It's dawn in the desert. The archaeologist is brushing dust from ancient stones when one slides open, revealing a secret chamber. She enters the dark passage, avoids the nest of scorpions and grabs the gleaming treasure! That's what being an archaeologist is like in novels and at the movies. In reality, archaeologists spend very little time in the field compared with the time they spend in the laboratory or the library. Secret chambers are very few and far between. Most archaeologists might be pleasantly surprised to make a spectacular find, the kind that attracts wide public excitement. |
Instead, they are hoping for solid information which will help them understand some question that remains unanswered. Even so, it's hard to find an archaeologist who does not love his or her work. At Troy, several generations of archaeologists have helped piece together the story of the city's levels. If you think you'd like to be an archaeologist too, here are some things to know. First, be clear on what archaeology is. Sometimes it is mixed up with studying dinosaurs (that's paleontology), or studying rocks and the makeup of the earth (that's geology), or with studying human cultures (that's anthropology). Archaeologists look at physical remains, usually buried in the earth, to find clues to the lives of people who lived in the past. It's been called "the science of rubbish"! An archaeologist needs to know many kinds of things to make sense of any find: not only |
what it is made of and how old it might be, but how it might fit into the culture and customs of the people under study. In this way they are very similar to anthropologists, and they often work together. Most archaeologists investigate ancient sites from "prehistoric" times, before writing allowed people to keep records. However, many archaeologists work on historic sites because physical clues can expand what we know from written sources. Beyond this, archaeologists specialize in eras and parts of the world because nobody can know about ALL the people of the past at once. |
