Do you want to know how to make an archaeologist really mad, really fast?
Ask her about the dinosaurs she's found.
People use catch-all, shorthand terms for things all the time, even in science.
Like, we might refer to one kind of physicist as an astronomer, even if he's never set his
eye to an eyepiece because the calculations that he works on have to do with the motions
of stars and galaxies.
It's just easier for people to understand when you're at a cocktail party, and it's
basically accurate, so no harm done.
But, to use archaeology as a synonym for the study of dinosaurs and fossils and forms of
ancient life, which actually called paleontology, is not lazy shorthand, it's wrong.
While the two disciplines do have some very basic principles in common, mixing up archaeology
with paleontology is sort of like taking your sick kid to a wildlife biologist for a diagnosis,
or ordering a birthday cake from a chemist.
People might understand why you've made that mistake, but they would also tell you that
you are way off.
So let me help you know your scientists.
Archaeology, first of all, is the study of the human past through material remains.
Not human remains at least the majority of the time, but through the traces that people
have left behind in the process of living their lives.
Those things could be artifacts, basically any objects that a human made or used, or
features, things that people made that can't be moved, like a wall or a ditch or an old
hearth full of charcoal.
Paleontology, by contrast, deals with the even more distant past; it's the study of
ancient life of all kinds, mostly but not always by investigating fossils, the mineralized
remains of living things.
It kind of makes sense that the two fields are often confused for each other because
they both use science to understand history, and they both involve a lot of digging.
In fact, the main thing that archaeology and paleontology have in common is the basic understanding
that the deeper down you dig below earth's surface, the farther back in time you go.
The surface of the earth is always reworking itself, after all, whether it's because of
plants dying and turning into topsoil, or volcanic eruptions covering everything in
ash, or floods laying down new layers of sediment.
That's why both archaeologists and paleontologists are trained in the science of reading these
layers, a branch of geology called stratigraphy.
But that's about where the similarities end, because archaeologists and paleontologists
explore the strata of earth at different depths, looking for different things.
You might not have to dig too far to find, like, stone spear points from a few thousand
years ago, but to reach back further into the past and find a fossil of a Pteranodon,
you got to get into older layers of earth.
So archaeologists study human history, but humans have been around a long time, and we've
left a lot of history lying around, so it makes sense that there are different kinds
of archaeology.
Since most of our history hasn't been written down, a lot of archaeologists study prehistory.
Now prehistory doesn't mean before there was history; obviously there's always been history,
but simply a time before historical events were documented, either in writing or in oral
traditions that can help us understand what we find in the ground.
So the investigation of cultures that thrived before they fixed their history into words,
is prehistoric archaeology.
The stone age dwellers of the Levant, the hunter-gatherers of America, even the cultures
that created Stonehenge and the great houses of Chaco Canyon all fit into this category.
But even after historical records started to become a thing, there were still lots of
gaps for us to fill in.
So historical archaeology is dedicated to exploring the lives of people who lived during
recorded history.
Classical archaeology, for example, focuses on ancient western cultures like those of
Greece and Rome.
Industrial archaeology explores old ways of engineering, mining and manufacturing.
There's even a whole sub-field of maritime archaeology, which just investigates shipwrecks.
None of these fields, you'll notice, involve raiding tombs or snatching golden idols from
booby-trapped chambers, or punching Nazis.
Archaeologists just like to dig and find stuff, and more often than not, leave them where
they found them.
Paleontology is just as diverse.
As soon as I mention fossils, you probably go straight to thinking about dinosaurs, and
yeah, lots of paleontologists study dinosaurs, but there are even more who study other kinds
of ancient life, salamanders as big as people, sloths as big as bears, winged reptiles the
size of giraffes.
All of these animals were once real and are now extinct, and they fall under the umbrella
of paleontology.
Not to mention all the other forms of life like invertebrates like insects and mollusks
and plants and all manner of microscopic life.
There are even fields devoted expressly to the study of things like pollen and ancient
animal tracks.
So, next time you're at a cocktail party and somebody says they're and archaeologist, ask
them about what sites, artifacts or features they're working on.
Maybe ask whether they do historic or prehistoric archaeology, or if they work in the ground
or underwater.
Just please, for the love of Pete, do not mention dinosaurs or Nazis.
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