Development of Archaeological Inquiry Flashcards
Examples of interest in antiquity in older civilizations?
- Aztecs, their Toltec heritage and the city of Teotihuacan
- Nabonidus, the last king of Babylon dug an important temple and found the foundation stone which had being laid 2200 years earlier.
- European middle ages - renaissance period, scholars began to study classical antiquity, also focused on field monuments such as Stonehenge and Carnac in Brittany.
William Stukeley
Phasing of field monuments and demonstrated that the monuments were built by people in antiquity and not by devils or giants.
Gongora
In 1675 led the New World’s first excavation by digging in the temple of the moon in Teotihuacan.
Bishop Ussher of Armagh
Chronology, and calculated the Creation (in the biblical sense)
Thomas Jefferson
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.
Christian Jurgensen (C.J.) Thomsen
Created the three-age system: stone-age, bronze-age and iron-age
Perthes
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.
Charles Lyell
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.
Charles Darwin
Natural selection
Austen Henry Layard
Discovered huge Assyrian sculptures, a great library of tablets and this lead to Henry Rawlinson proving that Kuyunjik was biblical Nineveh, crude excavations
Jean-Francois Champollion
Used bilingual description to decipher the hieroglyphs on the rosetta stone (which had both greek and Egyptian texts).
Henry Rawlinson
Interpreted the Assyrian tablets to prove that Kuyunjik was biblical Nineveh.
Edward Robinson
Rediscovery of the ancient biblical world : Hezekiah’s tunnel
Heinrich Schliemann
Rediscovery of “Troy” from Homer’s Iliad -> wife and ornaments
John Lloyd Stephen
Discovered the Maya
Ephraim Squire and Edwin Davis
Mounds of the Ohio and Mississippi River Valleys: Pioneered archaeological survey and publication of data (in the Americas)
John Wesley Powell
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.
Petrie
Sequence Dating (now known as seriation)
Pitt-Rivers
Total Recording
Wheeler
Grid Squares
Sir Arthur Evans
Discovery of Knossoss and the Minoas
Woolley
Ur and the Sumerians: pushed the date of the civilization even further back
Howard Carter
King Tut’s tomb - the discovery raised the profile of archaeology and egyptology
Gordon Childe
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.
Julian Steward
Ecological Archaeology and how people and cultures changed within this context
Gordon Willey
Analyzed settlement patterns and how they changed over time; also introduced processual archaeology with Phillip Phillips.
Graham Clarke
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.
Walter Taylor
Conjunctive approach
Willard Libby
Radiocarbon Dating
Robert Braidwood
Searching for the origins of Agriculture, looked into the origins of domestication
Binford
New Archaeology
