How important is archaeology?

Question

real archaeology, not raiding mummy tombs for gold or other indian jones BS. don't even MENTION dinosaurs.

Answer 1

I'm not sure what you mean by important, most people would say that archaeology is not important at all. But I would disagree with that. Archaeology helps us decipher the past, both historic and prehistoric.

I have worked primarily on historic cultures, and while someone might say that we could just read about them and archaeology was just a waste of time and money, again I would have to argue it. Archaeology gives a voice to regular and disenfranchised people. Much of what we know about the daily lives of slaves in the South, about the poor in rural areas, about the first settlers to the 'New World' comes from archaeology. These people often didn't know how to write, and the people who did know sure weren't going to give an accurate account for the history books.

People tend to fall for the glamor of the Egyptian pharaohs or the Mayan kings, but they tend to forget that they were only the very pinnacle of those civilizations. Finding a new tomb or some god is nice, and it's awesome for publicity and especially for funding. But underneath these rulers there were thousands of people living their day to day lives. For the most these people are ignored by the written histories of the time. Archaeology (and anthropology) can be used to help reconstruct the lives of these people, giving a more complete picture of these past cultures.

But don't be so down on dinosaurs. I got a job once because the museum director was too stupid to know that archaeologists didn't do dinosaurs. So I just let her believe that I knew all about them. I had taken a few geology classes to augment my archaeological studies so I knew enough to get by someone who obviously knew nothing. She was a total wack job, but I got the job. I was comfortably ensconced on the job before someone told her that it was a paleontologist she wanted. LOL!

Answer 2

Real archeology is spending days scraping the mud to find a few flakes of rock. Then measuring and recording them. It's also spending an hour in the lab for everyone you spend in the field. It's doing a soil flotation and then hours picking and sorting each  speck of stuff.

Finally, it's putting everything together in a well written report.

There's a spot outside Washington DC we dug for a number of years. We started with a "Foghorn Leghorn" glass, then worked back through a Spanish American War camp, a skirmish of the Civil War, a farmhouse and then Native American occupation. We finally got back 6,000 years.

It was nice to know what had gone on and how we ended up where we are.