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Archeology Gives History a Makeover
- mncharity 10y agoNote the juxtaposition of this self congratulation > Yes, the stories about excavating with tiny brushes and grapefruit knives are true, even though shovels and backhoes would get the job done quicker. The stories about obsessive photography, data recording, sampling, artifact recovery, and general record keeping are also true. The underlying reason for these quirks is that archaeological search and recovery can often simultaneously acquire evidence and destroy its context. That being the case, we are honor bound to document the process well enough to allow some future researcher to use discoveries not just to test our conclusions but also to help answer new questions that have not yet occurred to us. [emphasis mine] with this observation > Technological advances have dramatically improved our abilities to detect and recover archaeological information I fuzzily recall going to an archeology talk soon after PCR came out, and hearing how carefully they washed their recovered pottery shards. It reminded me of early paleontology using dynamite. We can now do single cell PCR, and single molecule sequencing exists. We can do near-field spectroscopy of nanometer-scale samples. And the microrobots are coming. Imagine a conversation a half a century from now. "We found a site untouched!" "Untouched? By looters, or by early 21st-century archaeologists?" "Given how much our technology has changed, and how rapidly it's changing now, there's little difference".