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Essay / Importance of Archeology for Science
Archaeology is the study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record includes artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, and cultural landscapes. Furthermore, archeology Archeology is the study of the ancient and recent human past through material remains. It is a subfield of anthropology, the study of all human culture. From the million-year-old fossilized remains of our earliest human ancestors in Africa to 20th-century buildings in what is now New York City, archeology analyzes the physical remains of the past with the aim of broad and comprehensive understanding of human culture. to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Archeology offers a unique perspective on human history and culture that has contributed greatly to our understanding of the ancient and recent past. Archeology helps us understand not only where and when people lived on earth, but also why and how they lived, by examining changes and the causes of changes that occurred in human cultures over time, looking for patterns and pattern explanations to explain everything from how and when people first arrived in America, to the origins of agriculture and complex societies. Unlike history, which relies primarily on archives and written documents to interpret great lives and events, archeology allows us to go far back in time before writing. languages existed and to gain insight into the lives of ordinary people through the analysis of the things they made and left behind. Archeology is the only field of study that covers all eras and geographic regions inhabited by man. It helped us understand big topics such as ancient Egyptian religion, the origins of agriculture in the Near East, colonial life in Jamestown Virginia, the lives of African slaves in North America, and the early trade routes of the Mediterranean. Furthermore, archeology today can tell us about the lives of individuals, families and communities that might otherwise remain invisible. The father of archaeological excavations was William Cunnington (1754-1810). He undertook excavations in Wiltshire from around 1798, funded by Sir Richard Colt Hoare. Cunnington made meticulous records of Neolithic and Bronze Age barrows, and the terms he used to categorize and describe them are still used by archaeologists today. One of the major achievements of 19th century archeology was the development of stratigraphy. The idea of superimposed strata dating back to successive periods was borrowed from the new geological and paleontological work of scholars like William Smith. The application of stratigraphy to archeology first occurred with the excavations of prehistoric and Bronze Age sites. During the third and fourth decades of the 19th century, archaeologists like Jacques Boucher de Perthes and Christian Jürgensen Thomsen began to arrange the objects they had found in chronological order. Military officer and ethnologist Augustus Pitt Rivers, who began excavations on his lands in England in the 1880s, was a major figure in the development of archeology into a rigorous science. His approach was very methodical by the standards of the time and he is widely considered the first scientific archaeologist. He classified his objects by type or “typologically”, and within types by, 42(3), 365-380.