Archaeologists study sites and artifacts to reconstruct what life was like in the past. Students in this course will learn methods of conducting archaeological surveys and excavations, dating archaeological deposits, sorting and cataloging artifacts, analyzing artifacts and the data derived from them, and interpreting patterns in those data in the effort to learn about the lives of people and groups in the past. This course concentrates on how archaeology is done, rather than on what archaeologists know about the archaeology of particular places and regions, but students will learn about selected sites and some of the major research topics of interest to archaeologists in different parts of the world.
Archaeologists are interested both in broad patterns of cultural change that affect all of humankind as well as the experiences of specific groups of people in particular places. They are interested in broadly similar topics as scholars in other subfields of anthropology—which include linguistics, cultural anthropology, and biological anthropology—but of course archaeologists focus on studying the material remnants of life in the past. Not only do archaeologists study sites and artifacts, they are also involved in the preservation and public interpretation of sites, antiquities, places, and cultural practices that are part of the heritage and history of people around the world, and archaeologists work in universities, museums, parks, government agencies, cultural heritage programs, and private consulting firms.