2.3: 'Digging Up Old Things' is not Archaeology


The suggestion sometimes heard that artefact hunting and archaeology have in some way 'common aims' in fact basically means that the people espousing this view (some unreflexive UK archaeologists included) consider that this common aim is nothing more than 'digging up (interesting) old things'. But that is the aim of bottle dump digging

Trash dump trashed
Bottle dump digging is not archaeology, any more than bird-egg collecting was ornithology.



Tamara Kroftova comments:
"The idea that one can find reflected in much archaeological discussion of artefact hunting that what is important is having access to objects is simply a naive and unreflexive denial of what differentiates archaeology from mere Treasure Hunting".


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

2.1: What is archaeology?

Image
Archaeological research   as a process There are many possible ways to define the subject and object of study. This is the definition of archaeology used here: Archaeology is the study of aspects the human past through the documentation and analysis of physical remains and traces, their associations and contexts, by the methodology of archaeology and dissemination of the results and conclusions. 1) " The study of aspects of the human past ", The past might be very remote, from the Lower Palaeolithic, where it may intercalate with palaeontology (but archaeologists don't do dinosaurs), to almost the present day (periods when other but not all aspects of the past are amply documented by other sources), 2)  " aspects of the human past ", many areas of the human past are arguably beyond the reach of even the most creative of archaeological thought, 3) " through the documentation ", the archaeological evidence does not exist in a vacuum, curran...
Read more

3.3: Archaeological layers

Image
In talking about archaeological context we tend to think of it in terms of being composed of individual layers. These are discrete units of sediment, debris, rock, and other materials that form or accumulate as the result of natural processes, human activity, or both. In order to describe them and indicate their position on a site and in its sequence, these layers are generally numbered sequentially (with the lowest number being that removed first). An individual layer or deposit may be termed (following geological nomenclature) a stratum, and multiple layers are called strata. Therefore the study of their sequence is called stratigraphy (description of what we call the stratification). One of the simplest ways to depict layers is to depict them as a vertical sequence and this is frequently done in the form of a section (or 'profile') through them. Here is an explanation from Michigan State University 'Campus Archaeology' page "Archaeology 101: Reading strati...
Read more

4.1 What the archaeological record looks like in the Ground

Image
If the responsible artefact hunter is to  record the bits of the archaeological record destroyed in removing artefacts in collection-driven exploitation of a site, obviously they need to know what it is they are looking for, in other words, what the archaeological record looks like. At this point, many textbooks would show the reader a section or two showing the superimposed layers ("like a cake"). But that actually is not the way the stratification of a feature are actually encountered in the field. The suggestion that it is the section that is always paramount in the recording and interpretation of a site is a very damaging one. This is despite the prevalence of s ingle-context recording in the standard excavation methodical toolkit for over half a century. The main manner in which the stratigraphical units of a site are met is from above, from the working surface. The first point that this raises is that this should at all times be kept clean of loose soil, trample ...
Read more