Archaeology - a definition

ARCHAEOLOGY studies all changes in the material world that are due to human action--naturally in so far as they survive. The archæological record is constituted of the fossilized results of human behaviour, and it is the archæologist's business to reconstitute that behaviour as far as he can and so to recapture the thoughts that behaviour expressed. In so far as he can do that, he becomes an historian. The aim of this book is therefore to explain how archæologists order their data to form a record and how they may try to interpret them as concrete embodiments of thoughts.

The most familiar surviving results of behaviour are of course the things men have made or unmade which may be called artifacts. These include on the one hand tools, weapons, personal ornaments, charms, statuettes, and on the other farm-houses, temples, castles, canals, mineshafts, graves. It is convenient to divide artifacts into two classes--relics and monuments. The former are portable and can be removed to a museum or laboratory for study. Monuments are either earth-fast or too massive to remove and have to be studied on the spot.
But not all archæological data belong to one or other of these classes, nor can be called artifacts at all. A Mediterranean shell found in a reindeer hunter's cave in Central France is not an artifact, not having itself been altered by man. But its presence in Central France several hundred miles from its nearest natural habitat is a result of human action and as such an archæological datum; for shells do not fly and no known natural agency would carry the cowrie shell from the Gulf of Lions to the valley of the Vezère that flows into the Bay of Biscay. So its transport is a very significant archæological phenomenon.

Again the interment of a body, crouched on its left side facing south, is the result of human action, but cannot be called an artifact. One house in the Late Bronze Age village of Buchau was twice as big as all the rest and more elaborate in construction. Such relations between monuments or relics are very significant archæological phenomena from which historical inferences can be drawn, but are themselves neither monuments nor relics. The relations of monuments and relics to the non-human environment too may be archæological data. The location of settlements in relation to good fishing grounds, to easily cultivable soil or to sheltered harbours may give a decisive clue as to the activities and economy of the settlers. The natural environment is at once an incentive and a limit to human action. At the same time man's intervention may itself profoundly affect the environment, exterminating some animals and introducing others, clearing forests and turning grassy steppes into dustbowls. These changes are strictly the result of human action, but cannot usually be defined by normal archæological techniques, but only with the aid of methods devised by the natural sciences--botany, zoology, climatology and geology. And their aid must be invoked too in determining the unmodified environment which, quite apart from human intervention, has undergone vast changes during the period of man's existence on the earth. The importance for archæology of these phenomena that must be studied by other disciplines has been recognized in the University of London by the creation of a Department of Environmental Archæology--a precedent followed by other universities in Britain and on the Continent

V. Gordon Childe (1956) Piecing Together the Past: The Interpretation of Archaeological Data. New York, Frederick A. Praeger, págs. 1-3