History of Archaeology

 

 

In Europe, interest in the remains of Greco-Roman civilisation and the rediscovery of classical culture began in the Late Middle Ages.

Despite the importance of antiquarian writing in the literature of ancient Rome, such as Livy’s discussion of ancient monuments, scholars generally view antiquarianism as emerging only in the Middle Ages.

Flavio Biondo, an Italian Renaissance humanist historian, created a systematic guide to the ruins and topography of ancient Rome in the early 15th century, for which he has been called an early founder of archaeology.

The itinerant scholar Ciriaco de’ Pizzicolli or Cyriacus of Ancona (1391—c.1455) also traveled throughout Greece to record his findings on ancient buildings and objects. Ciriaco traveled all around the Eastern Mediterranean, noting down his archaeological discoveries in his day-book, Commentaria, that eventually filled six volumes.

Antiquarians, including John Leland and William Camden, conducted surveys of the English countryside, drawing, describing and interpreting the monuments that they encountered. These individuals were frequently clergymen – many vicars recorded local landmarks within their parishes, details of the landscape and ancient monuments such as standing stones – even if they did not always understand the significance of what they were seeing.

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Shift to nationalism

In the late 18th to 19th century archaeology became a national endeavor as personal cabinets of curios turned into national museums. People were now being hired to go out and collect artifacts to make a nation’s collection more grand and to show how far a nation’s reach extends.

 

An example of this Giovanni Battista Belzoni who was hired by Henry Salt, the British consul to Egypt, to gather antiquities for Britain. In nineteenth-century Mexico, the expansion of the National Museum of Anthropology and the excavation of major archeological ruins by Leopoldo Batres were part of the liberal regime of Porfirio Díaz to create a glorious image of Mexico’s prehispanic past.

 

 

Among the first sites to undergo archaeological excavation were Stonehenge and other megalithic monuments in England. The first known excavations made at Stonehenge were conducted by Dr William Harvey and Gilbert North in the early 17th century.

Both Inigo Jones and the Duke of Buckingham also dug there shortly afterwards. John Aubrey was a pioneer archaeologist who recorded numerous megalithic and other field monuments in southern England.

He also discovered and mapped the Avebury henge monument.

He wrote Monumenta Britannica in the late 17th century, as a survey of early urban and military sites, including Roman towns, “camps” (hillforts), and castles and a review of archaeological remains, including sepulchral monuments, roads, coins and urns.

He attempted to chart the chronological stylistic evolution of handwriting, medieval architecture, costume, and shield-shapes.

William Stukeley was another antiquarian who contributed to the early development of archaeology in the early 18th century.

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He also investigated the prehistoric monuments of Stonehenge and Avebury; work for which he has been remembered as “probably… the most important of the early forerunners of the discipline of archaeology”

He was one of the first to attempt to date the megaliths, and argued that they were a remnant of the pre-Roman druidic religion.

Excavations were carried out in the ancient towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum, both of which had been covered by ashes during the Eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79.

These excavations began in 1748 in Pompeii, while in Herculaneum they began in 1738 under the auspices of King Charles VII of Naples. In Herculaneum, the Theatre, the Basilica and the Villa of the Papyri were discovered in 1768.

The discovery of entire towns, complete with utensils and even human shapes, as well the unearthing of ancient frescos, had a big impact throughout Europe.

A very influential figure in the development of the theoretical and systematic study of the past through its physical remains, was “the prophet and founding hero of modern archaeology,” Johann Joachim Winckelmann.

Winckelmann was a founder of scientific archaeology by first applying empirical categories of style on a large, systematic basis to the classical (Greek and Roman) history of art and architecture.

His original approach was based on detailed empirical examinations of artefacts from which reasoned conclusions could be drawn and theories developed about ancient societies.

 

In America, Thomas Jefferson, possibly inspired by his experiences in Europe, supervised the systematic excavation of a Native American burial mound on his land in Virginia in 1784. Although Jefferson’s investigative methods were ahead of his time, they were primitive by today’s standards.

Napoleon’s army carried out excavations during its Egyptian campaign, in 1798-1801, which also was the first overseas archaeological expedition ever.

The emperor took with him a force of 500 civilian scientists, specialists in fields such as biology, chemistry and languages, in order to carry out a full study of the ancient civilisation.

The work of Jean-François Champollion in deciphering the Rosetta stone to discover the hidden meaning of hieroglyphics proved the key to the study of Egyptology.

However, prior to the development of modern techniques excavations tended to be haphazard; the importance of concepts such as stratification and context were completely overlooked.

For instance, in 1803, there was widespread criticism of Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin for removing the “Elgin Marbles” from their rightful place on the Parthenonin Athens.

The marble sculptures themselves were valued by his critics only for their aesthetic qualities, not for the information they contained about Ancient Greek civilization.

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In the first half of the 19th century many other archaeological expeditions were organized; Giovanni Battista Belzoniand Henry Salt collected Ancient Egyptian artifacts for the British Museum, Paul Émile Botta excavated the palace of Assyrian ruler Sargon II, Austen Henry Layardunearthed the ruins of Babylon and Nimrud and discovered the Library of Ashurbanipal and Robert Koldeway and Karl Richard Lepsius excavated sites in the Middle East.

However, the methodology was still poor, and the digging was aimed at the discovery of artefacts and monuments.

Development of archaeological method

The father of archaeological excavation was William Cunnington (1754–1810). He undertook excavations in Wiltshire from around 1798, in collaboration with his regular excavators Stephen and John Parker of Heytesbury. Cunnington’s work was funded by a number of patrons, the wealthiest of whom was Richard Colt Hoare, who had inherited the Stourhead estate from his grandfather in 1785. Hoare turned his attention to antiquarian pursuits and began funding Cunnington’s excavations in 1804. The latter’s site reports and descriptions were published by Hoare in a book entitled Ancient Historie of Wiltshire in 1810, a copy of which is kept at Stourhead.

Cunnington made meticulous recordings of mainly neolithic and Bronze Age barrows, and the terms he used to categorise and describe them are still used by archaeologists today. The first reference to the use of a trowel on an archaeological site was made in a letter from Cunnington to Hoare in 1808, which describes John Parker using one in the excavation of Bush Barrow.

One of the major achievements of 19th century archaeology was the development of stratigraphy. The idea of overlapping strata tracing back to successive periods was borrowed from the new geological and palaeontological work of scholars like William Smith, James Hutton and Charles Lyell. The application of stratigraphy to archaeology first took place with the excavations of prehistorical and Bronze Age sites. In the third and fourth decade of the 19th century, archaeologists like Jacques Boucher de Perthes and Christian Jürgensen Thomsen began to put the artifacts they had found in chronological order.

Another important development was the idea of deep time. Before this, people had the notion that the earth was quite young. James Ussher used the Old Testament and calculated that the origins of the world were on October 23 4004 BC (A Sunday). Later Jacques Boucher de Perthes (1788-1868) established a much deeper sense of time in Antiquités celtiques et antédiluviennes (1847).

Modern methodology

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The next major figure in the development of archaeology was Mortimer Wheeler, whose highly disciplined approach to excavation and systematic coverage in the 1920s and 1930s brought the science on swiftly. Wheeler developed the grid system of excavation, which was further improved on by his student Kathleen Kenyon.

The two constant themes in their attempts to improve archaeological excavation were, first, to maintain strict stratigraphic control while excavating (for this purpose, the baulks between trenches served to retain a record of the strata that had been dug through), and, second, to publish the excavation promptly and in a form that would tell the story of the site to the intelligent reader.

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The bomb damage and subsequent rebuilding caused by the Second World War gave archaeologists the opportunity to meaningfully examine inhabited cities for the first time.

Bomb damaged sites provided windows onto the development of European cities whose pasts had been buried beneath working buildings. Urban archaeology necessitated a new approach as centuries of human occupation had created deep layers of stratigraphy that could often only be seen through the keyholes of individual building plots.

In Britain, post-war archaeologists such as W. F. Grimes and Martin Biddle took the initiative in studying this previously unexamined area and developed the archaeological methods now employed in much CRM and rescue archaeology.

Archaeology increasingly became a professional activity during the first half of the 20th century. Although the bulk of an excavation’s workforce would still consist of volunteers, it would normally be led by a professional. It was now possible to study archaeology as a subject in universities and even schools, and by the end of the 20th century nearly all professional archaeologists, at least in developed countries, were graduates.

New technology

Undoubtedly the major technological development in 20th century archaeology was the introduction of radiocarbon dating, based on a theory first developed by American scientist Willard Libby in 1949. Despite its many limitations (compared to later methods it is inaccurate; it can only be used on organic matter; it is reliant on a dataset to corroborate it; and it only works with remains from the last 10,000 years), the technique brought about a revolution in archaeological understanding.

https://www.globalxplorer.org/

 

 

 

 

Other developments, often spin-offs from wartime technology, led to other scientific advances. For field archaeologists, the most significant of these was the use of the geophysical survey.

This encompasses a number of remote sensing techniques such as aerial photography and satellite imagery.

Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR)is also used, a technology which measures the height of the ground surface and other features in large areas of landscape with resolution and accuracy that was not previously available.

Archaeologists have also used subsurface remote sensing such as magnetometry using such things as ground-penetrating radar (GPR), enabling an advanced picture to be built up of what lies beneath the soil before excavation even commences. The entire Roman town of Viroconium, modern day Wroxeter, has been surveyed by these methods, though only a small portion has actually been excavated. The application of physical sciences to archaeology, known as archaeometry or archaeological science, is now a major part of archaeology.

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Archaeology has also come to use Geographic Information System (GIS) technology, a system designed to capture, store, manipulate, analyze, manage, and visualize all types of geospatial data.

The discovery in 1991 in the Ötztaler Alpen of the prehistorical mummy of the so-called Man of Similaun introduced a new field of archaeological science. With the help of DNA Analysis the scholars could ascertain that Ötzi, as the mummy is called, doesn’t belong to any known human population. Generally speaking, in the following years genetics have helped to understand the human migrations occurred during Prehistory.