Archaeology

A Brief Introduction

Brian M. Fagan, Nadia Durrani

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000440294
• Edition: 13
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

Archaeology is a jargon-free and accessible introduction to the field which details how archaeologists study the human past in all its fascinating diversity.

Now in its thirteenth edition, this classic textbook has been updated to include the latest research and new findings in the field. Reflecting the global scope of the discipline, the book has a truly international coverage of important discoveries and sites from many corners of the globe. Individual chapters examine archaeology and its history, considering the role of the archaeologist and how they discover, investigate and classify sites and artifacts. This journey through archaeology also includes a discussion of important individuals and groups, and some of the ways in which archaeologists attempt to explain major social and cultural changes in the remote past. Archaeology ends with an outline of the complex world of cultural resource management and gives invaluable advice on how to become an archaeologist.

Richly illustrated throughout, this popular and engaging textbook on archaeological methods has introduced generations of students to the captivating world of archaeology.

1Fossils, Cities, and Civilizations

The Birth of a Science

The priests supervised the hasty digging of a vast pit in the royal cemetery at the city of Ur in what is now southern Iraq over a few days in 2100 b.c. Dozens of workers carried basketloads of earth up a lengthening ramp and dumped their loads to one side. Next, in the bottom of the hole, a few masons built a stone burial chamber with a vaulted brick roof. A small procession of high officials carried the royal corpse into the empty sepulcher and laid the dead man out in all his finery. They arranged food offerings alongside the bier in gold and silver bowls. Then the dead man’s closest personal attendants knelt silently by their master. They swallowed poison and accompanied the prince into eternity. The walled-up chamber stood at the back of the empty pit, where the priests presided over a lavish funeral feast.

A long line of soldiers, courtiers, and male and female servants filed into the mat-filled burial pit. The participants wore their finest robes, most brilliant uniforms, and badges of rank. Each courtier, soldier, or servant carried a small clay cup brimming with poison. The musicians bore their lyres. The royal charioteers drove the ox-drawn wagons down the ramp to their assigned place in the bottom of the great hole. Grooms calmed the restless animals as the drivers held the reins. Everyone lined up in his or her proper place in order of precedence.

Music played. A small detachment of soldiers guarded the top of the ramp with watchful eyes. At a quiet signal, everyone in the pit raised the clay cups to their lips and swallowed poison. Then they lay down to die, each in his or her correct place. As the bodies twitched, then lay still, a few men slipped into the pit and killed the oxen with quick blows. The royal court had embarked on its long journey to the afterlife.

The priests covered the grave pit with earth and a mud-brick structure before filling the hole and access ramp with layers of clay. A sacrificial victim marked each stratum until the royal sepulcher reached ground level.

Discovery! Archaeologist Jacques de Morgan holds up the golden crown of Egyptian queen Khnemet, wife of pharaoh Senusret II (nineteenth century b.c.). This romanticized picture appeared in the Illustrated London News in 1896. (North Wind Picture Archives / Alamy)

Archaeology is the stuff dreams are made of – buried treasure, gold-laden pharaohs, and the romance of long-lost civilizations. Many people think of archaeologists as romantic adventurers, like Hollywood’s Indiana Jones. Cartoonists often depict us as eccentric scholars in pith helmets digging up inscribed tablets in the shadows of great pyramids. Popular legend would have us as absent-minded professors so deeply absorbed in ancient times that we care little for the realities of modern life. Some discoveries, such as at Ur, or that of the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun’s tomb, do indeed foster visions of adventure and romance (see the Discovery box).

British archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley reconstructed the Ur funeral from brilliant archaeological excavations made in 1926; he uncovered a layer of skeletons that seemed to be lying on a golden carpet. Woolley worked miracles of discovery under very harsh conditions. He excavated with only a handful of fellow experts and employed hundreds of workers. When the going got tough, he would hire a Euphrates River boatman to sing rhythmic boating songs with a lilting beat. Woolley cleared 2,000 commoners’ graves and sixteen royal burials in four years, using paintbrushes and knives to clean each skeleton. He lifted a queen’s head with its elaborate wig-like headdress in one piece after smothering the skull in liquid paraffin oil. Nearby, he noticed a hole in the soil, poured plaster of Paris down it, and recovered the cast of the wooden sound box of a royal lyre. Woolley reconstructed a magnificent figure of a goat from tiny fragments. He called the cemetery excavation “a jigsaw in three dimensions” and wrote of the sacrificial victims: “A blaze of colour with the crimson coats, the silver, and the gold; clearly these people were not wretched slaves killed as oxen might be killed, but persons held in honour, wearing their robes of office” (Woolley, 1982: 123). Unfortunately, Woolley’s reconstruction from three-quarters of a century ago cannot be verified: his excavation notes are inadequate for the purpose.

DISCOVERY

Tutankhamun’s Tomb, Egypt, 1922

The small party of archaeologists and onlookers stood in front of the doorway that bore the seals of the long-dead pharaoh. They had waited six long years, from 1917 to 1922, for this moment. Silently, Howard Carter pried a hole through the ancient plaster. Hot air rushed out of the small cavity and massaged his face. Carter shone a flashlight through the hole and peered into the sepulcher. Gold objects swam in front of his eyes. He was struck dumb with amazement (Figure 1.1).

Lord Carnarvon fidgeted impatiently behind him as Carter remained silent.

“What do you see?” Carnarvon asked, hoarse with excitement.

“Wonderful things,” whispered Carter as he stepped back from the doorway (Carter and Mace, 1923–1933: 63).

They soon broke down the door. In dazed amazement, Carter and Carnarvon wandered through the antechamber of the pharaoh Tutankhamun’s tomb. They fingered golden funerary beads, admired beautifully inlaid wooden chests, and examined the pharaoh’s chariots stacked against the wall. Gold was everywhere – on wooden statues, inlaid on thrones and boxes, in jewelry, even on children’s stools. Soon Tutankhamun was nicknamed the “Golden Pharaoh,” and archaeology became a domain of buried treasure and royal sepulchers.

As for Carter and Carnarvon, they immediately installed an iron door to the tomb and placed a twenty-four-hour guard at the entrance while they planned the clearance of the sepulcher. Late that night they returned on their own, chiseled a small hole in the sealed burial chamber, and slipped through to verify that the pharaoh lay undisturbed in his sarcophagus.

Figure 1.1Archaeologist Howard Carter cleans the sarcophagus of pharaoh Tutankhamun, undisturbed for more than 3,000 years.

(Everett Collection Historical / Alamy)

It took Howard Carter eight years to clear Tutankhamun’s tomb, one of the greatest archaeological discoveries ever made. Unfortunately, Lord Carnarvon died of an infected mosquito bite shortly after the discovery of the sepulcher. Inevitably, there was journalistic talk of a “curse of the pharaohs” imposed by ancient Egyptian priests on those who violated the tomb. This is complete hogwash. The fact that most people who worked on Tutankhamun lived into their eighties is conveniently forgotten.

What Is Archaeology?

Although Indiana Jones is said to be a fictional composite of several early-twentieth-century excavators, we have never met a professional archaeologist who even vaguely resembled him and only a handful who ever wore pith helmets. The heroic days when one could discover an ancient civilization in a month and several royal palaces in a week are long gone. Today’s archaeology is a sophisticated multidisciplinary science, with roots in anthropology and history.

Archaeology is the scientific study of the human past via the material (or physical) record, from the earliest times right up to the present. As such, most archaeology is part of a much wider discipline, anthropology, which studies all aspects of humanity, ancient and modern. But archaeologists are unique among scientists in that they study changes in human cultures over long periods of time.

Archaeology is the only academic discipline and profession that has an ancestry in treasure hunting. Nineteenth-century archaeology often consisted of a hasty search for lost cities or gold-laden royal burials. It was a time of high adventure and, it must be admitted, a great deal of unbridled looting. The damage to the past was incalculable – royal tombs torn apart, temples ravaged, entire city mounds reduced to dust. Fortunately, treasure hunting gave way gradually to scientific excavation and, eventually, to the sophisticated science we know today. The specialized science of today is a product not only of modern scientific innovation but also of the work of flamboyant pioneers who did indeed find lost civilizations in remote lands.

How, then, did archaeology begin? Here is an outline of some major developments and discoveries, out of hundreds of important finds.

The Beginnings of Archaeology

People have speculated about human origins and the remote past for centuries. As early as the eighth century b.c., the Greek writer Hesiod wrote that humanity had passed through five great ages of history. The earliest was an Age of Gold, when “people dwelt in ease,” the last an Age of War, when everyone worked terribly hard and experienced great sorrow. In the sixth century b.c., the Babylonian monarch Nabonidus dug deep into ancient city mounds near the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. His workmen uncovered the foundations of the temple of the goddess Ishtar at Agade near Babylon. The find, says an ancient tablet, “made the king’s heart glad and caused his countenance to brighten.”

In later centuries, the Greeks and Romans were intensely curious about their primitive ancestors, about Scythian “barbarians” living on the northern plains who drank from cups made from human skulls, and about the Britons far to the northwest who painted themselves blue.

The history of archaeology really begins in the European Renaissance, which saw quickened intellectual curiosity not only about the world beyond the narrow confines of Europe but also about the Classical civilizations. People of leisure and wealth began to follow the path of Renaissance scholars, traveling widely in Greece and Italy, studying antiquities, and collecting examples of Roman art. The same travelers were not above undertaking illicit excavation to recover statuary from ancient temples and Roman villas. Soon the cabinets of wealthy collectors (antiquarians) bulged with fine art objects, and the study of Classical lands became a major scholarly preoccupation.

In 1738, Italy’s King Charles III commissioned Spanish engineer Rocque Joaquin de Alcubierre to excavate the famed Roman city of Herculaneum, buried under deep layers of volcanic ash by an eruption of Vesuvius in a.d. 79. Alcubierre blasted and tunneled his way through rock-hard ash, tunneling sideways into underground galleries where he found jewelry and statues of well-known Herculaneans. Visitors climbed down narrow shafts to walk through the buried theater, marble-columned houses, and frescoed rooms. Hundreds of men, including prisoners, labored below ground, recovering bronze busts, texts written on papyrus scrolls, and copies of now-lost Greek masterpieces. Toxic gases, slime, and collapsing tunnels brought an end to this glorified treasure hunt.

Many antiquarians were not wealthy enough to travel to Classical lands, so they stayed at home and searched for antiquities right in their own backyards. Stonehenge on the uplands of southern England was the most famous curiosity, a place where “stones of wonderful size have been erected after the manner of doorways” (Chippindale, 1994: 21). The antiquarians indulged their insatiable curiosity by digging into burial mounds and river gravels, recovering all manner of prehistoric finds – clay vessels, stone axes and adzes, bronze implements, even occasional gold ornaments. Their digging methods were brutally crude, usually little more than a hasty pit sunk into the center of a mound to recover a skeleton and its grave goods as quickly as possible (see Figure 1.2). Some fast-moving diggers would open two or three mounds a day. The accounts of their excavations frequently include complaints that a delicate find “crumbled to dust before their eyes” – hardly surprising, considering the crude digging methods they employed.

Figure 1.2A nineteenth-century British burial mound excavation as depicted in Gentleman’s Magazine, 1840. ‘Eight barrows were examined …Most of them, contained skeletons, more or less entire, with remains of weapons in iron, bosses of shields, urns, beads, brooches, armlets, bones, amulets, and occasionally more vessels.”

Until well into the nineteenth century, archaeology was little more than a glorified treasure hunt, even a sport. Not only that, but also the record of the remote past was a complete jumble of stone and metal tools and clay vessels. “All that has come down to us … is wrapped in a thick fog,” complained one Danish scholar in 1806.

The Three Ages and the Antiquity of Humankind

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