Mark Vincent E.

Colambo November 7, 2019

Archaeo 201

What is Archaeology?
By Mark Vincent E. Colambo

When I was a child, I view archaeology as an action-packed adventurous, treasure

hunting profession. Archaeologists were always depicted in movies as badass people searching
for artifacts. That conceptual depiction will always be fascinating to the eyes of an innocent
child. But that perspective would change as I mature and gain experience. I have a vague
memory during my high school days that every time my social science teacher asks about the
definition of archaeology, I’ll firmly answer that it is a complex study of fossils and artifacts.
Now that I’m an archaeology student, I realize that you cannot contain and isolate the meaning
of archaeology in just one coherent definition. The definition varies according to different
perspectives and disciplines. Each discipline sees archaeology differently.
An anthropologist would view archaeology as a way to study human culture through the
material remains left by past civilizations. Renfrew and Bahn (2016) stated that archaeology is a
discipline of anthropology. It is generally a past tense of cultural anthropology. The only
difference is cultural anthropologist studies culture through participant observation; by
experiencing the actual life of contemporary communities while archaeology study past humans
and societies primarily through the material culture left by former societies.
On the other hand, historians view archaeology in a similar sense. For them, archaeology
is a study of human activity in the past, primarily through the recovery and analysis of the
material culture. It could be concluded that archaeology is the primary source of history. It is the
principal discipline that reconstructs the past. A historian would study the past through the
analysis of written records while an archaeologist would study the past through the analysis of
physical remains. There’s somewhat a direct relationship between archaeology and history.
Without archaeology, reconstructing and understanding the past would be challenging.
As a science, archaeology is defined as the scientific analysis of artifacts and other
physical remains. According to Renfrew and Bahn (2016), objects that archaeologists discover
tell us nothing directly about themselves. Thus, archaeologists were required to conduct
scientific methods to make sense of these things and to develop a picture of the past.
 Based on the stated definitions, I could say that archaeology is the reconstruction of past
through the analysis of physical remains. It is an investigative discipline. You could easily
associate archaeology with forensic investigation. Forensic investigation is the gathering and
analysis of all crime-related physical evidence in order to come to a conclusion about the
suspect. Forensic investigators examine all physical evidences in the crime scene in order to
establish how a crime took place. In a similar fashion, archaeology examines physical evidences
in order to establish how past event or past phenomenon took place.
Archaeology is a combination of various disciplines. That reason alone makes it very
challenging to study, but that won’t discourage me from achieving my ambition to become an
archaeologist someday.

Reference/s:
Renfrew, C., & Bahn, P. (2016). Archaeology: Theories, Methods and Practice. New York: Thames & Hudson Inc.