Culture as a Center Study of Archaeology

Archeology as a science is all about the history of humanity. It discovers new facts about our ancestors, their life style, believes and traditions. Knowing the history means understanding the processes that are happening in the world today and also understanding traditions and cultures of other nations and nationalities. Culture is also a center study of archeology as it is closely connected and is a part of a history.

Non-material culture refers to the intangible or non-physical aspects of a culture. Things that cannot be held or touch like speaking language, behavior, beliefs, religion and value systems. These things cannot be preserve and cease to exist when a particular civilization or society becomes extinct. Material culture, on the other hand, encompasses the physical leftovers by the past ancient peoples. Fossils and artifacts such as tools, weapons, buildings and etc. are the physical remnants of the past. These remnants are usually preserved through the centuries by the natural elements from elements of rust, corrosion, erosion and decay. However, it's not always that these remnants are preserved in a complete good condition. Things do not turn up in complete sets. Usually, they are worn out and fragmented pieces from a certain artifact or fossil. This is due to exposure in the places or soil which they are found to also elements of decay and corrosion. It may also be due in part to human or animal activities which cause these things to be lost or fragmented.

Ancient civilizations and societies usually turn up with little or no written records at all about them and if there are, they have never been found. This is where archeology is different from the study of history. Since archeologists have very little to no written recordings of ancient cultures and since culture in and by itself is non-material, they can only rely on the physical evidence left behind by the ancients to tell and help them document and record about the past. This is where material culture is most important to archeologists. Like forensic experts, archeologists conduct extensive studies and research on these artifacts and fossils of evidence and try to reconstruct a picture the cultures of the ancient as completely as possible. From this, they deduce a relative idea of the culture, lifestyles of these ancient civilizations.

Things like statues and buildings from the past give a general idea or picture of how the people might look and dress physically and how they might have lived or work. They also might give an insight to their beliefs and religions. Movies like Indiana Jones often give people the false impression that archeology is adventurous treasure hunting in far off exotic places. That was how archeology started out in the past. People were more concerned in great findings of exotic and beautiful artifacts and structures. It was not until very much later when archeology became recognized as a science that people began to focus more on finding the small or ordinary things left behind by a culture or civilization. Things like tools, cutlery, weapons, clothing, utensils and even stationery usually speak more volumes on the culture and lifestyle of the ancients than those huge finds. They reveal more especially about the general population of commoners of that time, not only the rulers or nobles.

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Archaeological Study of Warfare

War is, in archaeological vocabulary, a comparatively simple notion to determine in relation to the material record, and without a doubt from other sources. It is possibly this diversity of resource angles that makes it easier to comprehend, and actually it can be constructive in accumulating indication about further societal activities on a wider extent. Having said this, there are still an amount of restrictions and instructive procedures which should be understood before investigating warfare in feature.
Warfare can be considered a useful, but very flexible, indicator of a society's state of development and scale. The commonly perceived easiest approach to archaeological problems is to look in the ground, so here is the first way in which to attack warfare. Graves are obvious evidence of warfare, especially warrior graves, meaning that a burial contains evidence that the body was a soldier. This evidence could be grave goods in the form of weapons or tools possibly used as weapons (an interpretative step that must be handled carefully), or grave goods specifically implicative or directly descriptive of warfare. Indeed in a different way injuries remaining on the skeleton, skeletal trauma, if identified as wounds inflicted by humans, can often be taken as indicators of warfare, and even more interestingly, structures of the numbers of such injuries within a single cemetery (given that it is a fair social cross-section and not, for example, a mass grave after a battle) can provide useful information on a society's relationships with its immediate neighbors, or even whether it had differing immediate neighbors.
Anglo-Saxon burials are most reliable in terms of surviving and respecting their warriors into the afterlife, by placing their weapons in the grave with them, indicative also of the warrior's high status in society.
Anglo-Saxon cemeteries have provided a useful line of broader investigation, including the cemetery at Sedge ford in North Norfolk with well-preserved warrior burials. One must be careful however not to draw immediate connections between grave goods and a person's position in life, a problem highlighted by the new movements of gender archaeology.
Following on from this, the battlefield itself provides, when it survives, possibly the best evidence for warfare. Not only may the later battlefields preserve the memory of fighting men, such as the Thermopylae mound memorial (although archaeologists are not allowed to excavate this heritage site), but solid evidence of a battle may be present in small finds littered around the site, or in mass graves for the deceased.


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What is Archaeology?

Archaeology is the study of the human past from its material remains, and therefore can make use of every conceivable subject in both arts and science. This factor gives it wide appeal and allows everyone to be involved.

However, it also inevitably means that nobody can "know it all". Much confusion seems to arise over archaeology's relationship to history which, although also a wide-ranging study of the past, is (for periods prior to the 20th century) primarily concerned with the written word. History forms the basic framework of study since the past is divided into prehistoric (before history) and historic periods.

When did history begin?

Historical dates are provided by documentary sources, which (obviously) presuppose the use of writing. However, not all writing can be proven to represent words or sentences and not all societies with writing used it to record events - sometimes it was used for magical purposes.

Writing has been found on many different materials - papyrus, paper, stone, metals, pottery, vellum and wood - and was developed independently in different parts of the world.

Writing seems to have been pioneered in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) in the 4th millennium BC. In Europe, although some tablets with unintelligible markings were found in a pit at La Tartaria in Romania, dating from circa 4,500 BC, these are now seen as connected with cult activities. If this is interpretation is accepted, no writing was employed in Europe until the rise of the Aegean civilisation of Bronze Age Greece and even then, the tablets in the scripts known as Linear A and Linear B (which date from circa 1600 BC and earlier) provide information that remains enigmatic.

In Britain, the first certain historical date is 55 BC, the year in which Julius Caesar crossed the Channel, writing a detailed account of his campaigns and descriptions of his adversaries. Where it has been possible to cross-check his accounts (for example at Alesia where the Gaulish leader Vercingetorix was finally besieged), they have been seen to be usefully accurate.

Doesn't history tell us enough without archaeology?

Since history is almost exclusively concerned with the written word there are limits to the information that it can provide. In many periods of the past, literacy was uncommon and reserved for a few sectors of society - typically (in Western world, for example) priests and the rich. As a result history often strongly reflects the preoccupations of these groups and is generally uninformative about the rest of the population.

Many written records survived by chance and others exist only in copies that were made in later times; some exist only as fragments. Some written material was kept in libraries in Constantinople (Byzantium, now Istanbul) and became more widely available after the fall of the city to the Turks in 1453.

There are however, very few surviving original records of events in Britain during the Roman period or its immediate aftermath. Even where copies survive, information has sometimes been added or deleted by the copyist to serve a particular purpose, or perhaps to try to make sense of material that seemed incorrect. It is often impossible to prove whether the record is reporting a true occurrence.

As a result there are many gaps in historical evidence, by period, or intent, type or survival. However, because of the differences in raw material, it is rarely possible for history and archeology to provide evidence for the same aspects of society, even for periods with a large of written material.

Archaeology is therefore of special importance in studying remote, non-literate or semi-literate periods for which there are few or no written records. Increasingly, archeology is used to study aspects of life in well-documented periods that were simply not written about directly (for example, the daily life of ordinary people).

Archeology routinely throws light on aspects of the past on which documentary sources are largely silent, such as technology or types of everyday objects that were in use in particular communities.

Seattle University Archaeology department and Seattle town car service offer guided tours to the history of our world. Seattle airport transportation provide limousine transfer from Seattle Tacoma International airport to University of Washington Archeology faculty.

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