Anthropology › Section B · Methods › Topic B.1
Archaeological research methods
Most of the human past left no written record, only objects, buildings, food waste and graves. Archaeologists find these traces, dig them up layer by layer and record exactly where everything lay, because once a site is excavated that information can never be recovered.
In this topic
- Reading the past from what people left behind
- Artefacts, ecofacts and features
- Finding sites
- Context is everything
- Excavating and recording
- Stratigraphy and the law of superposition
- Worked example: reading a trench section
- What survives
- Archaeology in many settings
- Worked example: one bowl, three contexts
- Common mistakes to avoid
- Key takeaways
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