Archaeology: The Basics

Brian M. Fagan, Nadia Durrani

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032024813
• eBook ISBN: 9781000530780
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Archaeology: The Basics, rewritten for this fourth edition, is a short, engaging book that takes the reader on a journey through the fascinating world of archaeology and archaeologists.

Written in a non-technical style by two experienced archaeologists and writers about the past, the book begins by introducing archaeology as a unique way of studying the entire span of the human past from our origins some six million years ago to today. The authors stress that archaeology is a global study of human biological and cultural diversity. After a brief look at early archaeological discoveries, they introduce today's multidisciplinary archaeology. Then they go on to describe the archaeological record, the archives of the past and the importance of contexts of time and space. How do we find archaeological sites and how do we explore them? Two chapters laced with examples examine these questions. Later chapters describe ancient technologies and how we study them, and the all-important subject of changing ancient environments and climate change. Zooarchaeology, flotation methods, and other ways of reconstructing ancient diet and subsistence lead us into the study of changing settlement patterns across the landscape. Next, they visit the people of the past, either as individuals or groups, calling on bioarchaeology to assist them. Two chapters discuss ancient culture change and the remarkable diversity of ancient societies, and they are followed by an exploration of the spiritual realm, the exploration of the intangible. The final chapter looks at the importance of archaeology in today's world. Rich in numerous examples and contemporary thinking about archaeology, this book tries to answer an important question: What does archaeology tell us about ourselves?

Archaeology: The Basics is essential reading for all those beginning to study archaeology and anyone who has ever questioned the past.

1

Introducing archaeology

DOI: 10.4324/9781003183556-3

In 1911, Gertrude Bell—influential political officer, desert traveler, and archaeologist—visited the German excavations at Asshur on the Tigris River in what is now northern Iraq. Site director Walter Andrae conducted her around the excavations overlooking the Tigris in flood. He told the story of the Assyrian capital, using walls, trenches, and ancient inscriptions. Later, they sat on the roof of the excavation house, the ziggurat (temple mound) rising high above them. It had witnessed four thousand years of often turbulent history, famines, floods, and bountiful harvests. “What did they watch from the summit?” asked Bell. “They watched the moon, as we do,” said Andrae. “Who knows? They watched for the god.”

The past, remote and not so remote, casts a magical spell on us. It surrounds us with evocative moments—a rainy day with the wind blowing in your face on Hadrian’s Wall in northern England; the profound silence of eternity in a locked Egyptian pharaoh’s tomb; or the vast mass of the Pyramid of the Sun in the heart of the city of Teotihuacán in the Valley of Mexico that makes you feel insignificant. Six million years of human experience lie behind us. Archaeology gives us an understanding of how we came into being, how we changed over these millions of years, and of the ways in which modern humans are both different and similar. Some years ago, a brilliant paleontologist, Steven Jay Gould, remarked that we’re all descended from the same African twig. It is our long and complex past that we archaeologists study with the help of modern science.

Figure 1.1 Archaeology as a treasure hunting adventure in 1847. Englishman Austen Henry Layard's workers lower a winged bull from the Assyrian palaces at Nimrud, Iraq. Photo 12/Alamy Stock Photo.

This short book talks about the basic principles of archaeology, a fascinating way of studying humanity—our origins, the chronology of our societies, the ways in which we developed technology, how we lived, and how we changed over the millennia. The pages that follow explore our shifting identities, and, above all, focus on the people of the past, whether individuals or groups, hunters, foragers, farmers, herders, or city dwellers. This book is about us.

What is archaeology?

Archaeology and archaeologists conjure up the inevitable images of eccentric professors digging into pyramids or romantic discoveries of gold-laden royal tombs and priceless treasure. Whip-wielding Indiana Jones, tomb-raiding Lara Croft, and all the paraphernalia of Hollywood leap from the movie screens of many people’s minds. Wrong! Archaeology did indeed begin as a glorified treasure hunt, a jumble of lost civilizations and high adventure in remote lands. Indiana Jones is said to be a composite of several early twentieth-century excavators, but we’ve never met an archaeologist who resembled him, let alone Lara Croft! Today’s archaeology is a sophisticated, multidisciplinary science with roots in both anthropology and history.

Archaeology is the scientific study of past human societies, using their material or physical remains––from the earliest times up to the present. Many nineteenth-century excavators worked virtually alone, supervising dozens of local workers. Today, we rely heavily on high technology science and on researchers from all kinds of academic disciplines—including biology, genetics, geology, physics, and zoology, to mention only a few. These sophisticated methods and techniques have turned the study of the human past into an important method of understanding today’s world.

We archaeologists are unique among those specialists who study humanity. We alone look back at the entire span of human existence. We are constrained by neither geography nor time. While historians depend heavily on written records and documents, we work regardless of their presence or absence. This means we can explore the many non-literate societies that survived until modern times in many parts of the world. It also means that, even within literate cultures, we can uncover the everyday lives of the folk who never left written records—which was most people. We can also reach into the remote past and talk about prehistory, extending back to human origins some six million years ago. In contrast, history, based on written records, extends back—at the most—5,100 years in the earliest cradle of civilization: Southwest Asia.

How did it all begin?

People speculated about the remote past for centuries before any form of serious excavation began. Archaeology as such began during the European Renaissance, an era of increased curiosity about the world beyond the narrow confines of Europe. By the eighteenth century, collecting Roman sculpture was fashionable as part of the Grand Tour of classical lands. Local landowners back home tunneled into prehistoric burial mounds as a sport, followed by lavish dinners. The result was a complete jumble of metal and stone tools and of clay vessels. “All that has come down to us … is wrapped in a thick fog,” complained one Danish scholar in 1806. And he was right.

The antiquity of humankind

For centuries, everyone in Europe believed that the Scriptures were the literal historical truth. Genesis chapter 1 states that God created the world and its inhabitants in six days, including Adam and Eve. Archbishop James Ussher of Northern Ireland (1581–1656) used the genealogies in the Old Testament to calculate that the world had been created on the night preceding October 23, 4004 BC. His bizarre calculations became religious dogma defended fanatically by theologians.

By the early nineteenth century, there was clear evidence of much earlier human existence. The massive canal building and railroad construction of the Industrial Revolution revolutionized field geology. Natural processes such as erosion, weathering, and sedimentation had formed the earth over a very long time—far longer than a mere six days. Many newly exposed geological levels contained the fossils of long-extinct animals. The French paleontologist Georges Cuvier used geological layers to place fossil discoveries in order. But he believed that each layer had been formed by God after he wiped out earlier strata with destructive floods. Yet the proof that humans had lived in far earlier times was right in front of his nose.

As early as AD 1600, elephant bones and a stone axe had been found in the heart of London, but no one took this, and other such discoveries, seriously. In 1836, an eccentric French customs officer, Boucher de Perthes (1788–1868) dug for fossils in the gravels of the Somme River near Abbeville in northern France. He was surprised to find dozens of stone axes alongside the bones of a long-extinct form of hippopotamus. Boucher de Perthes claimed that these were the work of people who had lived long before Noah’s biblical flood. Hippopotamuses in Europe? What a ridiculous idea!

Scientists ignored de Perthes until 1858 when stone tools and the bones of arctic elephants, rhinoceroses, and cave bears came to light in a sealed layer of a cave near Brixham in southwestern England. Then the scientific establishment paid closer attention and took the Somme finds seriously. As geologists and archaeologists visited the Somme in 1859, Charles Darwin published his On the Origin of Species. His theories of evolution and natural selection provided a theoretical framework for a remote past that extended much further back than 4004 BC.

Darwin’s assumption that humans were descended from ape-like ancestors horrified devout Victorians. “My dear, let us hope it is not so,” exclaimed one distraught mother. The discovery of a beetle-browed Neanderthal skull in Germany’s Neander Valley in 1857 provided the first scientific evidence of such evolutionary links. The great biologist Thomas Huxley called the evolutionary relationship between apes and humans “the question of questions.” It is a subject that still engages archaeologists and others. Since Huxley’s day, generations of archaeologists have filled in the millennia of prehistoric times with a remarkable diversity of human societies, both simple and more complex, including a dazzling array of pre-industrial civilizations

Discovering ancient civilizations

The Greeks and Romans considered the ancient Egyptians the fountain of wisdom and medical knowledge. But the early civilizations remained largely unknown until the nineteenth century. When Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt in 1798 in an abortive attempt to control a route to India, he took 167 scientists and technicians along with him to record all that was known of Egypt, ancient and modern. His soldiers called them “Napoleon’s donkeys,” but his scientists were electrified by what they found: pyramids and spectacular temples quite unlike those of the Greeks and Romans. Among their finds was the inscribed Rosetta Stone, which bore a trilingual inscription in Egyptian hieroglyphs and Greek. A brilliant French language scholar, Jean François Champollion, deciphered hieroglyphs in 1821 and unlocked the secrets of Egyptian civilization.

The scientists’ well-published discoveries attracted a new breed of visitors to the Nile—tomb robbers. For the best part of a century, a remarkable procession of adventurers, treasure hunters, and archaeologists came in search of spectacular loot, and information. Some of the tomb robbers were flamboyant characters, like the circus strongman-turned-archaeologist Giovanni Belzoni (1778–1823). From 1817 to 1819, he blasted and tunneled his way from one end of Egypt to the other. As he searched for papyrus inscriptions on mummy cases, he crushed a stack of them as he sank down “among the broken mummies, with a crash of bones, rags, and wooden cases.” A tall man of immense strength and considerable charm, Belzoni was an expert with levers, weights, and gunpowder, essential qualities for early nineteenth-century tomb robbers. He fled Egypt in a hurry following a fracas with his rivals when gunshots were fired.

Tomb robbing and looting continued for decades, alongside the efforts of dedicated scholars like John Gardiner Wilkinson (1797–1875), an Englishman who spent ten years recording inscriptions while living in an empty tomb. He wrote a detailed account of the daily life of the ancient Egyptians. His book revealed a colorful but deeply conservative civilization that was intensely religious and preoccupied with the afterlife.

The Egyptian discoveries led to searches for ancient cities in Mesopotamia, now Iraq. Biblical Nineveh and Babylon lay in Mesopotamia, “The Land Between the Rivers” (the Euphrates and Tigris). This was once a fertile land, but now a harsh desert, where dusty mounds were all that remained of ancient cities. The French were first on the scene, appointing Paul-Emile Botta as their consul in the small town of Mosul on the Tigris opposite what remained of Nineveh in 1840. His excavations there were unsuccessful, but he uncovered the palace of the Assyrian king Sargon, a vast structure adorned with bas-reliefs that boasted of his discoveries.

Five years later, a young, restless Englishman, Austen Henry Layard (1817–1894), started digging at Nimrud, downstream of Nineveh. He found two Assyrian buildings on the first day and was soon tunneling deep into magnificent palaces at both Nimrud and later Nineveh. This was the stuff of which archaeological legends were made. The visitor gazed at “portly forms of kings … so lifelike that they might almost be imagined to be stepping from the walls.” The young archaeologist excavated with a small army of workers and acted like a tribal chieftain. Fortunately, he was a brilliant writer; his books are still in print.

His greatest discovery was a complete royal library of clay tables inscribed with wedge-like cuneiform script. In 1872, George Smith, a cuneiform expert, deciphered a tablet, which told of a great flood sent by the gods to punish humanity, survived by a prophet named Hasisadra. The story electrified those who believed in the historical truth of the Bible. But scholars were much more interested in the evidence the Nineveh tablets gave of even earlier civilizations. In 1877, another French diplomat, Ernest de Sarzec, excavated the ancient city of Telloh in southern Mesopotamia. He unearthed a much earlier temple and the Sumerians, a civilization as old as, if not older than, that of the ancient Egyptians.

Spectacular archaeological discoveries abounded during the mid- to late nineteenth century. John Lloyd Stephens (1805–1852) and artist Frederick Catherwood (1799–1854) struggled through dense Central American rain forest to the Maya city of Copán, now in Honduras, where jungle-covered ruins covered kilometers. Stephens wrote a famous description of the silent, overgrown city, the only sound being troops of monkeys passing overhead. Most important of all, he established that Maya civilization was an indigenous society that owed nothing to Egypt and other Old World societies.

The German excavator Heinrich Schliemann at Homeric Troy and Mycenae, German archaeologists at Olympia, Englishman Arthur Evans at the Palace of Minos in Crete—the roll call of spectacular archaeological discoveries surrounded archaeology and archaeologists with enduring romance. After World War I, archaeology became a more established discipline, thanks to the gradual introduction of more rigorous archaeological methods. What is sometimes called the heroic era of archaeology was nearing its end with Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter’s discovery of Tutankhamun’s undisturbed tomb in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings in 1922. Perhaps the final act came with Leonard Woolley’s long-term excavations into Ur of the Chaldees between 1922 and 1934. He probed the Sumerian city and cleared the spectacular Royal Cemetery with its gold-laden burials. This was one of the last excavations that employed hundreds of unskilled workers presided over by a handful of archaeologists.

Explaining the past

Christian Jurgensen Thomsen (1788–1865) was a Danish archaeologist with a tidy mind and a passion for order. The jumble of finds from burial mounds and other archaeological sites led him to organize the exhibits of the National Museum of Antiquities in Copenhagen into three prehistoric ages in 1816. The first was the Stone Age, “when little or nothing at all was known of metals”; another room displayed objects of stone and bronze from Bronze Age graves; a third burial finds from the Iron Age. At first Thomsen’s “Three Age System” was a hypothetical concept, but one of his assistants, Jens Jacob Worsaae, went out and excavated more burial mounds, and proved that Stone Age occupations did, in fact, underlie Bronze Age levels, and that Iron Age sites were the latest of all. The Three Age System came into widespread use throughout Europe by the 1860s.

The 1860s were the decade when evolutionary thinking began to spread widely in scientific circles. It was also an era of remarkable technological and social progress. Charles Darwin’s theories were widely accepted. At the same time, doctrines of social progress became fashionable, given the popular assumption that the day’s industrial civilization was the pinnacle of human achievement.

The mid- to late nineteenth century was an era of aggressive exploration and colonization, and of the first anthropological research. The earliest anthropologists were explorers, colonial government employees and missionaries, all of whom had an intense curiosity about diverse human societies. The Australian and Tasmanian Aborigines were hunters and foragers, as were the Fuegian Indians from South America. There were subsistence farmers in tropical Africa, and a remarkable diversity of Native American societies, including the Pueblo Indians of the North American Southwest. Then there were the ancient Egyptians and the Sumerians, complex societies that could be linked to the early development of Western civilization, quite apart from the Maya and Aztecs of Central America, and the Inca of Peru.

But how could one explain all this diversity and the profound changes in human society from hunting and gathering to city dwelling? A combination of Thomsen’s Three Age System, theories of biological, and soon cultural, evolution, and the widespread assumption that Western civilization was the pinnacle of human achievement led, inevitably, to ladder-like sequences of human development. The pioneering British anthropologist Edward Tylor (1821–1917) developed a three-part sequence of human development, from simple hunting, which he called “savagery,” through simple farming and herding, “barbarism,” to civilization. Such notions of unilinear cultural evolution were easy to defend in a world where doctrines of racial superiority were commonplace and unchallenged.

As time passed, more and more information about ancient societies made a mockery of simple evolutionary schemes. How, for example, could Egyptian civilization have spread its institutions throughout Southwest Asia and much further afield? Did widespread, long-forgotten migrations account for the differences between human societies? Diffusionism is the assumption that many human inventions originated in one place, then diffused to other parts of the world. Such theories were popular in the early twentieth century, notably at the hands of an anatomist turned Egyptologist, Eliot Grafton Smith. (He was the first person to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Authors’ note
• 1. Introducing archaeology
• 2. The archives of the past
• 3. Finding the archive
• 4. Excavation
• 5. Technologies
• 6. Ancient environments
• 7. Subsistence: How did people live?
• 8. Living across the landscape
• 9. Dealing with others and the divine
• 10. People of the past
• 11. Community and identity
• 12. Why archaeology?
• Index