Archaeology: a personal view

A personal view.

Archaeology is the study of cultural layers. What do I mean by that?

The ‘-ology‘ means ‘field of study’, from the Greek -logia. It is used to mean a body of knowledge and in today’s world, a science.

‘Archaeo-‘ means ‘ancient’, so superficially at least, archaeology means merely the study of ancient things. The modern understanding, which imposes scientific enquiry and method upon scholarship, has taken this simple definition further.

Nowadays, archaeology is a scientific field of study and ‘ancient’ is no longer applied. I was unpleasantly surprised to find that archaeologists were recently studying a public building in my home town which I always regarded as modern and I have clear recollections of being used for its original purpose. Similarly, in London last year, archaeologists excavated a street for which there were still residents extant, able to describe in detail how they had lived in these houses.

‘Cultural layers’ means the impact mankind has made on the world. A layer is a period during which mankind made an impression on the earth. This could be the remains of a camp fire made by Neanderthals, the wreck of a ship on the seabed, or a city buried by time.

A landscape typically offers a limited variety of uses for people. A desert, for example, is suited to nomads, a fertile plain to farming, and a river ford for settlement and commerce. People through the ages therefore tend to utilise the same landscape in a similar manner, with the result that often layers build up one on top of the other. Hence the concern in archaeology with ‘cultural layers’ and their excavation.

What is not archaeological? You see archaeologists on television discussing the stars, DNA, all sorts of things. It would be easy to think that archaeologists are ubiquitous, poking their noses everywhere, into every subject.

Wildlife is not produced by culture and dinosaurs pre-date humanity, so palaeontology is separate from archaeology.

I would say that a fine, ancient stone sculpture of Buddha, purchased on eBay and now sitting proudly on display at home, is likely not to be archaeological. It may be 1900 years old and therefore very ancient, but did it come from a cultural layer and was it studied in that context?

Remember that the study of cultural layers in the basis of archaeology. It is not admiring an artefact with no context, no provenance.

This brings us to the method of study.

An archaeological relationship is the position in space and by implication, in time, of an object or context with respect to another. This is determined, not by linear measurement but by determining the sequence of their deposition - which arrived before the other. The key to this is stratigraphy.

Some cultural layers are visible on the surface of the ground, as with many historical buildings and ruins, such as the Pathenon on the Athenian Acropolis, the Forum Romanum and, of course, very many buildings of all types.

Most are, however, either just one layer of many and buried by time, under later layers. Study of these requires expert excavation.

Back to the stone Buddha, removed from its context without proper study and sold on eBay. Archaeology requires study of artefacts in context, which is generally within a cultural layer. This is called stratification, because layers are deposited in a time sequence, with the oldest on the bottom and the youngest on the top. That is known as the Law of superposition.

Strata of an archaeological site

These layers, or strata, exist between the surface – the ground (or seabed) – and either virgin soil, or bedrock.

To be absolutely sure of context for artefacts (and all data), a layer must not have been tampered with before excavation. This is called a ‘sealed layer’.  Everything found in a sealed layer will have proper provenance – we can be sure from whence it came.

What’s to stop somebody, a fraud, burying something in a site, then pretending to ‘find’ it?

The first protection is that an expert eye can determine where a hole has been dug through one layer into another. Archaeologists are trained to remove one layer at a time. We would expect an archaeologist to recognise a hole dug into a layer.

A second protection is the archaeologist and the standards by which the archaeologist is judged. To be recognised by the Institute of Field Archaeologists (the professional body in Britain), personal and professional references are demanded. The titles PIfA (practitioner) and MIfA (member) carry great weight (whereas AIfA – student, or affiliate, does not).

An artefact should also have provenance, accomplished by tracing the whole history of the object up to the present.

In the last few months, a number of people have approached me with artefacts they claim would rewrite history. These are typically stones with symbols or lettering and always to prove that somebody travelled somewhere earlier than we have reliable records.  None meet the criteria described above, which is how archaeology and its practitioners tend to come under attack, as a sort of party-pooper.

Anglo-Saxon hoard shines light on Dark Ages: The sheer quantity of precious metal uncovered is unprecedented

Can you be a treasure hunter and an archaeologist? Of course ‘yes’ – it depends entirely on method.

If you use a metal detector to find an object and dig it out of the ground, then the object has no provenance, cannot be studied in context and the cultural layer would then have a hole in it. That clearly cannot be archaeology:  the object has only a monetary value and little or no scientific value, and the archaeology is damaged.

Even so, metal detectors have great value to both archaeology and archaeologists. They just have to be used correctly, to assist in studying the site, rather than destroy it. Many archaeologists use metal detectors and I invite local clubs to work with me.

Some regard ancient coins as having only a monetary value, but this is wrong. Not only are coins used to date cultural layers, much can be learned from the age distribution. At Qumran (where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found), Robert Eisenman used coin distribution to show how the site could have been used until the Third Jewish Revolt (of Simon ben Kosiba).

Long before a 'hobbit' species of human lived on Indonesia's Flores island, other human-like creatures colonised the area. A range of stone flakes were found (scale-bar: 10mm)

Archaeology and anthropology together encompass the study of humankind from the distant origins of the human species to the present-day. Anthropologists study people and primates (such as chimps), researching their cultural, physical, and social development over time. Archaeologists investigate history by finding and studying the remains and objects a society leaves behind.

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