Most of human history is not described by any written records. Writing did not exist anywhere in the world until about 5000 years ago, and only spread among a relatively small number of technologically advanced civilisations. These civilisations are, not coincidentally, the best-known; they have been open to the inquiry of historians for centuries, while archaeology has arisen only recently. Even within a civilisation that is literate at some levels, many important human practices are not officially recorded. Any knowledge of the formative early years of human civilisation - the development of agriculture, cult practices of folk religion, the rise of the first cities - must come from archaeology.

Even where written records do exist, they are invariably incomplete or biased to some extent. In many societies, literacy was restricted to the elite classes, such as the clergy or the bureaucracy of court or temple. The literacy even of an aristocracy has sometimes been restricted to deeds and contracts. The interests and world-view of elites are often quite different from the lives and interests of the masses. Any writings that were produced by people more representative of the general population were unlikely to find their way into libraries and be preserved there for posterity. Thus, written records tend to reflect the biases of the literate classes, and cannot be trusted as a sole source. The material record is nearer to a fair representation of society, though it is subject to its own inaccuracies, such as sampling bias and differential preservation.

In addition to their scientific importance, archaeological remains sometimes have political significance to descendants of the people who produced them, monetary value to collectors, or simply strong aesthetic appeal. Many people identify archaeology with the recovery of such aesthetic, religious, political or economic treasures rather than the reconstruction of past societies.

This view is often espoused in works of popular fiction, such as Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Mummy, and King Solomon's Mines where the field has become profitable fodder for entertainment. When such unrealistic subjects are treated more seriously, accusations of pseudoscience are invariably levelled at their proponents (see Pseudoarchaeology, below). However, these endeavours, real and fictional, are not representative of the modern state of archaeology.

Ideology

Much of the early history of professional archaeology was motivated by an attempt to distance itself from pseudo-archaeologists and dilettantes, and to establish itself as a science. While this battle has been won, archaeology has been and remains a cultural, gender and political battlefield. Many groups have tried to use archaeology to prove some current cultural or political point. Marxist or Marxist-influenced archaeologists in the USSR and the UK (among others) often try to prove the truth of dialectical materialism or to highlight the past (and present) role of conflict between interest groups (e.g. male vs. female, elders vs. juniors, workers vs. owners) in generating social change. Some contemporary cultural groups have tried, with varying degrees of success, to use archaeology to prove their historic right to ownership of an area of land. Many schools of archaeology have been patriarchal, assuming that in prehistory men produced most of the food by hunting, and women produced little nutrition by gathering; more recent studies have exposed the inadequacy of many of these theories. Some used the "Great Ages" theory implicit in the three-age system to argue continuous upwards progress by Western civilisation. Much contemporary archaeology is influenced by neo-Darwinian evolutionary thought, phenomenology, postmodernism, agency theory, and cognitive science.

Pseudoarchaeology

Pseudoarchaeology is an umbrella term for all activities that claim to be archaeological but in fact violate commonly accepted archaeological practices. It includes much fictional archaeological work (discussed above), as well as some actual activity. Many non-fiction authors have ignored the scientific methods of processual archaeology, or the specific critiques of it contained in Post-processualism.

An example of this type is the author, Erich von Däniken. His Chariots of the Gods (1968), together with many subsequent, lesser-known works, expounds a theory of ancient contacts between human civilisation on Earth and more technologically advanced extraterrestrial civilisations. (This theory, known as palaeocontact theory, is not exclusively Däniken's.) Works of this nature are usually marked by the renunciation of well-established theories on the basis of limited evidence, and the interpretation of evidence with a preconceived theory in mind.