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Sep 20, 2022 · ed. Donna Kurtz, Reader in Classical Archaeology and Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford University, and Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, England. Based on Sir John Beazley's personal archive of materials related to the study of classical art and archaeology. Online collections include Athenian pottery, sculpture casts, and gems.
- Jenny Davis
- 2016
Journal of Archaeological Research brings together the most recent international research summaries on a broad range of topics and geographical areas. This authoritative review journal improves access to the growing body of information and literature through the publication of original critical articles, each in a 25-40 page format.
Feb 19, 2024 · Books written by scholars are a good source of information for many topics. Why You Should Use Them: Written on a broad subject; Easier to read than journal articles, and written for a broad audience; Often undergo a peer-review process; May contain a collection of chapters written by different authors
Oct 17, 2022 · science in mainstream archaeology but cautioned that practitioners need to understand the theory behind the techniques they use to ensure proper application, as well as integrate methodology and complex archaeological research questions (5). In this special feature of PNAS, we recognize several key landmarks in the growth of archaeological ...
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Summary. As the study of the past through its material remains, archaeology has a long tradition of drawing on the sciences, especially the natural sciences. The multifaceted approach required in the study of human societies, and the focus on the material – artefacts and ‘ecofacts’, manufactured and natural – means that, perhaps more ...
- Overview
- History of archaeology
- The Mediterranean and the Middle East
archaeology, the scientific study of the material remains of past human life and activities. These include human artifacts from the very earliest stone tools to the man-made objects that are buried or thrown away in the present day: everything made by human beings—from simple tools to complex machines, from the earliest houses and temples and tombs to palaces, cathedrals, and pyramids. Archaeological investigations are a principal source of knowledge of prehistoric, ancient, and extinct culture. The word comes from the Greek archaia (“ancient things”) and logos (“theory” or “science”).
The archaeologist is first a descriptive worker: he has to describe, classify, and analyze the artifacts he studies. An adequate and objective taxonomy is the basis of all archaeology, and many good archaeologists spend their lives in this activity of description and classification. But the main aim of the archaeologist is to place the material remains in historical contexts, to supplement what may be known from written sources, and, thus, to increase understanding of the past. Ultimately, then, the archaeologist is a historian: his aim is the interpretive description of the past of man.
Increasingly, many scientific techniques are used by the archaeologist, and he uses the scientific expertise of many persons who are not archaeologists in his work. The artifacts he studies must often be studied in their environmental contexts, and botanists, zoologists, soil scientists, and geologists may be brought in to identify and describe plants, animals, soils, and rocks. Radioactive carbon dating, which has revolutionized much of archaeological chronology, is a by-product of research in atomic physics. But although archaeology uses extensively the methods, techniques, and results of the physical and biological sciences, it is not a natural science; some consider it a discipline that is half science and half humanity. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that the archaeologist is first a craftsman, practicing many specialized crafts (of which excavation is the most familiar to the general public), and then a historian.
The justification for this work is the justification of all historical scholarship: to enrich the present by knowledge of the experiences and achievements of our predecessors. Because it concerns things people have made, the most direct findings of archaeology bear on the history of art and technology; but by inference it also yields information about the society, religion, and economy of the people who created the artifacts. Also, it may bring to light and interpret previously unknown written documents, providing even more certain evidence about the past.
Britannica Quiz
Archaeology: Digging and Scraping Quiz
No doubt there have always been people who were interested in the material remains of the past, but archaeology as a discipline has its earliest origins in 15th- and 16th-century Europe, when the Renaissance Humanists looked back upon the glories of Greece and Rome. Popes, cardinals, and noblemen in Italy in the 16th century began to collect antiqu...
Archaeology proper began with an interest in the Greeks and Romans and first developed in 18th-century Italy with the excavations of the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Classical archaeology was established on a more scientific basis by the work of Heinrich Schliemann, who investigated the origins of Greek civilization at Troy and Mycenae in the 1870s; of M.A. Biliotti at Rhodes in this same period; of the German Archaeological Institute under Ernst Curtius at Olympia from 1875 to 1881; and of Alexander Conze at Samothrace in 1873 and 1875. Conze was the first person to include photographs in the publication of his report. Schliemann had intended to dig in Crete but did not do so, and it was left to Arthur Evans to begin work at Knossos in 1900 and to discover the Minoan civilization, ancestor of classical Greece.
Egyptian archaeology began with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798. He brought with him scholars who set to work recording the archaeological remains of the country. The results of their work were published in the Description de l’Égypte (1808–25). As a result of discoveries made by this expedition, Jean-François Champollion was able to decipher ancient Egyptian writing for the first time in 1822. This decipherment, which enabled scholars to read the numerous writings left by the Egyptians, was the first great step forward in Egyptian archaeology. The demand for Egyptian antiquities led to organized tomb robbing by men such as Giovanni Battista Belzoni. A new era in systematic and controlled archaeological research began with the Frenchman Auguste Mariette, who also founded the Egyptian Museum at Cairo. The British archaeologist Flinders Petrie, who began work in Egypt in 1880, made great discoveries there and in Palestine during his long lifetime. Petrie developed a systematic method of excavation, the principles of which he summarized in Methods and Aims in Archaeology (1904). It was left to Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon to make the most spectacular discovery in Egyptian archaeology, that of the tomb of Tutankhamen in 1922.
- Glyn Edmund Daniel
2 Citations. Summary. This chapter will focus on new research in archaeology, interdisciplinary science that uses various physical, chemical, biological, and social sciences. Such studies, also known as archaeological sciences, are generally referred to as archaeometry.
