Alternative spellings

• archæology (Commonwealth)
• archeology (primarily USA)

Archaeology (sometimes written archæology) or archeology (from Greek ἀρχαιολογία, archaiologia – ἀρχαῖος, arkhaīos, "ancient"; and -λογία, -logiā, "-logy") is the science that studies human cultures through the recovery, documentation, analysis, and interpretation of material culture and environmental data, including architecture, artifacts, biofacts, and landscapes. Archaeology aims to understand humankind through these humanistic endeavors. In the United States it is a subset of anthropology, which contains: physical anthropology, cultural anthropology, archaeology, and linguistic anthropology. However, in some universities in America and many in the United Kingdom and Europe, archaeology is considered as a separate discipline entirely.

Methodology, theory, and philosophy centralize archaeological (and anthropological) debate. Research, survey, excavation, analysis, and preservation are the tools of archaeological processes.

'Archaeological goals' are debatable. Some goals include the documentation and explanation of the origins and development of human cultures, understanding culture history, chronicling cultural evolution, and studying human behavior and ecology, for both prehistoric and historic societies.

In broad scope, archaeology relies on cross-disciplinary research. It draws upon anthropology, history, art history, classics, ethnology, geography, geology, linguistics, physics, information sciences, chemistry, statistics, paleoecology, paleontology, paleozoology, paleoethnobotany, and paleobotany.

Archaeology is the study of human cultures through the recovery, documentation and analysis of material remains and environmental data, including architecture, artifacts, biofacts, human remains, and landscapes.

Contents

• 1 Sourced
  • 1.1 Verse
• 2 Unsourced
• 3 External links

Sourced

• Archaeology is destruction.
  • Mortimer Wheeler Archaeology From the Earth (1954)

• Archaeology is archaeology is archaeology
  • David Clarke "Analytical Archaeology" (1968)

• History is too serious to be left to historians.
  • Ian Macleod, The Observer (July 16, 1961)

• He that diggeth a pit, shall fall into it.
  • King James Bible Proverbs 26:27,

• Archaeology is the nearest history comes to shopping.
  • Alan Bennett (2004) The History Boys

Verse

Dug from the tomb of taste-refining time,

Each form is exquisite, each block sublime.

Or good, or bad,—disfigur’d, or deprav’d,—

All art, is at its resurrection sav’d;

All crown’d with glory in the critic’s heav’n,

Each merit magnified, each fault forgiven.

Martin Archer Shee (1805) Rhymes on Art, or the Remonstrance of a Painter Part 2