INTRODUCTION TO ARCHAEOLOGY Nancy White - Touro Institute

acquisition of the material (from that quarry site we get the stone), manufacture (we make the
stone tool by chipping it or flintknapping), use (which puts wear and other evidence on the stone
tool), and deposition (either accidental, by losing something, or deliberate, by throwing it away).
All of these can be included under the heading of site formational processes, with two kinds, the
human and the natural. After the original people are gone later humans transform the landscape,
reusing old materials, plowing them down, covering them, and so forth. Modern human action is
responsible for destroying hundreds of archaeological sites per day in the U.S. and across the
world, mostly because people do not realize what they are destroying or how important it is. This
is why education in the stewardship of the past is so
important worldwide.
Natural processes can be classed as physical (erosion,
rain, gravity), chemical (weathering, rusting), or
biological (animals burrowing, bacteria decaying) , and
can work at the small scale (rotting away of a wooden
artifact) or the large (rotting away of a whole village of
wooden houses). They can be subtractive, destroying
the materials, or preservative, burying the materials in
river flood sands or volcanic deposits.
The vagaries of the archaeological record severely bias
our archaeological interpretations. What are the kinds
of materials best preserved? Usually stone and ceramics. What is usually not preserved? Usually
organic materials such as wood, animal flesh and bone. What conditions preserve organic
remains best? Freezing, drying, or keeping wet all the time. The Florida climate, for example, is
wonderful for organic decay because it is hot and cold, wet and dry. The soils are acidic, insuring
rapid decay of organics. But in a shell midden the basic nature of the shell contributes to good
preservation of animal bones, such as those passed
around.
At the Windover site near Cape Canaveral, where
Archaic period Indians buried their dead in a pond, the
constant wet environment preserved wood, bone, grass
matting, and even the people’s brain matter inside their
skulls. Your book pictures other preserved people from
Danish bogs, with all their clothes and even some with
ropes around the neck indicating they were killed and
thrown in there. On the desert coast of Peru, the lack
of rainfall for years at a time guarantees the
preservation of skin, feathers, textiles, and other
perishables. Frozen Inca mummies have been
recovered from high-altitude ceremonial sites in the Andes, and other frozen past people have
come from the Arctic and elsewhere. There is even the frozen 5,300-year-old Italian guy from
the Alpine glacier who we will see later in the class.