The Humble Beginnings

Introduction!

So I see you have decided to take the path of archeology. It is a great choice for a career! Like I am so excited to become one myself! Do you really know what being an archeologist is all about? It isn’t really like Indiana Jones, that’s just a Hollywood portrayal of it. However, it is still an adventurous career full of glorious travels. First and foremost archeology is the study of the material past. What does that mean? Well it means that we use certain clues such as artifacts, or humanly altered objects, to decipher certain characteristics of that specific past. The study is a science in ways that a hypothesis is formulated and from that hypothesis we employ the use of extensive research methods to come up with a conclusion about a certain site or culture. When discovering an archeological site, or a place where there are traces of past activity, you hypothesize who may have inhabited that area and other things about their culture.  Archeology is actually a really young study that only cameinto practice around the 19^th century in Europe. So those lovely implications about how all archaeologists have a British accent originated from the fact that it all started there. They just would never call themselves that and that word probably didn’t exist back then either. Archeology hits so close to home since our third president Thomas Jefferson was the first to do a scientific excavation on Indian Burial mounds(Figure 1). He did this to find out if certain views about Indian burial customs were actually true.

Figure 1: Adena Mound

Archeology was established when three advances were emplaced into the discipline which were the idea of evolution, the antiquity of human kind and the development of the three age system. These gave a scheme for studying and asking astute questions about the past. The concept of evolution comes from Charles Darwin, who borrowed ideas from other theorists. Evolution does not equal diversity, progression or complexity most subtly it means change over time. Also please stop with this idea that Charles Darwin coined the phrase “Survival of the fittest” he never once mentioned it in his book Origin of Species it actually comes from some guy named Herbert Spencer he referred to it in his book called Social Statics . Charles chose reproductive fitness, or being able to reproduce as often and early as possible, to differentiate from Herbert’s social theory. The antiquity of human kind means blatantly the dating of the first human being or the upbringing of the human race. This idea brought curiosity about our past hence bringing archeology into position. The three age system is made up of three time periods that are named for their tool making technologies. The three time periods are Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age.  In this blog however we are going to go knees deep in the Bronze Age since Egyptian culture began around 3500 BCE that’s when the first settlers came to the fertile Nile valley and began to cultivate the land. These were the humble beginnings of Egypt and its powerful society that will follow from it(Figure 2).

Figure 2: The Great Pyramids of Giza: Sphinx

Sources:

Archaeology: Theories, Methods and Practices by Colin Renfrew and Paul Bahn (TextBook)/ http://www.amazon.com/Archaeology-Theories-Methods-Practice-Edition/dp/050028976X