As I say, both classical and Christian archaeology developed first as ways of going back to the sources of modern civilization. Archaeologists in that tradition aimed to uncover the original phases of political, civil, and religious architecture by removing later reconstructions and repairs. Excavation and renovation by classical archaeologists aimed at leaving important buildings and monuments visible in their original state at the center of modern cities. Little room was made for the preservation of traces of later life, even in those buildings themselves. During the twentieth century, however, archaeologists began to adopt methods that would allow them to disclose a development, a succession of events. Today, as a result, archaeology is seen not as a way of finding objects but of uncovering history. Indeed, archaeology is not so much a source for history as a way of doing history, albeit different from text-based history.
All study of the past is based, of course, on the belief that we can identify a succession of events accurately; but there are different ways of approaching that task, using different kinds of evidence and different methods. Events leave traces both in texts and in the physical remains investigated by archaeologists. Sometimes those traces corroborate each other; but sometimes they appear contradictory, or may survive only in one form, physical or textual; and sometimes there are no traces left at all, or at least not preserved. Archaeology always risks underestimating the importance of evidence that does not exist or that is still unknown. That is especially the case in the study of Greek and Roman civilization, where such an abundance of material has been preserved that it is easy to forget the monuments and other traces that we cannot see: in some cases they have not survived, but in others they are simply covered still by later phases.
World History
