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- [Woman] Everyday we discard things.
If we think about this in terms of centuries,
these objects get buried over time.
Older things get buried deeper
and that's essentially what we're talking about
when we think about an archaeological site.
- [Man] Just like if you look around
the place where you live today,
the objects tell a story about things you like,
things that you don't like, ways that you live your life
and the story of the past lies in the objects,
since the people themselves can't be interrogated.
And so the whole range of human experience,
archaeology can tell that story.
- [Woman] So thinking in terms of layers is crucial.
- [Man] Everything relies on layers
and archaeological stratigraphy relies on,
what we call, the law of superposition,
which simply means that the oldest thing
tends to be at a lower level
and the more recent material
tends to be closer to the modern surface.
- [Woman] So an archaeologist will be recording
what level of the soil the object is found at,
what objects are nearby
and they're also learning things from the soil.
- [Man] In a sense the archaeologist is reading the site
as if you were reading your favorite book backwards,
in starting at the end of the story
and then trying to work your way
towards the beginnings of the story
by disassembling and documenting
the layers of human activity and
lack of activity that have occurred at that place over time.
- [Woman] So an archaeological site is
rich and dense with information.
If we go in and we only pull out the most beautiful,
the most precious objects, and cast aside what seems like
the detritus of everyday life,
we're going to lose so much
that could tell us about a culture.
- [Man] As a discipline,
the 21st century archeologists have come to the point
where not only are they interested
in the discovery and the conservation of the object,
but they're also committed
to the preservation of its contextual information.
- [Woman] Often archaeological sites are looted
and when that happens we lose so much context.
Objects are looted so that people can live and eat
in parts of the world that are deeply impoverished.
So, there is often a sense that it's the collector at fault,
it's the demand for these objects that are the problem.
- [Man] The looting of archaeological sites
that's happening in the world today,
tends to be motivated by concerns
that are different from those of archaeology,
in that the archeological exploration
of a site tends to be slow and methodical
and looting tends to happen along a different
and much quicker timeline in order to acquire,
extract objects that the black market has a taste for.
It often means a serious disruption
of whatever the archeological context is
in the pursuit of whatever objects are desired.
And often the things that are not objects per se,
like the soil matrix,
this helps tell the contextual story of that place
and once those are destroyed or seriously disrupted,
there's no recovering them.
- [Woman] So what can we learn from the soil matrix?
- [Man] We can increasingly learn more
from dirt than ever before.
We can even understand things about elements in human diet
by looking at mineral traces in human remains.
- [Woman] We can do garden archaeology
and learn what people were growing, not just to eat,
but to decorate the outside of their homes.
- [Man] And this is an example of why
contextual information is so vital.
- [Woman] So if we privileged the object,
we're losing so much,
especially if we're privileging the objects
that collectors are most interested in.
- [Man] If we focus only on the object,
we are going to miss most of the story.
- [Woman] And these days there's so many tools
for archaeologists to accurately record
an archaeological site.
- [Man] Computerated technology
has really revolutionized archaeological field work.
It has not only made things more accurate,
but it has also enabled us to collect
more data than ever before,
such that we may even be collecting data now
that scholars from the future may still be able to analyze
further than we can.
- [Woman] And I can even use photogrammetry
to recreate that object digitally in three dimensions.
- [Man] Those photo models can then
allow someone who was not present at the excavation
to virtually experience that object
or a grouping of objects in their original context.
- [Woman] And we can also get into the air.
- [Man] Air born imaging, whether Lidar
or from drones or from fixed wing aircraft,
is further enhancing our ability to read human landscapes
and to see the human activity
that happens over time in any given place,
as well as to establish patterns
of human activity in the landscape.
So not just focusing on a site,
but seeing groupings of sites
or patterns of human occupation in the landscape.
- [Woman] Archaeology is always destructive in some way.
One is undoing those layers of the past.
- [Man] We often say that archaeology
is the unrepeatable experiment,
in that once the site is disassembled,
there's no real way of assembling it again.
The properly conducted archaeological field work
is usually slow and may be a bit boring,
especially when compared to
Hollywood versions of archaeology.
But this slow, methodical recording of the site
is perhaps the most important part
of the archaeological method.
- [Woman] But every site can only tell us
a piece of a story.
- [Man] Any archaeological site,
incredibly ancient or even quite recent
will always be incomplete.
The archaeological record will always have gaps.
One could even imagine that an archaeological site
is like a 5,000 piece picture puzzle
that one might have in the closet at home,
only you've lost about 2,800
of the pieces (woman laughs)
and that helpful picture on the box lid
that shows you what its supposed to look like
has also perished.
And so contextual interpretation means,
can you use extant knowledge to fill in the missing pieces.
And the sad answer is that you will never
have a total picture of that place,
but you can get pretty close.
- [Woman] And that's why we wanna do everything we can
to preserve those contexts and discourage
the destruction of archeological sites through looting.
- [Man] Yes, we want to encourage people
to think about the fact that archaeology
is telling the human story
and we need as many pieces of information
as we can get our hands on.
And so, if we're only focused on an object
that is pleasing to us for one reason or another,
our ability to tell a complete and holistic story
of the human past is greatly diminished.
And so, looting, that fuels a demand
for black market items for instance,
essentially means that we are literally destroying
irretrievable elements of the story of our collective past.
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