Real Archaeology: How is it Done?

We all love a good Indiana Jones adventure. But what about the real archaeology? The kind where even the smallest speck of dirt can tell a story. It’s pretty amazing when you think about it.

In this article, I really want to emphasize is just how much more there is to archaeology than most non-archaeologists ever consider. While it’s rarely as adventurous as the movies, even the most mundane archaeological work can be pretty cool when you put it all together with all the other work that goes into investigating a site or doing an excavation.

Context, Context, Context

It’s all about context. Think of it like this: you find, say, a clay a pot sherd (if you wonder why I wrote “sherd” and not “shard,” click the link). So far, this alone is interesting, right? But what if that sherd was buried beneath the floorboards of a long-gone house? Or what if you found it next to some charred grains, hinting at maybe the last meal it was associated with was cooked in that very spot.

Suddenly, it’s not just a random piece of pottery but a clue to a whole way of life.

Archaeologists are trained to spot those seemingly insignificant details. Take the site of historic Jamestown in Virginia for instance. At Jamestown, archaeologists could actually tell the difference between ground that had never been touched and areas where wooden posts had once stood just by observing the subtle differences in the color and texture of the soil. That’s a super-detailed level of observation that lets them reconstruct entire settlements even when all that’s left are these faint traces in the ground. This really makes you wonder how much we could completely miss if we just dig.

In a few recent social media posts on Twitter and YouTube, there are some enthusiasts for archaeology that have wondered why sites like Gobekli Tepe are being excavated so slowly. Their excitement to know what secrets this site holds is commendable, but there’s a limit to how fast or furious archaeologists can recover data from a site.

We have to consider a lot of factors, among them:

• How much trained labor is available for the unit (the spot where dirt is being dug).
• How much trained labor exists in the laboratory (this is where necessary cleaning and documentation is occurring).
• Who’s available to map and sketch?
• Who’s working the survey equipment (theodolite, transit, Trimble GPS, etc.)
• What are the nature of the artifacts and features being uncovered?

Once the excavation starts, the site is changed forever. Excavation is necessarily a destructive process, which is a prime reason why most archaeologists take it slow and plan each next step as they carefully take a unit down a centimeter at a time, sifting each grain of sand or bit of clay. And archaeology is not just about digging. It’s about using a variety of techniques to carefully map out a site and understand its stratigraphy.

Stratigraphy is a bit like looking at the layers of a cake, only a tad more complicated.

But this analogy actually holds up surprisingly well. Each layer of soil it represents a different period in time: the oldest layers, those are way down at the bottom. And then the most recent ones, those are up at the top—assuming some outside process doesn’t come along to muck it up (we call that taphonomy). By meticulously excavating just one layer at a time, archaeologists can actually trace the development of a site over centuries—even millennia.

When it comes to tools, it’s not all just trowels and brushes. Archaeologists actually use an incredible array of technology these days to help uncover the past.

Things like ground penetrating radar (GPR) and even aerial photography are pretty standard. LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) is also used so frequently its rare not to see a Lidar map of the site before ground is even broken. In fact, with tools like these archaeologists can even get a sense of a site’s stratigraphy along with major features before they ever even put a shovel in the ground.

This allows us to do more purposeful planning rather than just digging and hoping for the best.

A wonderful example of this is the Sutton Hoo ship burial, one of England’s most famous archaeological discoveries. Before they even thought about digging, they used a combination of aerial photography, geophysical surveys, very carefully placed test pits to map out that entire burial mound.

So, back to the Sutton Hoo.

The methods archaeologists on that site used really let them understand the layout of the ship, what it contained, and importantly, it let them plan their excavation in a way that made sure they preserved as much of this incredible find as possible. The idea is not to just uncover the past, but also protect it for future generations.

Marble Does Not Float

A big part of what makes archaeology so fascinating is that it really isn’t hunting for treasure. It’s not just about the thrill of discovery but also about understanding the past and then protecting it, preserving it for the future.

Early archaeologists were really just antiquarians. They were looking for treasure and adventure. Sure, they made important discoveries that we still hold dear today: Giza, Saqqara, Troy, Athens…

But so much was lost forever because they were, in many cases, blinded by ambition and greed. Or because they didn’t value the same sorts of data we do today. Much of the world where these antiquarians were excavating were controlled as colonies of England, France, Netherlands, and even the United States and their treasures were removed and sent to far away museums where many of them still reside.

Until the 1970s and 1980s, most of the classical archaeology being done around the Mediterranean was concerned with people of elite status and wealth, often the priestly castes of society. I recall an anecdote from a professor of Classical Studies that was in attendance to an archaeological conference perhaps in the 1970s where a female grad student or post-grad was giving a talk on the results of her flotation analysis that focused mostly on the methods and why it was important.

She was, according to my witnessing professor, rudely interrupted midway through her talk only to be informed that, “My dear, marble does not float.”

I don’t know the details of that exchange or who the key players were. But the gist was that, even in the mid-20th Century, the primary concern of archaeology was that which had the immediate effect of astounding us: marble statuary, figurines, exotic pottery, weapons, burial ships, underground tombs filled with the treasures of King Tutankhamen…

The Multi-Disciplinary Approach to Archaeology

So how do archaeologists go from this jumble of dirt-covered objects to actual insights about the past?

On many of the large projects there are a litany of people working varied aspects of the project. Many of them are archaeologists with niche specialties like archaeobotany, zooarchaeology, archaeoastronomy, geoarchaeology, and lithics to name just a few.

Those specialists will work at various stages of an excavation to collect the data they need to do the work they need, which will produce results that help put the entire site into perspective.

The days of just retrieving the statuary, figurines, and pretty bits are a thing of the last century. In 21^st century archaeology, a holistic approach is given to the overall investigation. Ironically, one of the first principle investigators to do this were the Braidwoods in the early 20th Century. Linda and Robert Braidwood were renowned for putting together multidisciplinary teams as they investigated sites along the “Hilly Flanks” of the Zagros Mountains in Mesopotamia.

What was once a rarity, the multidisplinary approach to archaeology is now a standard practice.

The Ceramicist:

They will be looking at pot sherds and using them to pinpoint time periods, regions of origin, associating certain pottery with different kilns, and so on. All by examining the clay, the glaze, the temper, and so on. They can perform dating techniques like radiocarbon, rehydroxlation, or thermoluminescence.

The Archaeobotanist:

This person is going to study plant remains ranging in size from microscopic pollen and seeds on up to large wooden canoes and wooden remains from as far back as the Pleistocene. She or he might learn how ancient people used plants for food, fuel, medicine, construction, and even magic or ritual (not that magic is real, but it was certainly perceived to be in antiquity)! The way these remains are preserved include charring, desiccation, mineralization, and waterlogging.

The Zooarchaologist:

They study the remains of animals found in archaeological contexts with a goal to learn about the relationships between humans and animals of the past. These remains include vertebrates like mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish, but also include invertebrates like insects and shellfish. The zooarchaeologist can learn much the same things about ancient peoples as the archaeobotanist but they can also see how things like domestication changed human subsistence strategies, and gauge how successful the subsistence strategies hunter-gathering and agrarian societies might have been based on statistical analyses of things like bones and shells.

The Archaeoastromer:

For decades now, archaeologists have been interested in what ancient peoples understood about the sky above them an how it influenced their cultures. People of the past often carved petroglyphs or painted pictographs to represent the motions and positions of the sun, moon, and even stars. They oriented their monumental architecture in ways that helped track astronomical events like equinoxes, which could be of vital importance to agrarian societies. Archaeological sites that have clear relationships to astronomical observations in the past include Stonehenge, Giza, Macchu Picchu, Caco Canyon, and Poverty Point to name just a few.

The Geoarchaeologist:

This niche focuses on Earth sciences as a way to answer research questions about archaeological sites. Geoarchaeologists are uniquely qualified to reconstruct and model paleoenvironments through analyses of stratigraphy and sediment, developing geochronologies that are helpful in dating the sites themselves. They use methods from geology, geography, geophysics, and geochemistry to better understand how ancient peoples adapted to and used their environments.

The Lithicist:

This specialist studies the stone tool technologies within an archaeological assemblage or site by sorting lithics (stone tools) into types like knives, scrapers, and projectiles. They’re able to comment and interpret aspects of a society like the kinds of hunting or subsistence they engaged in, what sorts of trade they might have participated in and with whom, and population movements based on raw materials, which can sometimes be sourced to various geographic locations.

This is but a small handful of the kinds of specialists you might find working on an archaeological project. Every project is different and there are some that don’t even seem like archaeology on the surface. Archaeologists do so much more than simply dig holes. Just this past weekend I led a team of volunteers who erected over 750 linear feet of woven wire fence and a gate around an historic cemetery as a means of preservation because wild hogs were damaging it and the grave-markers within, many from the 19th Century.

There are hundreds more specialists with wide-ranging skill-sets and it’s it can be like they’re each looking through a different lens. And then when you combine all their insight, and all their differing points of view, you can get an incredibly rich and multi-dimensional view of like what life was like for people of the past. Whether that past was decades ago, hundreds of years ago, or even in the Pleistocene, living during the last Ice Age.

And this is what I find so fascinating about archaeology: it’s not just dates and names and facts. It’s about people. It’s about understanding the human story in all its complexity. A story that is constantly being rewritten as new information is uncovered, new data are compiled, and as new technologies emerge.

Archaeology isn’t just about uncovering the past, it’s also about interpreting it. And that interpretation that’s always going to be shaped by our own perspectives, our values, our own understanding the world as it is now. This means that archaeology isn’t just about the past, it’s also a reflection of ourselves, which is one of the reasons why archaeology is so important. It has this power to challenge our assumptions, expose forgotten stories, and give a voice to those who have been silenced.

Photo Credit for the Stratigraphy photo: Jamestown Rediscovery, please visit their website!

#RealArchaeology

Further Reading

Barker, Phillip (1993). Techniques of Archaeological Investigation. Routledge

Carver, Martin (2009). Archaeological Investigation. Routledge