Contemporary archaeology, no matter where in the world it may be found, is interdisciplinary. Excavation teams include not only archaeologists expert in ancient architecture and artifacts, but also specialists in plant remains; animal bones; metallurgy; DNA extraction and analysis of samples from human and nonhuman bone or botanical materials; sediments and stratigraphy; and a host of other topics now regarded as essential to archaeological projects. It may seem selfevident that archaeologists must confer with many different kinds of scholars in order to understand the vast array of items and materials they unearth as well as the contexts of those items and materials. Nevertheless, both the nature and the practice of interdisciplinary archaeology are actually quite complex and rather recent developments in the history of archaeology.
One source of complexity is the fact that different kinds of archaeology have different histories and different scholarly homes. Classical archaeology, for example, is traditionally grouped with the humanities, especially those centered upon the Greek and Roman civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean world, their languages and their histories. Prehistoric archaeology, on the other hand - addressing the earliest part of the human story in Africa, Europe, and Asia - developed in relation to geology, palaeontology, botany, and zoology; hence, it was traditionally grouped with the natural sciences. Students learning to be classical archaeologists studied Greek, Latin, history of art and architecture, and the massive literature of scholarship on Bronze Age and Iron Age civilizations in the Mediterranean region and in Central and Eastern Asia. Students learning to be prehistorians studied stone tool typologies; sediments and stratigraphy; geochemical dating techniques; the environmental, ecological, and cultural implications of floral and faunal species and assemblages; the fossil record of human evolution in the Old World; and the archaeological remains left by hunter-gatherer-forager or early agricultural societies around the globe, as well as ethnographic information about such societies provided by European explorers of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries and by anthropologists of the late nineteenth to twentieth centuries. Because of the abundant written records left by ancient Greek and Roman societies and their predecessors, classical archaeologists did not traditionally concern themselves with systematic recovery of animal bones and plant remains because it was believed that essential information about the economies and physical environments of these societies was contained in their own records and archives.
Another major source of complexity surrounding the issue of interdisciplinary research in archaeology is the practical one. It is extremely difficult to establish and maintain adequate integration among even a few nonarchaeological collaborators on the one hand, the archaeologists on the other, and the two groups in concert during all the stages of a project: survey, excavation, analysis, and publication. Simply making certain that each specialist has essential equipment, research space, and access to materials pertaining to that specialist’s area of expertise is daunting, especially if the work is being carried out in a remote locale, or in a country foreign to the scholars doing the work. Many interdisciplinary projects founder on these logistical issues alone, quite apart from conceptual matters of any sort.
World History
