#archaeology misconceptions

[ochipi]

Debunking archaeology stereotypes #4

Myth: we know everything about everything that’s old.

Reality: although we can seem like it, we are not walking libraries. Field archaeologists have two kinds of “specialties”. The thing we did our masters on, or just a thing that’s super close to us, and then there are the things that can be expected to be found on site.

As a Western European archaeologist, we can expect to find podzol in a sandy soil, and around a medieval settlement will usually be a ditch. And we might sound super smart explaining that to others, history is not random and people were not dumb.

When it comes to artifacts, that’s when the fun starts. We usually specialize in some kind of artifact within a special time frame. I know loads about Germanic jewelry, but nothing about Germanic pottery, let alone late medieval pottery.

One of the reasons I chose to educate myself in these is because they come from where I come from. It’s about relevancy to you. And to be rude, job possibilities as well. And to be honest, even for me, after having studied 600+ Germanic bird brooches, they will start looking alike. It’s too much to handle. Let alone know everything about every possible artifact in the world ever.

Also: But where does this come from? My best and only guess? Indiana Jones. Even the antiquarians would stick to one kind of culture/era/site, but between the 1930’s and the 1980’s, being an antiquarian wasn’t really a thing anymore. Also, too much wars and shortages to spend it on Egyptian death masks.

So when the wildly popular Indiana Jones movies came out and people once again met up with the past, it was the only mainstream example to took up to. And because the movies and the following adventure movie genre all went along with the same premise… well, that’s what you get.

[ochipi]

Debunking archaeology stereotypes #1

Myth: we do dinosaurs.

Reality: no we don’t. And there’s actually a pretty good reason for it. There are plenty of people who study animal remains in archaeology. It’s called archeozoölogy. Why is that not biology? Because the animals are studied as part of human interactions on living beings as we see them in a buried context. Everything revolves around human actions from the past with soil being the medium in which we read them.

Living dinosaurs have never ever been in contact with humans so there is no archaeological search methodology that can be applied. Digging techniques are for sure very similar, but that’s about it.

When in a 1000 years archaeologists dig a natural history museum which used to house dinosaurs than yes, that will count as archaeology because there has been human intervention on the fossils. But pure in situ fossils are researched by people who are not called archaeologists but paleontologists.

Also: dinosaurs have not been around all of prehistory. So where do we draw the line for “human interaction”? For simplicity, we use radiocarbon dating, also called C14 dating. It’s measuring the half life of carbon elements which are present in every single biological specimen. And although humanoids existed for as long back as about 300.000 years, C14 can date a maximum of about 60.000 years back. Conveniently that’s also around the same time our ancestors started leaving artifacts behind that we can find nowadays.