What Does an Archaeologist Do? Lesson Plan

Guiding Questions:

What is archaeology?

What does an archaeologist do?

Why do we need archaeologists?

Primary Text: A Practical Handbook of Archaeology by Christopher Catling

Articles about recent archaeological finds and discoveries

Wikipedia page on Archaeology

Quotations about archaeology

"In archaeology, you uncover the unknown. In diplomacy, you cover the known." 

~Thomas Pickering

"Archaeology is the peeping Tom of the sciences. It is the sandbox of men who care not where they are going; they merely want to know where everyone else has been." ~Jim Bishop

"As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end." ~Michel Foucault

"It's crucial to reveal the mystery of the pyramid. Science in archaeology is paramount. People all over the world are waiting to solve this mystery." ~Zahi Hawass

"There must be a rule of thumb in pop-culture archaeology that states that the allure of any topic is inversely related to its assigned importance in the affairs of humanity. The more trivial the subject, the dearer it is to most of its partisans and the more worthy of scholarship. The smallest things in life often mean the most to people." Paul Di Filippo

"There's even an aircraft sensor system that sends down hundreds of thousands of pulses of light measured at different return rates. It allows you to strip away vegetation and see entire cities beneath the rain forest canopy. This use of aircraft sensor systems is the unbelievable future of archaeology." ~Sarah Parcak

"In archaeology, context is the basis of many discoveries that are imputed to the deliberate workings of intelligence. If I find a rock chipped in such a way as to give it a sharp edge, and the discovery is made in a cave, I am seduced into ascribing this to tool use by distant, foetid, and furry ancestors." ~Seth Shostak

"Satellite archaeology refers to the use of NASA and commercial high-resolution satellite datasets to map and discover past structures, cities, and geological features." ~Sarah Parcak

"I'm not an historian, but I can get interested, obsessively concerned with any aspect of the past, whether it's palaeontology or archaeology or the very recent past." ~Penelope Lively

"One of the things that I love to do is travel around the world and look at archaeological sites because archaeology gives us an opportunity to study past civilisations and see where they succeeded and where they failed. I like to look at some of these places and ask myself what these folks might have been thinking." ~Nathan Myhrvoid

Archaeology studies human cultures through the recovery, documentation, and analysis of material remains, and environmental data, including architecture, artefacts, ecofacts, human remains, and landscapes.

Because archaeology employs a broad range of different procedures, it is considered both science and humanity.

Archaeology studies human history from the development of the first stone tools in eastern Africa 3.4 million years ago up until recent decades. Do not confuse archaeology with palaeontology. It is of most importance for learning about prehistoric societies, when there are no written records for historians to study, making up over 99% of total history, from the Palaeolithic until the advent of literacy in any given society.

The  25 most important archaeological discoveries in history:

Archaeology: the study of the past through material remains.

The landscape is the assemblage of surfaces that are a portion of land, region, or territory that is observable in its entirety.

The landscape includes all of the visible features of an area of land, including the physical elements of landforms such as mountains, hills, rivers, lakes, ponds, and sea. The landscape also includes vegetation and human elements of land use.

Landscape archaeology is the study of the ways in which people in the past constructed and used the environment around them. Landscape archaeology is inherently multidisciplinary in its approach to the study of culture and is employed by both pre-historical, classical, and historical archaeologists. The key feature that distinguishes landscape archaeology from other archaeological approaches to sites is that there is an explicit emphasis on the study of the relationships between material culture, human alteration of land and cultural modifications to landscape, and the natural environment.

An archaeological field survey is a method that archaeologists use to search for archaeological sites and collect information about the site. The information includes the location, distribution, and organisation of past human cultures across a large area.

Surveys are conducted to search for particular archaeological sites or kinds of sites to detect patterns in the distribution of material culture over regions, to make generalisations or test hypotheses about past cultures, and to assess the risks that developmental projects will have adverse impacts on archaeological heritage.

The surveys may be intrusive or non-intrusive, depending on the needs of the inquiry team and the risk of destroying archaeological evidence. They might be extensive or intensive, depending on the types of research questions that the archaeologists and historians ask of the landscape in question. Surveys can be a practical way to decide whether or not to carry out an excavation as a way of recording the necessary details of a possible site.

Excavation is the exposure, processing, and recording of archaeological remains. An excavation site or "dig" is a site that the archaeologists are studying.