Archaeology is known in contemporary times as a series of methods carried out in a scientific manner to test and explore theories about the past. During the first third of the nineteenth century, the interdisciplinary elements of archaeology began to come together. Discoveries by geologists decades earlier were revisited by their professional counterparts in the 1830s, who began to appreciate the significance of flint artifacts observed in geological strata. Lyell revolutionized geology with his depositional theories. Boucher de Perthes announced the discovery of artifacts in deep geological strata and concluded that they had great antiquity. The findings of geologists stirred great controversy because the idea that such antiquity of humans flew against Biblical theology and prevailing belief. The concept, however, was the nucleus for Paleolithic archaeology. Their observations of strata superimposed over each other and contained archaeological materials led to the important discovery of stratification, which enabled archaeologists to look at questions of time depth. Questions about time began to change armchair speculation and antiquarianism into a scientific discipline. Of course, as we have seen, interest in the meaning of time, albeit in a broader sense, is the root of archaeology centuries ago.
By the 1830, the major questions put to archaeological materials had to do with ordering the contemporary world. Class, race, and politics were still influenced and inspired by monuments and materials of past ‘great’ civilizations. Scientific inquiries into race by S. G. Morton influenced the attitudes of anthropologists toward Native Americans. Morton compared skulls from North American Indians with similar relics derived both from ancient and modern tribes, to understand their origins. The writings of Englishman Henry Lubbock significantly influenced American evolutionary archaeology, known also as prehistoric archaeology. He, too, took an evolutionary approach that attributed American Indians with biological inferiority over European-descended Americans. Scientific analysis of antiquities and osteological specimens thus addressed theories about the history and peoples of America. The findings were interpreted to construct a national identity favoring the circumstance of European-Americans.
The rise of science (which began in eighteenth-century rationalism), industrialism of Europe and America, and the expansion of power to unexplored or exotic regions, all contributed to the development of archaeology. Some early specialists largely dismissed speculation and began considering methodological questions, such as how to pose problems, to excavate, to present data, and to answer questions in a rigorous manner. J. J. A. Worsaae (1821-85) articulated that burial goods were associated by their usage at the same time and that they were placed in the burial at the same time. Worsaae also recognized the importance of careful excavation and record keeping and, significantly, that the primary purpose of excavation was to gather information on humankind’s history and development rather than to gather specimens for museums and private collections.
The beginnings of archaeology as it is recognized today as a series of methods and logical sequences began centuries ago. The recognition of a need for a conceptual shift from speculation to adequate recording and mapping of archaeological sites began in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. By the 1840s, the fields of anthropology included archeology, ethnology, physical anthropology, and linguistics; these were seen as separate disciplines, but all were concerned with cultural evolution and the study of indigenous peoples. The historical roots of archaeology run deep through centuries of human curiosity about the past and in each other.
See also: Biblical Archaeology; Classical Archaeology.
World History
