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What is Archaeology?

Archeology is the study of the human past from its material remains, and therefore can make use of every subject imaginable in both the arts and sciences. This factor gives it great appeal and allows everyone to participate.

However, it also inevitably means that no one can “know everything”. Much confusion seems to arise about archeology’s relationship to history which, while also a broad study of the past, (for periods before the 20th century) deals primarily with the written word. History constitutes the basic framework of study since the past is divided into prehistoric (before history) and historical periods.

When did the story begin?

Historical dates are provided by documentary sources, which (obviously) presupposes the use of writing. However, not all writing can be proven to represent words or sentences and not all societies with writing used writing to record events; it was sometimes used for magical purposes.

Writing has been found on many different materials (papyrus, paper, stone, metals, ceramics, vellum, and wood) and developed independently in different parts of the world.

The script appears to have been pioneered in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) in the fourth millennium BC. In Europe, although some tablets with unintelligible markings were found in a pit at La Tartaria in Romania, dating to around 4500 B.C. C., now they are considered related to cult activities. If this interpretation is accepted, writing was not used in Europe until the rise of the Aegean civilization in Bronze Age Greece, and even then, the tablets in the scripts known as Linear A and Linear B (dating from around the 1600 BC and earlier) provide information that remains enigmatic.

In Britain, the earliest certain historical date is 55 BC. C., the year Julius Caesar crossed the Channel, writing a detailed account of his campaigns and descriptions of his opponents. Where it has been possible to cross-check accounts of him (for example, at Alesia, where the Gallic leader Vercingetorix was finally besieged), they have been found to be useful and accurate.

Doesn’t history tell us enough without archaeology?

Since history deals almost exclusively with the written word, there are limits to the information it can provide. In many periods of the past, literacy was rare and reserved for a few sections of society, typically (in the Western world, for example) the priesthood and the wealthy. As a result, the story often strongly reflects the concerns of these groups and generally provides no information about the rest of the population.

Many written records survive by chance, and others exist only in copies made in later times; some exist only as fragments. Some of the written material was kept in the libraries of Constantinople (Byzantium, now Istanbul) and became more available after the city’s fall to the Turks in 1453. However, there are very few surviving original records of events in Britain during the Roman period or its immediate aftermath. Even when copies survive, the copyist has sometimes added or deleted information to serve a particular purpose, or perhaps to try to make sense of material that seemed incorrect. It is often impossible to prove whether the record reports an actual event.

As a result, there are many gaps in the historical evidence, by period, intent, type, or survival. However, due to differences in raw material, it is rarely possible for history and archeology to provide evidence for the same aspects of society, even for periods with a large amount of written material.

Therefore, archeology is of special importance in the study of remote, illiterate or semi-illiterate periods for which there are few or no written records. Increasingly, archeology is being used to study aspects of life in well-documented periods that were simply not directly written about (for example, the daily lives of ordinary people).

Archeology usually sheds light on aspects of the past about which documentary sources are silent, such as technology or the types of everyday objects used in particular communities.

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