For the first blog post I selected Archaeology as my topic and used the website for the Archaeological Institute of America (www.archaological.org). The website is a good central hub of archaeological information, including pages for things like field work and publications, with a wide array of information for everyone from professional archaeologists to people in the public who are simply interested in archaeology.
Archaeology focuses on studying humans of the past through excavation and lab work. It can be split into two types, historical and pre-historic archaeology, though there is some debate about the word choice when it comes to ‘historical’ with some people arguing that using historical / prehistoric favors a European world view. For the sake of the blog post, however; I’ll stick to the aforementioned terms.
Historical archaeology focuses on a time with written records and employs archival research along with the traditional excavation. Prehistorical archaeology doesn’t have access to written records (or if there are written records they are from a different society than the one being studied, and often have to be taken with a grain of salt due to biases).
Prehistorical archaeology is mostly done through excavations during a field season and then subsequent lab work that involves cataloguing and studying artifacts found at the sites. Unfortunately the funding is almost entirely in the excavation side of things, and there is very little money to be had for those people doing lab work.
Archaeology adds to the overall field of anthropology by focusing on the past of humanity. It helps us learn where we came from and how we developed, and can give us insight into how we might develop in the future. As someone who wants to go into Historical / Evolutionary Linguistics, I find that the past is incredibly interesting and can tell us a lot about who we are as humans currently.
I hope to eventually study things like symbols, art, and cave paintings from archaeological records in conjecture with cognitive science and linguistic development to study how human cognition has progressed over time. Though this is a broad concept and will probably be difficult to accomplish, as we don’t know that much about modern human cognition. I feel that much like how studying our past contributes to our knowledge of our present day selves, studying our past cognitive development can contribute to our understanding of current cognition.
Hello, I would like to commend you for such a well written blog. Over the few lectures and a couple of blogs that I’ve read including yours I have noticed that the goal of archaeology is to understand how and why human behavior has changed over time. Archaeologists search for patterns in the evolution of significant cultural events such as the development of farming, the emergence of cities, or the collapse of major civilizations for clues of why these events occurred. Understanding how and why human behavior has changed over time is really important because they enjoy learning about what things were like for their ancestors. For academics, it’s important because we can gain a greater understanding about how humanity has reached the current point in time.
Hello, I really enjoyed your blog post. I chose to write about the Forensic field of anthropology so finding more details on the archaeological side of things was really interesting. The more specific detail that you provided on the differences between historical and prehistorical archaeology was helpful to comprehend how old a lot of these remains that are helpful to decipher ancient human behavior truly are. Having a basic understanding of the tools and utensils used by ancient peoples can help us track the progress of humanity thus far. I also think this course could be really helpful for someone who plans on studying evolutionary linguistics, just based on the focus on human evolution so far. I also admire your sentiment regarding learning from our past selves and I tend to agree that there’s a lot to be learned from the mistakes of the past.
Hi,
I focused on Primatology so reading your blog to get a different view of Anthropology was really interesting. I did not realize that there was a debate on how the two types of archaeology can be defined but I guess there will always be people who have different ways of viewing things. I like that you chose to stick to the aforementioned terms to make this a less controversial blog. Since the money is focused on excavations mostly, historical archaeology probably does not get as much attention as prehistorical archaeology does. This probably causes issues in this field of work since both should be given equal importance. I think it is really interesting that you want to go into Historical/Evolutionary Linguistics since archaeology also has a historical focus.