| AOR Archaeology Online Resources |
| The History of Archaeology |
| "Discover, Explore, and Learn from the Past!" |
| Here you can learn how Archaeology developed through the ages. |
| Archaeology as we know it today is a relatively new field, with its core focus and methodology only coming after the 1800's. The Greeks and Romans speculated about ancient times, and believed that Egypt was the cradle of all civilization. Roman tourists flocked to the Nile to gaze on the Pyramids. This soon ended with the fall of Rome. Archaeology in the modern sense began around the 1740's with wealthy European men, who went to Italy and brought back Classical antiquities with them. Others began analyzing earthworks, burial mounds, and ancient monuments around the countryside. By the late eighteenth century, people were digging into burial mounds and filling their homes with cabinets of relics. In 1807, the Danish museum curator Christian Jurgensen Thomsen arranged the displays of the Royal Museum in Copenhagen in three separate rooms. These were the Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age. This three age system was the first classification of prehistoric times. In 1839, John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood traveled to Belize and searched for ancient Maya temples. They found the ruins of Copan, one of the great Maya centers. These men recorded indepth visual descriptions and pictures of what they had found. They then continued to Palenque, Guatemala and recorded the rooms, courtyards, and structures decorated with reliefs and hieroglyphs. They both returned to New York, and Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and the Yucatan was published in 1841. The two men returned in 1842, and explored Uxmal, Chichen Itza, and other Mayan sites. In 1840, the French Government appointed Emile Botta, their Consul at Mosul, a small town on the Tigris upstream from Baghdad. Botta made several discoveries at Khorsabad, unearthing an Assyrian palace with vivid reliefs. Austen Henry Layard, an Englishman, arrived in India in 1842 and was fascinated with the mounds on the banks of the Tigris. In 1854, he returned and started digging in mounds 17 miles downstream from Nineveh at Nimrud, the Biblical city known as Caleh. Layard found three Assyrian palaces in a month, all adorned with exotic wall motifs. Supervising some 600 men, Austen Layard uncovered a virtually unknown civilization. He continued digging at sites further out from Nimrud, discovering the royal palace of King Ashur-bani-pal in 1850. |
| Further Resources: Archaeology Development in the United States Columbia Encyclopedia: History of Archaeology History & Development of Archaeology Timeline of Archaeological Development |
| Mesopotamian archaeology came about in the 1870s, with the discovery of Sumerian civilization between the Tigris and Euphrates. Leonard Woolley's 1920s and 1930s excavations of the famous Royal Cemetary at Ur, which date to about 3200 BC, is a classic example of early archaeology. In 1856, a primitive looking skull with massive bony ridges above the eye sockets was discovered near Neanderthal, Germany. A British biologist Thomas Huxley thought it to be an ancestor of modern people...and the first to state a relationship between human beings and chimpanzees. British archaeologist John Evans visited quarries along France's Somme River and found stone axes alongside extinct European animals like the hippopotamus, elephant, and saber-toothed tiger. Around 1798, Napolean invaded Egypt, and had 40 scientists with him to record ancient and modern life along the Nile, uncovering many great historical items and reliefs. The Rosetta Stone was one of these great finds. In 1822, Jean Francois Champollion deciphered the stone...and in 1828, he was one of the first scientists who could read the inscriptions on Ancient Egyptian temples and tomb walls. The great era of exploration of Egyptology ended in November 1922, with the amazing discovery of pharoah Tutankhamun's tomb by Carter. Around the 1920s, Franz Boas and his students collected massive amounts of data in North America, and argued for Archaeology as a viable Science. In the late 1920s, tree-ring dating (dendrochronology) was perfected by A.E. Douglas, an astronomer...for use in the Southwestern United States. This was the first method developed for determining chronological age of archaeological sites. The Midwestern Taxonomic System is proposed by W. C. McKern and colleagues as a method for organizing archaeological data collected in large regions, and it is widely used through the 1960s. During the 1950s, Carbon 14 dating was developed by J.R. Arnold and W.F. Libby, allowing archaeologists to date sites and artifacts back to 50,000 years. For a more detailed history and information, be sure to check out the links listed above. The "Archaeological development in the United States" is an especially informative link. |
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