Development of Archaeological Inquiry

Question 1

Examples of interest in antiquity in older civilizations?

Answer 1

1. Aztecs, their Toltec heritage and the city of Teotihuacan
2. Nabonidus, the last king of Babylon dug an important temple and found the foundation stone which had being laid 2200 years earlier.
3. European middle ages - renaissance period, scholars began to study classical antiquity, also focused on field monuments such as Stonehenge and Carnac in Brittany.

Question 2

William Stukeley

Answer 2

Phasing of field monuments and demonstrated that the monuments were built by people in antiquity and not by devils or giants.

Question 3

Gongora

Answer 3

In 1675 led the New World’s first excavation by digging in the temple of the moon in Teotihuacan.

Question 4

Bishop Ussher of Armagh

Answer 4

Chronology, and calculated the Creation (in the biblical sense)

Question 5

Thomas Jefferson

Answer 5

Father of American Archaeology, emergence of a “scientific” approach to archaeology, dug a trench across a burial mound to test the question of what the mounds were. Found that it was a burial mound with many layers, hence it was reused.

Question 6

Christian Jurgensen (C.J.) Thomsen

Answer 6

Created the three-age system: stone-age, bronze-age and iron-age

Question 7

Perthes

Answer 7

Worked in gravel quarries of the Somme River and found evidence of human artifacts and bones of extinct animals > indicated that human existence goes further back than the biblical flood.

Question 8

Charles Lyell

Answer 8

Uniformitarianism : stratification of the rocks is due to processes still on going in the seas, oceans, lakes, etc.
Also, wrote “Principles of Geology” where he argued that ancient conditions are in essence uniform with present conditions.

Question 9

Charles Darwin

Answer 9

Natural selection

Question 10

Austen Henry Layard

Answer 10

Discovered huge Assyrian sculptures, a great library of tablets and this lead to Henry Rawlinson proving that Kuyunjik was biblical Nineveh, crude excavations

Question 11

Jean-Francois Champollion

Answer 11

Used bilingual description to decipher the hieroglyphs on the rosetta stone (which had both greek and Egyptian texts).

Question 12

Henry Rawlinson

Answer 12

Interpreted the Assyrian tablets to prove that Kuyunjik was biblical Nineveh.

Question 13

Edward Robinson

Answer 13

Rediscovery of the ancient biblical world : Hezekiah’s tunnel

Question 14

Heinrich Schliemann

Answer 14

Rediscovery of “Troy” from Homer’s Iliad -> wife and ornaments

Question 15

John Lloyd Stephen

Answer 15

Discovered the Maya

Question 16

Ephraim Squire and Edwin Davis

Answer 16

Mounds of the Ohio and Mississippi River Valleys: Pioneered archaeological survey and publication of data (in the Americas)

Question 17

John Wesley Powell

Answer 17

Published information on the rapidly dwindling Native American race, and settled the question of the Moundbuilder race. Proved that the Natives had created the mounds. Also, founded Bureau of American Ethnology.

Question 18

Petrie

Answer 18

Sequence Dating (now known as seriation)

Question 19

Pitt-Rivers

Answer 19

Total Recording

Question 20

Wheeler

Answer 20

Grid Squares

Question 21

Sir Arthur Evans

Answer 21

Discovery of Knossoss and the Minoas

Question 22

Woolley

Answer 22

Ur and the Sumerians: pushed the date of the civilization even further back

Question 23

Howard Carter

Answer 23

King Tut’s tomb - the discovery raised the profile of archaeology and egyptology

Question 24

Gordon Childe

Answer 24

Excavated at Scara Brae Neolithic settlement on island of Oakley. Almost single handedly wrote the prehistory of Europe. Used the recurring artifacts to interpret and describe a culture. Went beyond the questions of chronology, to ask why and how things happened, evolved the complexity of ideas.

Question 25

Julian Steward

Answer 25

Ecological Archaeology and how people and cultures changed within this context

Question 26

Gordon Willey

Answer 26

Analyzed settlement patterns and how they changed over time; also introduced processual archaeology with Phillip Phillips.

Question 27

Graham Clarke

Answer 27

Environmental adaptation but through a scientific approach: first time brought collaborations between ecologists, botanists and other specializations, and had an economic approach to analyzing people and cultures in antiquity.

Question 28

Walter Taylor

Answer 28

Conjunctive approach

Question 29

Willard Libby

Answer 29

Radiocarbon Dating

Question 30

Robert Braidwood

Answer 30

Searching for the origins of Agriculture, looked into the origins of domestication

Question 31

Binford

Answer 31

New Archaeology