialists are involved (including geologists, geochronologists, paleontologists, paleobotanists and prehistorians), who then carry on their research in a laboratory, close to the site, at the Tautavel European Prehistoric Research Center, but also in various labs both in France and abroad.

No single researcher can master all of the disciplines that aid in dating and reconstructing the behavior and the way of life of prehistoric peoples - it is through the work of a team, and one in which there specialists act together constantly, that the study of a site such as the Arago Cave can be carried out.

In the four decades that excavations have been carried out at Tautavel, we have combined a considerable amount of material - more than 500,000 objects - that we have coordinated, perfectly pinpointed in space, mapped and studied in the laboratory.

Geologists and sedimentologists study sediment using various methods (including granulometry, micromorphology, petrography and mineralogy), in order to determine the nature and origin of sediment in the cave and how it got there. They also study its physical, chemical and biological changes over time.

The Specialists in paleomagnetism and magnetic susceptibility can tell us to what part of the Quaternary Period the site and its contents belong. Geochronologists, for their part, launch dates by means of the uranium isotope disequilibrium method, measured using alpha spectrometry, gamma spectrometry and mass spectrometry. They also establish dating by means of thermoluminescence, electronic or paramagnetic spin resonance, and fission track dating.

Paleontologists, working on fauna, obtain information about the evolution of species, which also allows them, in function of the species' evolutionary stage, to recommend an age bracket for a layer using biostratigraphy. Archaeology, through study of bone fractures and cut marks, can reform the hunting, skinning, and butchering techniques and culinary practices of prehistoric people.

Researchers are specialized in the study of technology; typology and the function of prehistoric tools are able to reconstruct the daily activities of prehistoric people (wood working, leather working, cutting up meat, etc.) and identify various cultures.

As you can see, this extraordinary detective story allows us to penetrate the daily lives of prehistoric people, to observe their behavior and their way of life, and to grasp their level of understanding.