Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Archaeology can be a destructive science for the finite resources of the archaeological record are lost to excavation. Therefore, archaeologists limit the amount of excavation that they do at each site and keep meticulous records of what is found.
Understanding a site in modern archaeology is a process of grouping single contexts together in ever larger groups by virtue of their relationships. The terminology of these larger clusters varies depending on the practitioner, but the terms interface, sub-group, and group are common.
Archaeology is the study of human activity in the past, primarily through the recovery and analysis of the material culture and environmental data that they have left behind, which includes artifacts, architecture, biofacts (also known as eco-facts) and cultural landscapes (the archaeological record).
Archaeology is distinct from palaeontology, which is the study of fossil remains. Archaeology is particularly important for learning about prehistoric societies, for which, by definition, there are no written records. Prehistory includes over 99% of the human past, from the Paleolithic until the advent of literacy in societies around the world. [1]
The different approaches to archaeological evidence which every person brings to his or her interpretation result in different constructs of the past for each individual. The benefit of this approach has been recognised in such fields as visitor interpretation, cultural resource management and ethics in archaeology as well as fieldwork.
A multitude of different theoretical approaches have developed over the last 50 years and exist in parallel across the discipline. These range broadly from an empirical archaeology viewed as a science, to a relativistic post-modern concept of archaeology as an ideology that cannot verify its own concepts.
Processualists, and other subsequently critics of cultural-historical archaeology argued that archaeological culture treated culture as "just a rag-tag assemblage of ideas." [13] Archaeological culture is presently useful for sorting and assembling artifacts, especially in European archaeology that often falls towards culture-historical ...
An archaeological site with human presence dating from 4th century BCE, Fillipovka, South Urals, Russia.This site has been interpreted as a Sarmatian Kurgan.. An archaeological site is a place (or group of physical sites) in which evidence of past activity is preserved (either prehistoric or historic or contemporary), and which has been, or may be, investigated using the discipline of ...