Archaeology In The News

While I only spent long enough on the subject to earn a minor in college, anthropology, and archaeology especially, has always fascinated me.  There are three major reasons as to why it fascinates me, or I should say, at least three.  Firstly, as a historian, it's interesting to see the earliest origins of our societies and be able to compare them to how far we've come.  Also, it amazes me how we can draw conclusions from so little evidence, and be accurate doing it.  Lastly, it's just romantic to think of man in a more simple way of life.

The study of past cultures can explain basic symptoms of mankind's illnesses: war, greed and corruption.  Old sites reveal that even back in early Celtic times, the individuals with power were buried with great ceremony.  They would be covered in valuable clothing, decorated with fancy jewelry and surround by ornate artifacts.  Such a value placed on them after they were already deceased, implies that they must have been powerful in life.  The same can be seen easier with the pyramids at Giza. The power they wielded in life probably had all of the same negative implications that power now wields. 

So much can be determined by so little in archaeology.  Different colors in the soil can imply posts were used.  Then, you can map the locations of all of these posts to decide it it was a structure of housing or some sort of fence perhaps.  If it's housing, you can determine what living structures were like, how many people might sleep in one hut, if animals stayed inside with them and so on.  Finding a grouping of pottery shards can imply that people focused their waste in one spot, or the person who lived there was a klutz.  All from shards or the color of dirt.  When you bring new scientific inventions into the equation, the possibilities are nigh on endless.

However, the real reason I am drawn over and over to archaeology is that it's romantic.  Not in the Harlequin sense, but in the childhood dreaming sense.  I find something really intriguing about a simpler way of life.  Whenever I'm wedged in between to giant SUVs on the freeway on my way to work, I ponder what my forebears did for a "living."  If I could live on a small plot of land, work that land, hunt for some food, fix my own problems and just be cut off from the rest of the world... but, it's just a dream I suppose.  What would an ancient Illyrian make of a Blackberry?

Also, looking at these articles is nice, because unless you are thoroughly entrenched the archaeological community, there are no politics involved.  And that's really nice, isn't it?  So, I thought I would share these interesting little gems.

Illyrian site in Balkans- article

Another interesting article

Dialogue on Kosovo rock art - article