archaeology

archaeology as a discipline attempts to reconstruct the origin, prehistory, and history of the human race using material remains such as artefacts, settlements, earthworks, burials, and skeletal remains. It also uses evidence for human impact on the natural environment such as pollen, soil erosion, and animal and plant remains. Though it had its origins in history and art history in the last century, it has developed its own theoretical and methodological base, drawing on anthropology and geography for models, on biology for environmental reconstruction, geology for excavation techniques, and the natural sciences for analytical and dating methods. It thus encompasses in a unique way the arts, social sciences, and natural sciences.

Its relationship with history started as merely a means of illustrating or verifying information derived from written sources. However, increasingly archaeology has been able to fill in gaps, for areas and periods where written sources are rare or lacking, for aspects of society not covered in the texts, or even providing alternative or contradictory hypotheses to those based on historical evidence. However, like written sources, there are inbuilt biases, due to the processes of deposition and survival of archaeological data, the selection of field methods and excavation techniques, and the skills of observation and academic viewpoint of the excavator (‘archaeologists only find what they are looking for’).

In the 19th cent. archaeology rapidly established itself as the only means of studying pre-literate societies, and the great civilizations such as those of Egypt and Mesopotamia where written archives could be recovered. For societies where historical sources already existed, archaeology was marginal, and concerned primarily with antiquarianism or art history, the discovery of objects primarily for their intrinsic artistic quality, such as the sculpture and painted pottery of classical Greece, or the uncovering of plans of temples, churches, and castles.

With the shift in interest to social and economic questions, such as the nature of early farms, villages, and settlement patterns, archaeology came into its own, not only to illustrate the physical nature of, for instance, buildings described in the written documents, but also to answer questions on which the written sources were silent. In the period between the wars the lead was taken by southern Scandinavia. In northern Germany there were excavations such as those of the Viking trading port of Hedeby, or of the raised villages or terps of the Frisian coast. In Denmark the leading archaeologist was Gudmund Hatt who concentrated on settlements of the Germanic and Viking Iron Ages, reflecting the interests of the politically important Danish farming communities in their origins and environmental setting.

In Britain it was not until the 1950s that social and economic paradigms made their mark on archaeology, with excavations such as those by Brian Hope-Taylor of the Northumbrian palace complex at Yeavering, or Maurice Beresford and John Hurst who initiated the study of the origin and demise of the deserted medieval village of Wharram Percy in North Yorkshire. In both cases the excavators consciously introduced the Scandinavian techniques of ‘open area excavation’, the stripping of large surfaces which are then systematically cleaned and recorded layer by layer. While respecting the stratigraphical sequence, this technique allows a better understanding of the ephemeral stone and timber buildings which are the norm in peasant societies. In the 1960s it was gradually adopted by prehistorians and finally Roman archaeologists, as their interests shifted from narrow culture-historical and historical interpretations to more socio-economic problems.

The new methods had a major impact on urban archaeology, as the town became envisaged more as an organic whole. Massive open area excavations of complex stratified sites in cities such as Winchester and York in the 1960s produced huge quantities of data and finds, forcing an increased specialization of archaeology in the 1970s. In many cases permanent teams, or ‘units’, were established to monitor urban renewal and excavate threatened sites, though only now has computerization allowed adequate recording techniques to be developed. This work has revolutionized our knowledge of urban development, and new scientific techniques such as dendrochronological dating are providing detail of a precision which can rival that of the written sources. See also industrial archaeology.

John Collis