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.