DIGGING DEEPER

DIGGING DEEPER

How Archaeology Works

ERIC H. CLINE

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright © 2020 by Princeton University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Cline, Eric H., author.

Title: Digging deeper : how archaeology works / Eric H. Cline.

Description: Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020006701 (print) | LCCN 2020006702 (ebook) | ISBN 9780691208572 (paperback) | ISBN 9780691211398 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Archaeology—Methodology.

Classification: LCC CC75.5 .C55 2021 (print) | LCC CC75.5 (ebook) | DDC 930.1072—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020006701

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020006702

Version 1.0

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

Editorial: Rob Tempio and Matt Rohal

Production Editorial: Lauren Lepow

Text Design: Carmina Alvarez

Cover Design: Karl Spurzem

CONTENTS

1. List of Illustrations    vii

2. Preface: A Petrified Monkey’s Paw    ix

3. DIGGING DEEPER 1

How Do You Know Where to Dig?    1

4. DIGGING DEEPER 2

How Do You Know How to Dig?    27

5. DIGGING DEEPER 3

How Old Is This and Why Is It Preserved?    60

6. DIGGING DEEPER 4

How Do We Know What They Ate, Wore, and Looked Like?    85

7. DIGGING DEEPER 5

Do You Get to Keep What You Find?    108

8. EPILOGUE

Back to the Future    120

9. Acknowledgments    130

10. Notes    131

11. Bibliography    141

12. Index    157

ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. 1. Pylos (PRAP) survey area

Fig. 2. Using LiDAR at ground level to record the wine jars at Tel Kabri

Fig. 3. Doing remote sensing at Megiddo

Fig. 4. Beginning a survey transect at PRAP

Fig. 5. Surveying in the Western Galilee

Fig. 6. Excavation tools of the trade

Fig. 7. Excavating with dental tools

Fig. 8. Excavating at Tel Kabri

Fig. 9. Kenyon-Wheeler squares in Area Q at Megiddo

Fig. 10. Stratigraphic section at Tell el-Maskhuta in Egypt

Fig. 11. Stratigraphic section with “ice cream layers” at Tel Kabri

Fig. 12. Pottery washing at Megiddo

Fig. 13. Ötzi the Iceman after discovery

Fig. 14. Tollund Man

Fig. 15. Iron helmet from Sutton Hoo

Fig. 16. Reconstruction of Ötzi the Iceman

Fig. 17a–b. Wet sieving soil samples at Tel Kabri

Fig. 18. (a) Flotation machine; (b) sorting through flotation material at Tel Kabri

Fig. 19. Looting pit at Lisht in Egypt, May 2011

PREFACE

A PETRIFIED MONKEY’S PAW

There is something a bit disconcerting about waking up from an afternoon nap to find the excavation’s physical anthropologist arranging parts of a skeleton on a table at the foot of your bed. Even for me, that’s not an everyday occurrence. And yet, such can be the nature of archaeology in the field.

In 2017, I published a book called Three Stones Make a Wall: The Story of Archaeology, which is meant to be an introduction to archaeology for people of all ages. In it, I traced the evolution of archaeology from its earliest beginnings to its emergence as a highly organized, professional, and scientific systematic study of past peoples and cultures. It includes stories about the archaeologists and discoveries that are the most fascinating to me, and that I believe are among the most important in illuminating how archaeology has developed as a discipline over the years, and how it has shed light on some of the long-lost ancient sites and civilizations.[1]

Within that book, I also included sections entitled “Digging Deeper.” In those, I provided practical details and advice about how to actually do archaeology, by giving answers to questions that I am frequently asked, like the following:

“How do you know where to dig?”

“How do you know how old something is?”

“Do you get to keep what you find?”

However, I was not able to include everything that I wanted to in those sections, since the volume was getting too long. In particular, I had to leave out an entire section on how we know what people ate, wore, and looked like; how we know what their environment was like; and so on. It was suggested that I might spin off a smaller volume, consisting of just those “Digging Deeper” chapters, for those who are more interested in learning about how we do archaeology than in reading about ancient sites. I jumped at the chance, for it meant that I would be able to add that chapter, as well as update the others to some extent.

The result is the book that you are currently holding. I hope that it is of use to those of you who are about to go on your first excavation, as well as to those who have not yet had the opportunity to do so.

Before we begin, I should note that in the chapters below I have included a number of examples based on the work of my fellow archaeologists, like the account of Ötzi the Iceman, but I also have drawn from my own fieldwork, ranging from Crete to Cyprus to California. In some cases, my experiences can be held up as an example of what not to do on a survey or an excavation. There was the time I fell down a small cliff while surveying in Greece, and my intriguing discovery, on my first dig in Israel, of what I thought was a petrified monkey’s paw—it turned out to be a Hellenistic bronze furniture piece in the shape of the Greek god Pan, the one with horns on his head who goes around playing on the double pipes. This means that my discussions will occasionally be very location specific. For instance, we regularly use pickaxes to dig in the Middle East, whereas they are almost never used at digs on the East Coast of the United States, and so I have noted when the tasks that I am describing might require different techniques in other parts of the world.

In addition, in this book, I have included some of the newest advances in science and in scientific techniques that are now enabling us to tell far more about ancient humans, their environment, and how they lived and died than ever before. It is truly an exciting time to be an archaeologist.

DIGGING DEEPER

DIGGING DEEPER 1

HOW DO YOU KNOW WHERE TO DIG?

Let’s begin with one of the questions that I am asked most frequently: “How do you know where to dig?” That’s a great question that bears on some of the essential tools and methods archaeologists employ. In this chapter, we’ll answer that question by discussing archaeological surveying—that is, the process of looking for sites on the ground surface, because some are obvious, but others are not. Surface survey can also help us figure out where to dig at an already-known site.[1]

First and foremost, though, we need to define what we mean by a site, because they come in all shapes and sizes. For example, the Agora in Athens and huge mounds like Megiddo in Israel—I’ve excavated at both—are clearly ancient sites. But others can be tiny and very hard to find. As Brian M. Fagan and Nadia Durrani point out in their excellent introductory archaeology textbook, a site can be as small as “a tiny scatter of hunter-gatherer artifacts” or as large as the ancient city of Teotihuacán in Mexico; sites are simply “places where traces of past human activity are to be found … normally identified by the presence of artifacts.”[2]

We should also define what an artifact is—and isn’t. Quite simply, artifacts make up most of the “good stuff,” the stuff that’s worth writing home about from an excavation or a survey—they are things made or altered by human beings. Within this category, we include everything from the earliest stone tools to pottery, weapons, jewelry, clothes, and pretty much everything else portable that humans can make. Some artifacts, however, and things associated with them, can’t be moved. We call these features.[3] Something like a ditch is a feature—it’s obviously made by a human, but you can’t move it without losing it. The same goes for doorways, fire pits, stone altars, and the like. Sometimes, though, we also call something a feature when we’re just not quite sure yet what it is, but we know it’s a “something.” Hence the archaeological axiom “One stone is a stone; two stones is a feature; three stones is a wall.”

There are several ways to find sites, but almost all involve conducting what we call archaeological surveys. Within this broad category are ground surveys, aerial surveys, remote sensing, and sample surveys. In all instances, the goal is to find sites that lie within a specific area, like the region around Pylos in southern Greece, where I once was part of a survey project called PRAP (Pylos Regional Archaeological Project), which we will discuss below.[4]

FIG. 1. Pylos (PRAP) survey area (photo by E. H. Cline)

The traditional way to do a ground survey is to have team members physically walk the area in question and see what remains are there. These are frequently called reconnaissance surveys or full-coverage surveys, but they can also be referred to as pedestrian surveys, for obvious reasons. In some areas, however, like regions of the northeastern United States where vegetation masks the ground surface, archaeologists sometimes conduct ground surveys by digging small shovel-test pits every few yards, to see whether there is any evidence of artifacts beneath the ground.[5] The density of objects found determines whether these areas can be mapped as a site.

Ground surveys first became popular in the 1960s and 1970s and then gained traction in the 1980s, in part because they are usually a cheaper alternative to digging and can cover larger areas. They also allow archaeologists to ask and answer questions different from those explored at a single site, since they frequently involve multiple sites. For instance, someone may want to investigate how intensively a specific area in Greece was occupied during the Bronze Age and later periods—the Dark Ages, archaic and classical Greece, Roman and Byzantine periods, and the Turkish Ottoman age. Did the settlement pattern change during the later eras? Can the number of sites and their size tell us the relative population of various time periods? Can changes in where people settled tell us about what resources they were using, how dangerous their environment was, what the political situation was like?

Ground surveys can help provide answers for these kinds of questions. By doing surveys and identifying the various sites from different periods in the area, archaeologists can frequently construct a history of the region without ever digging at a single site. Many surveys result in subsequent excavations, though, especially when the archaeologists decide to concentrate on one of the promising new sites that they have just found and get a permit to dig.

Times have changed, and these days we don’t always begin with a ground survey; it sometimes makes more sense to start with aerial surveys, at least in areas where the ancient inhabitants erected buildings or otherwise left remains made from durable materials that might still be discernible. This can be as simple as buying aerial photographs or satellite images from specific companies, or as complicated and expensive as arranging for overhead flights to do an aerial survey of your area.

If you want to buy imagery, which is by far the easiest way to go, there are a few options. One possibility is to purchase declassified military satellite images like the ones taken by the Corona program, a surveillance operation conducted by US intelligence agencies from 1960 to 1972. Images from the program were declassified by an executive order in 1995 and are now used for all sorts of purposes, including finding archaeological sites.[6] We can sometimes see sites very clearly even in these older images, either with the naked eye, by enlarging the image on a computer screen, or by looking at it with a magnifying glass.

Older photos like these can be very valuable. Aerial photos for warfare, spying, or general reconnaissance have been taken for more than a century. Some of them are useful in part because they were taken before recent economic development or urban expansion destroyed or damaged archaeological sites. Among the earliest examples are the discoveries of John Bradford, an archaeologist who was serving in the British army during World War II. In 1943, while studying photographs taken by the Royal Air Force for military purposes, he was able to locate more than two thousand Etruscan burial mounds in northern Italy, simply from the differences in color of the grass or soil visible in the pictures.[7]

Bradford joined forces in 1956 with an Italian engineer from Milan named Carlo Lerici; from 1957 onward, they explored many of the Etruscan tombs that Bradford had first identified on the aerial photographs, boring into the earth at these locations with a small high-speed auger or drill. Initially they inserted a hollow pipe containing a small spy camera and took photographs of the interior of the tombs, but soon they developed what is known as the Lerici periscope, which was specially designed with a powerful light that could fit into the narrow hole that had been drilled. This instrument helped them to quickly look inside the tombs without having to wait for photographic film to be developed, and to identify which tombs had already been looted, either in antiquity or in modern times, and which still contained ancient remains and even frescoes painted on the walls. In this way they were able to investigate several hundred tombs per season without excavating or damaging them in any way.[8]

In 2017, we created a modern version of the Lerici periscope at our site of Tel Kabri in Israel, using a drill, a colonoscopy camera, and a laptop computer. It worked—we could see the images on the laptop when we inserted the camera into the hole made by the drill—but, unfortunately, we had drilled straight into a large rock buried about three feet below the surface, so there wasn’t too much to see. I remain optimistic that this type of instrument can eventually be used successfully, given the right situation.

There is also the option of getting up-to-the-minute high-resolution contemporary color satellite images from companies like DigitalGlobe, or images that have been taken from the space shuttle. For example, there’s a fairly well-known picture of the ancient city of Angkor in Cambodia that was taken from the space shuttle Endeavor, in which all the buildings that are still standing can be seen very clearly.[9]

My colleague Sarah Parcak—a National Geographic Explorer and professor at the University of Alabama, who is perhaps better known as the “space archaeologist” and the winner of the $1 million TED Prize in 2016—surveys using satellite images. The images allow her to use all kinds of fancy techniques, like infrared imaging, to illuminate some features and suppress others. Using these techniques, she found several hundred previously undiscovered sites in Egypt, including seventeen lost pyramids as well as the nearly legendary site of Tanis, all of which were “hiding in plain sight,” as she puts it.[10]

Such new techniques with satellite imagery have enhanced our ability to see things that were previously essentially invisible, including ancient paths crisscrossing a desert. That’s how the lost city of Ubar in Oman was found in 1992. Endeavor had taken a picture of the area, and archaeologists noticed where the ancient paths converged. They subsequently excavated there and found the ancient site.[11]

Buried walls, earthworks, and other large constructions associated with settlements can often be seen more easily from the air than on the ground, even if one is walking right over them. In a raking light—that is, in the early morning or late afternoon when the sun’s rays come in at an oblique angle—or if an aerial photograph is taken at a slight tilt, shadows cast by buried walls are sometimes visible.

More commonly, aerial photos can illuminate “crop marks.”[12] Such crop marks document the location of buried items precisely, whether they are features like ditches or structures like buildings and walls. They do so because those buried items affect the amount of water absorbed by the soil, which in turn affects the color and height of the vegetation that is growing directly above them. (Note that this won’t work if there is something built on top, like a modern parking lot, but it will work in a field where grass, wheat, barley, or thick weeds are growing.)

Thus, for example, if there is a buried ditch below the modern surface, the vegetation growing directly above it will be higher and lusher than the surrounding vegetation, because the soil right there contains more water and nutrients. If there is a buried wall below the modern surface, on the other hand, the vegetation growing directly above it will be lower, less dense, and less lush than the surrounding vegetation, because there are fewer nutrients in the soil at that location.[13]

These differences in height and density might be almost imperceptible at ground level, but from the air they are immediately obvious at certain times of the year. In England and in Europe, especially in Italy, crop marks that are about three feet wide and run straight as an arrow across the fields often indicate the presence of buried Roman roads. Round ones, like those that John Bradford saw in the Royal Air Force photographs of northern Italy, may indicate the presence of buried tombs.

When I’m on a flight that is landing somewhere in Europe, I frequently look out the window of the airplane as we are descending and try to see whether I can discern any crop marks in the fields surrounding the airport. It’s amazing how many times I’ve seen something that I’d love to go back and excavate, in order to figure out what it was.

Archaeologists have also added LiDAR to their toolkit. It’s most useful in places like Central America or Southeast Asia, because it can penetrate the trees in a jungle or rain forest, by firing lasers at the ground, and provide images of lost temples, buildings, and even cities that are completely overgrown and almost inaccessible now. That’s how the Maya city of Caracol in Belize was discovered in 2010.

Similarly, in June 2016, archaeologists working in Cambodia announced that they had found “previously undocumented medieval cities not far from the ancient temple city of Angkor Wat … that promise to upend key assumptions about south-east Asia’s history.” The cities are between nine hundred and fourteen hundred years old and were found by Australian archaeologist Damian Evans. Evans used LiDAR data captured by an instrument mounted in a helicopter during an aerial survey in 2015 that fully covered 734 square miles. He believes that “the colossal, densely populated cities would have constituted the largest empire on earth at the time of its peak in the 12th century.” Other archaeologists agree with his assessment, asserting that these are the most significant archaeological discoveries in the region in the past century.[14]

FIG. 2. Using LiDAR at ground level to record the wine jars at Tel Kabri (photo by E. H. Cline)

LiDAR is also useful in areas without tremendous amounts of vegetation; it has been used to map the site of Jezreel in northern Israel and is yet another way to locate Roman roads in England. We’ve used it at ground level at our site at Tel Kabri in Israel to quickly and accurately record the wine cellar that we found in 2013.[15]

Most recently, archaeologists have added commercial drones to their toolkit as well, flying the drones much as hobbyists fly model airplanes, both to find and document sites and to detect looting. From drones it is possible to take either low- or high-level photos of a region, sometimes sending the results directly to a computer for future manipulation and analysis.[16]

There are other remote-sensing techniques that are ground based and can help us figure out whether there is something under the ground where we might want to dig. They include electrical resistivity or conductivity, which basically works by running an electric current through the ground between two poles. If there is something like a buried wall in the way, it will interrupt the current; if there isn’t, the current won’t be interrupted. The end result is a rather fuzzy picture of what is below ground, but often it is not clear exactly how far below the surface the ancient remains are, or even whether the images are being interpreted correctly.[17]

This is where something called “ground truthing” comes in. Ground truthing means double-checking or confirming what has been spotted in the photographs or remote-sensing images to make certain it is real or has been properly interpreted. It frequently involves foot surveys or actual excavation. Thus, at our site of Tel Kabri in northern Israel, electrical conductivity images taken in 2003 indicated that there were probably walls in the area that we were interested in, and so in 2005 we went to ground-truth the area by excavating to see whether the images were accurate. It took us more than two weeks of digging through totally sterile soil (that is, soil with no archaeological remains in it at all) before we came upon the walls and floors belonging to our Canaanite palace, but they were there—fully six feet below the present surface.[18]

FIG. 3. Doing remote sensing at Megiddo (photo by E. H. Cline)

The same principles work with magnetometers, which measure the magnetic field in areas that are of interest to archaeologists. If there are buildings or ditches or other archaeological features that are buried underground, they may show up on a magnetometer reading, because such features affect the magnetic field in the area.

These techniques all share the same limitations. Although they show anomalies below the surface that stand out from the general soil, it can be difficult to pin down whether the anomalies match certain kinds of subsurface structures. The consistency of soil below the surface can also determine whether the anomalies stand out against it, and the readings don’t always let you know how deep the features are located. Different methods might give results that look different. In each case, excavation is needed to confirm what the remote-sensing device identifies.[19]

For some or all of these reasons, our attempts to use a magnetometer at Tel Kabri in Israel didn’t produce good results, most likely because of the nature of the soil at the site. On the other hand, at David Schloen’s excavations at Zincirli in Turkey, a magnetometer survey worked so well that the results looked like a photograph of excavated ruins, despite the fact that it had been done before the excavation while the ruins were still buried. The excavators at Troy tried several types of magnetometers before they finally found one kind—a cesium magnetometer—that yielded results. They were then able to map an entire lower town at Troy, buried under the agricultural fields around the mound. Teams had been excavating the mound since the days of Heinrich Schliemann in the late 1800s, but nobody had thought to excavate in the fields next to it, because it looked as though nothing was there. But there was.

Another common remote-sensing technique is ground-penetrating radar, which works exactly as its name suggests, by having radar signals bounce back up from buried objects.[20] The newest versions of this technique are extremely powerful and can “see” down nearly four meters (about thirteen feet). This has resulted in some incredible discoveries from the area of Stonehenge in England in 2014 and 2015, including the fact that Stonehenge was apparently once a complete circle.[21]

Here, using ground-penetrating radar, as well as magnetometers and other remote-sensing techniques, archaeologists have been involved in something called the Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes Project. According to media reports, in just a few years of work they have detected Bronze Age burial mounds, Iron Age shrines, and enclosures for cows and other livestock that date to either the Bronze Age or the Iron Age, none of which had ever been noticed before.[22]

Most exciting were the reports in September 2014 that they had also found another monument of standing stones at Durrington Walls, less than two miles from Stonehenge, which probably dates to about the same time—that is, forty-five hundred years ago. Apparently dwarfing Stonehenge in size and therefore dubbed Superhenge, it was thought to be a C-shaped enclosure comprising more than fifty—and perhaps as many as ninety—giant stones, each about ten to fifteen feet long and five feet in diameter. None were visible: they appeared to have been deliberately buried horizontally about three feet below the surface, which is why they hadn’t been spotted before. It was only through remote-sensing techniques that they were first detected and reported.[23]

Two years later, however, in 2016, additional reports in the media noted that trial excavations had been conducted in the interim, in order to ground-truth the remote-sensing images by digging to reveal two of the huge stones. What the archaeologists found instead surprised them—no giant stones, but rather two enormous pits that may once have held huge timber posts. The posts are no longer present, for they had been removed at some point—if they were ever there—and the pits filled in with chalk rubble. The remote-sensing instruments had registered the rubble as solid rock, giving rise to the original reports of “giant stones” instead of the debris-filled pits that they actually were. Some media reports are now calling Superhenge a timber circle complex five hundred meters in diameter, but they note that it was never completed.[24] Whether that is correct remains to be seen, but the sequence of events has become a cautionary tale: we should wait until the archaeologists have completed their work and published their findings in a peer-reviewed journal before we make further assumptions and construct new hypotheses.

Although big advances have been made in remote sensing in the past couple of decades, sometimes satellite imagery and other high-tech solutions don’t help at all in a search for sites. In those cases, archaeologists must resort to the tried-and-true methods of finding archaeological sites on foot. Sometimes this is as simple as taking advantage of the natural erosion that has occurred and keeping a sharp eye out while walking through potential areas.

Other times, it might be a better idea to conduct an organized ground survey, in which sites, structures, features, and artifacts can be seen directly on the ground. These techniques go back to the origins of survey archaeology and were made more systematic in the 1960s and 1970s. We used these methods on the two archaeological surveys in Greece that I participated in, as well as a survey in Israel, so I can attest to exactly what’s involved in doing a site survey in one of these areas. Such surveys are conducted throughout the world, limited only by visibility of materials on the ground and by permission of the landowners.

There are two types of ground surveys that are used in certain areas of the world. As has been mentioned, one type is conducted on a large scale and is intended to cover large areas quickly; this is the reconnaissance or full-coverage survey. The goal of these surveys is to create a map showing the location of possible ancient sites in a large landscape. The other type is an intensive survey that usually involves the examination of a single site or a small area that was initially discovered during the larger survey and flagged as being particularly promising.[25] In this case, the goal is to identify as much as possible about the specifics of the location—its extent, age, cultural affiliation, and range of material objects—often as a prelude to excavation. The archaeologists will do a very detailed investigation of the site or a small area that may involve picking up and bringing back to the camp every single artifact that they find there.

Archaeologists working in an area where no comprehensive map exists of ancient sites from different time periods will start with a general reconnaissance survey. If done systematically and on foot, by having the team members painstakingly walk over every square meter of the area, it is called a full-coverage survey.[26] This is what we did in the region of Boeotia near the city of Thebes in Greece back in the early 1980s, when I was a member of the CABBAGE (Cambridge and Bradford Boeotian Archaeological and Geographical Expedition) survey project, and again near the Mycenaean palace of Pylos in the early 1990s when I was on the PRAP survey.

At Pylos, we were split into three teams of about six people each. I was in charge of Team A, which we promptly renamed the “A-Team.” At first, we were assigned to survey the mountain heights on one side of the valley, despite my protestations that I was afraid of heights. Sure enough, on the very first day, as we began our survey, I froze and had to be manhandled back to the car from one sheer drop. It was hardly an auspicious start for the team or the team leader. Later we were able to move lower; I had no problems from then on, but I learned a valuable lesson that I still draw on to this day—listen to your team members, especially if they tell you about a phobia that might affect their performance.

Once we started to get into the swing of things, we got our routine down. First, we would find our location on a contemporary map, usually a readily discernible element such as a road. This is much easier today with GPS systems. We would then spread out, about 30 feet (9 meters) apart from each other, so that we covered a total of about 180 feet (55 meters, give or take). When I shouted or blew a whistle, each person would start walking forward in the designated direction and walk in a straight line to a specific predetermined point, usually another road or a boundary wall that was also marked on the map. This meant walking in increments of about the length of a US football field—about a hundred yards or meters—because more than that became complicated.

This is what is known in archaeological surveying terms as “walking a transect.” And when I say walking in a straight line, I mean quite literally walking in a straight line, regardless of whether that meant fording a stream, rappelling or falling down a small cliff, facing down a bull, or interacting with a local shotgun-toting farmer who didn’t want us on his land. All those things happened, either to me or to other people on our team, but what was much more frequent was ripping our legs to shreds, even through our pants, because we had to walk right through the underbrush, which in Greece is known as the macchi. That stuff can be nasty.

While we walked, we scoured the ground, looking for pottery sherds, stone tools and flakes, ancient walls, or anything else that might have marked the remains of an ancient settlement. By the way, it’s always easy to identify people who have just spent several weeks on an archaeological survey, because they’re the ones who spot the pennies and other loose change on the street when they get back to civilization.

Each team member carries a clicker, and they click once every time they see a pottery sherd, a worked piece of stone, or another type of artifact. Three pieces of pottery get three clicks, five pieces get five, and so on. At the end of every ten steps or so, team members write down the number that is on their clicker, which is the number of artifacts they saw during that small section, reset it to zero, and start walking and counting again. By the time they have reached the end point of the transect, they have a record of the number of the artifacts that they saw during each stage of the hundred-yard walk.

FIG. 4. Beginning a survey transect at PRAP (photo by E. H. Cline)

Why is that important? Durable items like pottery, stone, and metal, from archaeological structures below the ground, commonly appear on the surface, brought there by farming, erosion, rodents, irrigation ditches, pits, and a host of other natural and human processes. When walking across a site that was inhabited in Bronze Age, Iron Age, Roman, and Byzantine times, you will see potsherds and stone tools from all those periods simply lying on the ground. If the numbers are recorded via a clicker, they will increase astronomically as you enter the boundaries of the site. After you cross the boundary of the site on the other side, the numbers will decrease again.

A team member’s clicker tallies, recording the number of pieces of pottery and worked stone seen every ten paces or so, will be something like this: 1, 5, 25, 107, 510, 423, 298, 152, 87, 0. And the numbers for the people immediately adjacent to the team member, on either side, will probably be similar, because they are likely to have walked across that same site. Those further out, however, if their transect did not cross the site, will have a normal “background scatter” of artifact counts—for example, 1, 6, 4, 12, 0, 5, 3, 8, 5, 0.

The team members give their numbers to the team leader, who records them in a notebook and marks the probable site on the map, so that the follow-up team can find it again and examine it more thoroughly. And then the team members spread out again to cover the next section. Again they march a predetermined distance, clicking as they go, repeating the process again and again, until they reach the end of the designated area. They then swing around, spread out once again, and return the way that they came, covering the next segment in the transect, and repeating the process over and over. In this way, the team can traverse and record all of the sites in a square mile or kilometer, or whatever they choose, each day, until the whole region has been covered.

Back at camp, the results of each day’s survey are recorded, and from these results a map of potential sites is developed. The most promising of the new possible sites then receive a visit from a team of experienced surveyors, who are tasked with doing an intensive survey of the newly discovered area. The surveyors record the surface finds more carefully and collect representative objects from the site to document it for future researchers. In our case, the objects consisted mostly of pottery sherds whose size, location on a pot (rims, bases, or handles), manufacture techniques, or decoration helped the pottery experts on the team figure out what periods they came from.

Those are the survey methods that we used near Pylos in the 1990s and in Boeotia in the 1980s—and the same methods are often employed today elsewhere in the world. But if the ground is covered with a thick coating of leaves, as in thickly forested areas, or if natural processes have covered the ancient landscape with more recent soil, or if the ancient people did not construct large structures of durable material, which is the case in the northeastern United States, then survey techniques will differ. Places where objects were made from wood, fiber, or other perishable materials also don’t work for this kind of survey. Thus, although pedestrian surveys are widely employed in the eastern United States along river floodplains where farmers have been plowing the fields, they are not used in heavily wooded areas.

Furthermore, when the region is too large for a full-coverage survey, there are techniques to cover only specific portions, or randomly chosen portions, of an area. In such cases, called sample surveys, the areas to explore are often derived from sampling techniques used in statistics.[27]

There is also one other type of ground survey to mention. This is a targeted type of survey, which involves only revisiting sites that have previously been discovered. It is the type of survey that we did in the area around Tel Kabri in northern Israel during 2006 and 2007. We had already done some preliminary digging at the site in 2005 and had determined that we wanted to start a long-term multiseason excavation. First, though, we wanted to understand its context—what did the area around Tel Kabri look like before, during, and after its heyday in the Middle Bronze Age, almost four thousand years ago?

FIG. 5. Surveying in the Western Galilee (photo by E. H. Cline)

Fortunately, it was easy for us to do such a targeted survey of known sites because the Western Galilee, where Kabri is located, has been investigated previously by several teams of archaeologists doing full-coverage surveys in almost every season and under almost every condition imaginable during the past thirty years or more. We already had maps of the area, with all the known Middle Bronze Age sites marked on them. We also had access to the pottery and other artifacts that had been collected and stored by the previous teams of archaeologists.

Maps and survey reports in hand, we drove to these known sites and simply did an intensive survey of each site around Tel Kabri and its hinterland. Our goal was to confirm and refine the dates previously assigned to the sites. We also wanted to recheck how large (or small) each site was. In the end, we were able to produce a map showing the sites that were inhabited in the area just before, during, and after the time that Kabri had flourished as a major center almost four thousand years ago.[28]

And so the answer to the question posed at the beginning of this chapter, “How do you know where to dig?” boils down to one word—surveying—because once an area has been surveyed, it’s pretty easy to decide where you want to dig. As to how one actually digs, that’s a whole different story, which we will discuss in the next chapter.

DIGGING DEEPER 2

HOW DO YOU KNOW HOW TO DIG?

This brings us to our second question: “How do you excavate a site?”

The first thing you need to know is that it’s possible to learn how to dig in about fifteen minutes. The essential skills are not far different from those necessary for backyard gardening. The specific techniques may vary to a certain extent with the part of the world where one is working, but the tools used are the same in most places. Archaeologists excavating large areas use big tools like picks, shovels, and wheelbarrows. Detail work is done with handpicks and trowels, while dental tools and toothbrushes are used for extremely delicate work, such as excavating skeletons and other organic features: seeds, nuts, animal bones, and the like.[1] The complications come when one is trying to figure out what is being excavated—Is it inside an ancient building or outside? Is a pit or is some other feature present?—or addressing some other problem involving stratigraphy.

Pickaxes are used on excavations far more often than most people imagine, at least in the Mediterranean regions where I have worked. My friend and colleague at Megiddo, Israel Finkelstein, has been known to say on many occasions, “Used properly, a pick can be the most delicate instrument on the tell.” He is correct, but the secret, even if you’re digging through ten centimeters of fill or soil at a time, is usually not to raise the pick higher than your hips and to let the pick head drop down into the soil by the force of its own weight, rather than raising it high in the air and swinging wildly. If a team member just starts whacking away at the ground, somebody’s going to get hurt. In fact, at one dig that I was on, one of the volunteers swung a pick erratically and knocked her kneecap out of position and halfway up her thigh, or close to it. That meant a full-length cast for the next six weeks or more—so please do be careful.

The rest of the toolkit will consist of a variety of implements, but it will always include a trowel. Archaeologists don’t use just any trowel from the local hardware store, however. Marshalltown and WHS are the preferred brands—usually Marshalltowns for US archaeologists and WHS trowels, which are smaller and less flexible, for British or European archaeologists. They aren’t expensive; each costs less than twenty dollars, even if one purchases a fancy leather holster in which to carry it.

FIG. 6. Excavation tools of the trade (photo by E. H. Cline)

What’s amazing to me is that my own trowel is now older than most of the students who come to dig with me these days. It’s a Marshalltown, which my mother gave me when I turned twenty-one. I hate to say it, but if I dropped it by accident at a site now and somebody dug it up, it would probably be considered an artifact itself at this point.

Some people also bring their own handpick, a smaller version of the pickax, which is known as a patiche on excavations in Israel. A handpick can be purchased for about sixty dollars from a couple of companies in the United States. The dig will often provide them, however, and I’ve never really seen the need to have my own until very recently, though some members of expeditions that I have been on over the years wouldn’t be caught dead without one or two hanging from their belts.

The dig will also provide all dustpans, brushes, and measuring tapes. These, along with the trowels and handpicks, will be the instruments of daily use. However, be aware that you should probably bring your own gloves, since working with all of these tools will rub blisters on your hands from the first day on; they will harden into calluses by the time you’re done, but there can be a few painful days in between. I prefer gloves with padding on the palm and with the fingers cut off, like those that weight lifters or bicyclists wear, but other people simply go to Home Depot or Lowe’s and get general-purpose gloves with the fingers intact (be sure the palms are padded, though). You may also want to bring knee pads, like the ones that volleyball players or skateboarders wear, since you’ll be kneeling more often than you’ll be standing while you dig.

I bring dental tools with me every summer as well. My dentist saves the broken ones for me and gives them to me during my annual visit for a checkup and cleaning. We generally use dental tools only when we’re excavating something that needs to be dealt with very delicately, like a skeleton. I often just leave my case of dental tools in the supply room of whatever dig I’m on, since I use them infrequently.

FIG. 7. Excavating with dental tools (photo by E. H. Cline)

It always astounds me just how much equipment is needed to run an excavation—it’s more than the picks, hoes, trowels, and dental tools for the field. It’s also office supplies, printers, laptops, and so on, to be used back at the camp or hostel or wherever you are staying, not to mention the coolers needed for the snacks and drinks in the field—and other things that you might not ever think would be found on a dig, like double-stick tape and lots of Post-it notes.

At many excavations in the Mediterranean region, there will most likely be a color-coded bucket system in place. For instance, at Megiddo and Tel Kabri, we put the excavated dirt into black buckets, pottery into orange buckets, and animal bones into green or blue buckets (warning: your actual bucket colors may vary, depending upon the dig and the availability of various colors—sometimes orange is the new black, or vice versa).

Then, every so often, we call for a bucket line and pass the buckets full of dirt all the way down to the dump, where they are emptied. Other times, we simply transfer the dirt from the buckets into wheelbarrows and then trundle them to the same dump and empty them.

Sometimes, though, especially when we are carefully excavating on an ancient floor, before dumping the dirt, we will carefully sift all of it through a mesh screen, looking for the smallest objects. And sometimes we will wet sieve everything, using water to get rid of the soil and leaving the pebbles, bones, and other objects behind; we will discuss this further below, in “Digging Deeper 4.”

One observation that was reinforced for me after our most recent season at Tel Kabri is that digging is much more exhausting than most people might imagine. By the end of the season, because of carrying all of those dirt buckets around, the team members have usually grown muscles and shed pounds. We had a lot of people who joined us for a few days at a time this summer, and my practice was to ask them every so often how it was going, and whether it was anything like they had imagined it would be. Invariably they would say that it was a lot more physical than they had expected—it is one thing to read about using pickaxes, hauling buckets filled with thirty pounds of dirt, and schlepping equipment around, and quite another to actually do it. On the other hand, each day was better than the one before, and by the time their stay was over, they had gotten used to the regime. To a person, they also said that archaeologists misadvertise their digs: they should actually be marketing them as weight-loss and fitness clinics, where one can lose weight and get in shape while simultaneously uncovering ancient remains.

I should also warn you not to go on a dig expecting to find skeletons, gold, jewelry, buried treasure, tombs, or any such exotic artifacts every day—or perhaps any day, for that matter. Instead, on excavations in the Mediterranean region, it is pottery, stone tools, and other small objects that are found virtually every day. In the United States or in Central and South America, or in England or Europe, what one might expect to find may be a bit different, but not by much. Nevertheless, although most of the finds are mundane objects like pottery and walls of buildings, being the first person to touch those objects in hundreds, if not thousands, of years, is pretty exciting, and that feeling never gets old.

Regardless of where in the world you are digging, a universal rule of thumb is that you should never yank anything out of the ground when it first starts appearing. It is more important to know where the bottom of an object is than where its top is—it may be resting on a floor, for instance, and this will generate important information about what we call its context.

And so, after alerting the square or area supervisor and getting permission to continue digging, do so until the object, and whatever other artifacts might be related to it, are sitting as if they are on top of a table. Only when they can simply be picked up and taken away, as you would pick up a plate from the table after dinner, should any thought be given to removal. But if the find is significant enough, the supervisor will probably want to bring the photographer over to take a picture, and perhaps an artist to draw the objects while they are in situ—that is, still in place.

Let me take this opportunity to mention that photography is an integral part of every excavation. These days, especially on social media, students frequently say, “Pics or it didn’t happen.” The same is true in archaeology. Since we can see these things only once before we excavate, and either destroy or remove them, it is imperative to capture them on film or via some other medium. At our excavation at Tel Kabri, the square and area supervisors each have their own Galaxy tablets, and so they are able to take working photographs either with the tablet or with their iPhones. Then, since I am the dig photographer as well as the codirector, I show up, carrying the official meter stick (which is exactly what it sounds like, a painted wooden stick that is one meter long, marked off in 10 cm increments); an arrow to point north, which is also 10 cm in length; and a small rectangular board on which I can put letters that identify where the photograph is being taken (for example, the board might have on it, each on a separate line, “Tel Kabri,” “Area D-West,” the locus number, and today’s date). With those items in the picture, we know exactly where we are in both time and space.

FIG. 8. Excavating at Tel Kabri (photo by E. H. Cline)

I prefer to take such photographs, which may well end up in the final publication, in the soft light of the early morning, but that is not always possible. If we take them in harsher light later in the day, or at a time when direct sun is hitting the area, we must frequently hold up tarps to create temporary shade; otherwise, the significant colors and other features might be washed out. For the more important objects, structures, or areas, many excavations have now also begun to do 3-D photogrammetry, where we take numerous photographs from a variety of angles and then use a computer software program that will help us create a 3-D model, but this is still a relatively new addition to the recording process.

The reason that we go to all of this trouble is that every object on an archaeological excavation—or anywhere in the world, for that matter, regardless of whether it is being excavated by an archaeologist—has a context that is crucial to our understanding of it. The context includes all the things that are found associated with the object—such as the other grave goods found in King Tut’s tomb, for instance—and its physical surroundings, such as whether it is found in sand, mud, water, ice, or ordinary dirt. Knowing an artifact’s context can often help us to figure out how it got there.[2] It will also frequently allow the excavator to determine the absolute date of the object—for example, 1177 BCE—or, more generally, the twelfth century BCE.

It is the context of each ancient object that is a large part of what makes it so important, and which separates the work of the archaeologist from that of a treasure hunter or a looter. If I am shown, or read an article about, a gold bracelet or some other artifact, the first thing I’m going to say is, “Wow, where did it come from? What was its context?” If we don’t know an artifact’s context, it loses most of its inherent value for archaeologists, because that means it’s not known where it was found, or when it was found, or what other objects were found with it, or anything about its findspot at all. That’s why an archaeologist is so sad to see an object that has been looted and then sold on the art market—an object that could have provided us with a tremendous amount of information is now being sold just because some collector thinks it’s pretty or wants something from ancient Egypt or Iraq.

Also, just to add a twist to all of this, an object can be found, even if it’s by archaeologists, in a primary context, or a secondary context, or even a tertiary context.[3] If we say that something has been found in a primary context, that means that we’ve found it right where it was originally deposited way back when, and that it hasn’t been moved or disturbed since.

If we say that an artifact was found in a secondary context, that means that we believe it’s been moved or disturbed by someone or something after it was first buried. One example of secondary context comes from Jericho, during Kathleen Kenyon’s excavations there in the 1950s. Kenyon found that at Jericho during the Neolithic period—that is, back about 7500 BCE, or nearly ten thousand years ago—the people would bury the body of a deceased person, or maybe even leave it lying out in the open; but after the flesh had disintegrated, they would take the head, remove it from the body, plaster it with clay (probably to simulate the vanished flesh), and stick cowrie shells into the sockets where the eyes had once been. They would then put the plastered head on a shelf in one corner of the living room in their house, perhaps as a form of ancestor worship. Therefore, when Kenyon found those skulls, they were in a secondary context.

Does context really matter? Yes, absolutely—the discovery that the ancient inhabitants of Jericho were removing the skulls of their dead family members, plastering them, and then putting them in the living room, where the archaeologists found them in a secondary context, means that we can now get some idea of what they were thinking and why they did what they did. It gives us a glimpse, perhaps, into their thought process, their fears about death or their belief in a life after death, or even the beginning of what we would now call religion.

All in all, an understanding of the concept of archaeological context and its importance is essential because it serves in part to explain why we excavate so carefully and why we need to keep careful records while we do so, because we are destroying the object’s very context when we excavate it. Context is everything, and record keeping is essential. In fact, archaeologists estimate that ancient objects that have been ripped from their archaeological contexts by looters and sold on the art market without any documentation have lost about 90 percent of their value, because so little information is now attached to them. Similarly, fakes and forgeries can irretrievably, and incorrectly, affect our thought processes about the ancient world.

So if you’re going to dig a site properly, what’s involved?

One possibility is called horizontal excavation, which is exposing one complete layer, or stratum, over an entire site.[4] It is then recorded, drawn, and photographed. Horizontal excavation is often what is done at sites like Colonial Williamsburg in the United States. It’s also what was done by the University of Chicago for part of their excavations at Megiddo in the 1920s and 1930s.

A horizontal excavation can help you understand the layout of an entire period at a site—where various activities took place, where people lived, worked, worshipped, and were buried. For sites that have only a single level of occupation, horizontal excavation is the obvious strategy. For multilayer sites, there is a trade-off to be made, because in achieving this breadth, you sacrifice depth—you know what one level at the site looks like, but you give up learning how the various parts of the site changed over time. At Megiddo, for example, the excavation team from the University of Chicago had worked for almost ten years and still managed to clear off only the top three layers of the site and expose the fourth—leaving the other sixteen layers below unexplored, until they changed their excavation plan for the final five years.

The other major option is to conduct a vertical excavation—to dig deeply in a few areas in order to get a feel for the chronological sequence or the depth of the site.[5] This can be a good way for archaeologists to get an idea of the stratigraphy that they might encounter if they later decide to expand the excavations at the site. In that case, just a few limited areas will be selected, and in those places one digs as deeply as possible. This is what the archaeologists from the University of Chicago ended up doing in one area at Megiddo, where they dug a deep trench all the way down to the very first occupation, which was built upon the bedrock—that’s how we know that there are twenty major levels at the site, going back to about 5000 BCE.

William Matthew Flinders Petrie—one of the most important of the early archaeologists—was among the first to demonstrate the importance of vertical archaeology at a multilevel site. Petrie originally had no formal schooling at all, though he had already been surveying in England, including at Stonehenge, long before he went to Egypt to measure the pyramids at the age of twenty-six. He learned by experience and eventually became the first professor of Egyptology at the University of London in 1892, when he was about forty years old.[6] He then held that position for the next forty years.

Petrie first dug in Egypt, where he eventually trained a whole group of workers from the village of Quft, near modern-day Luxor. To this day, the descendants of those workers, known as quftis, provide much of the skilled labor for archaeological excavations in Egypt. Most quftis do the same task that their father, grandfather, or great-grandfather was assigned by Petrie—some are the pickmen, some are the trowelmen, some are the overseers. Quftis are a very talented group of workers; I had the pleasure of working with some of them when I was on a dig in the Nile delta region of Egypt back in the mid-1980s.

Petrie also dug in what is now modern Israel and the Gaza Strip. There he was responsible for the introduction, or in some cases the popularization, of a number of concepts that we take for granted in archaeology today, including stratigraphy and superposition—both of which revolve around the idea that earlier things are usually found lower down than more recent things.[7] This is especially true in the tells that can be seen across much of the Middle East, because tells are composed of one ancient city on top of another, built up over centuries or millennia, and the earliest city is always at the very bottom.

For example, at Megiddo, as just mentioned, the Chicago team found that the seventy-foot-tall mound has no fewer than twenty cities hidden within it. The first one at the bottom dates back to about 5000 BCE, and the most recent one, at the top, dates to just before 300 BCE. If you look at a side profile that’s been cut into one of these mounds, it is easy to see the different layers, since they are full of dirt, stones, and other materials, with all sorts of different colors, textures, and consistencies. Archaeologists officially call such a side profile a “stratigraphic section”; it is usually very carefully drawn and photographed for publication, so that other scholars can see whether the excavation was done properly or whether something was misinterpreted.

Petrie is also one of the people responsible for realizing that all the broken pieces of pottery that excavators find with almost every bucketful of soil can be used to help date the levels of the mound. It turns out that certain types of pottery go in and out of fashion, just like men’s and women’s clothing and shoes today. The fashions of pottery can often be correlated with fairly specific dates and periods, sometimes within a decade or so. Archaeologists call this dating method “pottery seriation.”

It is frequently these pieces of pottery that give their names to our archaeological periods, so that in Greece, for instance, we talk about Late Helladic IIIA1 pottery, which dates to the first half of the fourteenth century BCE, during the Mycenaean period. Petrie also realized that if the same type of pottery is found at two different sites, the levels in which they are found at the two sites are probably equivalent in time. This has proven to be an extremely important, and useful, point.

Perhaps the oddest thing about Petrie, though, is that when he died in 1942, he willed his head—and his brain—to science. He had died in Jerusalem, and the rest of him is still buried there, but his head was shipped to London. At some point, when it had been stored in a basement for quite a while, the label on the jar fell off, so that for a while nobody knew whose head it was. It was eventually identified and is now reportedly somewhere in a storage room at the Royal College of Surgeons in London, although I haven’t gone to look for it personally.[8]

Two other archaeologists who contributed substantially to how we dig today are Mortimer Wheeler and his best-known student, Kathleen Kenyon, whom we met earlier. Wheeler—who excavated at many sites, including Maiden Castle in England and Harappa in India during the 1930s and 1940s—invented a new excavation method, which he employed during his excavations in both countries.[9]

As Wheeler found, the stratigraphy at a site can get extremely complicated. He therefore decided to excavate in five-meter-by-five-meter squares, but he left a one-meter-wide unexcavated area called a balk between contiguous squares. It sounds complicated, but it’s not—simply picture a rectangular ice-cube tray like the ones many people keep in their freezers (if they don’t have an automatic ice maker). The ice cubes, or the squares that you fill with water in order to make the ice cubes, are the squares that you are excavating, and the plastic ridge between cubes is the balk. Wheeler’s workers could walk and push wheelbarrows on the balk, but, more important, leaving a balk also allowed Wheeler to keep track of the stratigraphy, because each square that was being excavated now had four interior sides to it—these were the internal faces of the balks that had been left in place on all four sides of each square.

FIG. 9. Kenyon-Wheeler squares in Area Q at Megiddo (Skyview Aerial Photography, Inc.; courtesy of Israel Finkelstein and the Megiddo Expedition)

If it helps, picture yourself small enough to actually jump down into the square where you’re going to pour water in the ice-cube tray and realize that there are four sides that you can look at when you’re in there. In the same way, Wheeler could jump down into each square that his workers were excavating and look at the faces of the balks that had been left in place on all four sides, so that he could see what they had already dug through and get a visual idea of the history of the area. It can be quite easy to inattentively dig through a very patchy plaster floor, if there’s not much left of it, but afterward it can be seen very plainly as a white line stretching straight across the side of the square in the balk. (And, trust me, it’s not fun to finally notice that white line in the balk when you didn’t see the floor while digging through it!)

Balks are straightened every day, so that a careful eye can be kept on what’s happening, including whether someone has accidentally dug through any plaster floors. The balks have to be completely vertical if they are to yield a clear picture of what has already been dug through; hence the need to straighten them daily. This is where pickaxes can come in handy, for you can use a pick to quickly and easily straighten up the balks.

At the end of each season, most archaeological teams will draw and photograph each section so that they can publish a record of it for others to see and discuss. After all, archaeology is destruction—we destroy the very things that we are studying as we dig through them—and therefore we need to record every little thing as we do so. When we publish detailed drawings and photographs of the excavated sections, other archaeologists can see them too, and they can either agree or disagree with the conclusions reached by the excavators. This is now a standard part of the scientific method for archaeologists working in the Mediterranean, and for many elsewhere as well.

So, for instance, when I was excavating as an area supervisor at Tell el-Maskhuta in Egypt in the mid-1980s, we ended up with a square in which we had dug down about twenty feet, with spectacular balk faces on the interior sides. In these, we could clearly see huge differences in colors between the layers—some were gray and black with ash, from when there had been a fire; others were as sandy as the day is long, from when the site had been abandoned for a period. In other layers, we could clearly see the outlines of mud bricks from the walls of buildings that had stood in our area in a given period. It took us days to properly measure, draw, and photograph each of the balks at the end of the season that year, but we finished with accurate records that we could publish, and that other scholars and future archaeologists can consult.

FIG. 10. Stratigraphic section at Tell el-Maskhuta in Egypt (photo by E. H. Cline)

Another time, at Tel Kabri, we found a gorgeous series of white plaster floors with dark brown layers of soil between them. These were from different phases of the palace, as it went through renovations over time. The balks looked like an ice cream layer cake and were easy to measure, draw, and photograph.

FIG. 11. Stratigraphic section with “ice cream layers” at Tel Kabri (photo by E. H. Cline)

In Athens, which is such a tourist destination, the archaeologists and city planners came up with a unique way of showing the stratigraphy that they had to dig through when building the new Metro system in time for the 2004 Olympics. In some of the Metro stations, glass panels were placed on the walls so that the dirt and the stratigraphy could be seen still in situ, as if they were the balks for an ongoing archaeological excavation. The layers of soil can be clearly seen, as well as partial walls of buildings, drains, and even parts of a road, all of which can be appreciated but not touched.

When recording balks, many archaeologists and excavations now also utilize what is called a Harris matrix, which is a method of representing the stratigraphy graphically. In a Harris matrix, each level is represented by a box drawn on the page according to its stratigraphic position, with the lower levels placed lower on the page and the higher levels placed higher on the page. Lines connect the boxes, in order to show their vertical and horizontal relationship to each other and thus the stratigraphic history of the square.[10] Frequently one can construct a Harris matrix as a rough working sketch while in the field, which helps trench or area supervisors keep the various levels and their relationships to each other straight in their minds.

Kenyon brought Wheeler’s method with her when she began excavating at Samaria in what was then British Mandate Palestine in the 1930s, and later used it when she was digging at both Jericho and Jerusalem as well. It is now therefore known as the Wheeler-Kenyon or the Kenyon-Wheeler method.[11]

She and others introduced modifications into this system over the years, however, and it is now frequently combined with a process of having workers or team members physically change the buckets into which they put the pottery and other finds, as well as the labels that go with them, whenever there is a change in the color or texture of the soil. The change in color or texture may represent the beginnings of a new level or stratum at the site that might become really obvious only later. In this way we are able to detect and record subtle changes in the phases of the remains being excavated. If the digging has been done properly, including changing buckets, tags, bags, labels, and everything else every time a change in soil color or texture is noted, then a mirror reflection of that should be visible in the balks of the area.

With that in mind, once the digging starts in earnest, it would be best to follow the advice that I was given on my very first dig, back when I was a sophomore in college—if there is a change in the color of the soil or the texture of whatever it is that is currently being excavated, stop and alert somebody before continuing to dig, rather than possibly going right through a floor or some other important feature. The supervisor will bring new buckets, tags, labels, and everything else, just in case the different color or texture represents an actual change back in antiquity, like an entirely new level within the mound. If this is the case, that change will also eventually be visible in the balks.

Very frequently, the directors of an excavation will order the balks to be taken out at the end of a season, after they have been drawn and photographed, especially if the team has been uncovering a large building or area that runs through several squares. They can then take aerial photos on the last day of the season, so that the exposed building or area can be seen in all its glory, without earthen balk lines covering it up every five meters. This, however, has given rise to another archaeological maxim: the best thing(s) will always be found on the last day of the season … and in the balk (when you take it down). I don’t know why that is, but it happens more often than one might imagine.

Again, I should emphasize that this is what we do at the sites that I have worked on in the Mediterranean region. Archaeologists excavating in the United Kingdom and in Europe, or in the Americas or elsewhere in the world, may follow their own system, such as bagging artifacts separately by unit and excavation level, as needed.

In addition, the documentation of daily finds and other activities is a necessity, regardless of where in the world you are digging. Such regular chronicles not only help the archaeologists in publishing their results after the season is over, but will also aid future researchers coming back to reexamine the data, perhaps in light of new findings elsewhere or new suggestions made by other scholars. These records will include field notes on what was excavated each day; photographs of the structures, features, and artifacts as they were found in the field, as well as back in the laboratory after some have been cleaned and conserved; spreadsheets for ceramics and small finds, with running inventory lists of what has been found; and other relevant data. In many cases, excavations such as those at Pompeii and Megiddo are now entering some of the records directly onto laptops, iPads, or other devices in the field and then uploading the information daily to servers back home in the United States, England, and elsewhere, so that there is little or no risk of losing data.

For those who are wondering what a typical day on an excavation consists of, I can speak only about what we do in the Mediterranean region, but a normal workday for us at both Kabri and Megiddo begins with the team out at the site and digging by 5:00 a.m. We dig for a little more than three hours, until about 8:30 a.m., and then stop for half an hour to have breakfast. Then we continue digging until 11:00 a.m., at which time we stop for a fifteen-minute break, which usually includes coffee, fruit, and cookies. Returning to work, we continue until 12:30 or 1:00 p.m., when we all pile onto the bus and head back to wherever we’re staying. By that time of day, most areas around the Mediterranean are too hot for excavators to want to be shoveling dirt in a trench.

After a big lunch, most people head for the swimming pool or a long nap in their room during the few hours of downtime, before reconvening at 4:00 p.m. At that point, some team members will wash all the pottery that was found that day and leave it out in the sun to dry, so that the directors can look at it the next day and figure out what time period it comes from. Others will wash the fragmentary animal bones that were found. Still others will enter data into the computer or do whatever task might have been assigned to them. Square and field supervisors will be writing up their notes for the day and planning the next day’s work. That will go on until 6:00 p.m. or a bit longer, with dinner at 7:00 p.m., followed by a lecture at 8:00 p.m.—since many people are doing this for college credit—and then either more work or socializing until lights go out at about 10 p.m.

The whole team then wakes up at 4:30 a.m. the next morning, are out at the site by 5:00 a.m., and the entire routine begins again, usually for five days per week, and anywhere from four to seven weeks per field season. All this takes place for us in June and July, since that’s when most people are able to come as volunteer team members. Most are college students, but others are people from various walks of life, usually ticking off an item on their bucket list—so we have retired doctors, lawyers, nurses, schoolteachers, and so on. The one thing that they all have in common is that they had always wanted to go on a dig, though some are quite surprised at the actual conditions; all I can say is that when you’re digging anywhere in the Middle East, be prepared for it to be very hot, and probably quite dry and dusty, unless the site is somewhere near the coast, in which case it can be incredibly humid as well as very hot. I can tell you from firsthand experience that you will probably be more exhausted, sweaty, dirty, hungry, and thirsty, and (usually, but not always) happier than you ever thought possible.

FIG. 12. Pottery washing at Megiddo (photo by E. H. Cline)

And the other thing that never fails to happen: after six or seven weeks of digging nonstop, no matter how organized we are, closing up the dig is always a balagan—chaos. But it’s a controlled chaos, involving overtired people, boxes going to eighteen different places for analysis or storage, and such essential questions as these: Do you throw out your beloved shorts and shoes or bring them home? Do you remember to say goodbye to your new best friends? This past season at Kabri, we actually finished digging in the field a full day early, but we were still making lists on our laptops in the office and then taping up boxes of small finds to go to the university at 10:50 a.m., with checkout at 11:00 and the cleaning crew waiting impatiently to disinfect the room and vacuum out the six weeks of dirt that we had tracked into every nook and cranny.

Of course, when excavating elsewhere in the world, such as in England or in North America, one should be prepared for very different situations, including digging in the rain and mud. The time frame involved for an individual day’s work can also vary greatly, especially if one is working entirely with professionals, rather than volunteers. This is particularly true when the archaeologists are involved in what is called “cultural resource management”—such as when they are hired to go in just ahead of the bulldozers before a major construction project, in order to make certain that there are no archaeological remains that might be destroyed. In such cases, the workdays can be much longer, possibly from dawn to dusk without a break—except for hastily consumed meals and coffee—for days or even weeks at a time.

What will be found on a typical day during an excavation? At many sites in the Mediterranean region—from Italy to Israel and beyond, unless one is working at a prepottery Neolithic site—there will be broken pieces of pottery turning up with almost every trowelful of dirt. These are called sherds, which is shorthand for potsherds (they are not shards, which are pieces of broken glass, but sherds—this is the most common mistake made by nonarchaeologists). Think of them as broken dishes thousands of years old. Pottery was in common use for almost all household and industrial activities in most places in the ancient world—made out of local clay, fired en masse, and easily broken when dropped. It was cheaper and easier to gather up the broken pieces of a vessel, toss them away, and make or obtain a new one than to try to fix it. The same is true of stone tools made of chert, flint, obsidian, or quartz in prehistoric sites—easily made, easily broken, cheaper to replace than repair.

Remember we said earlier that most of the good stuff worth writing home about is going to be what we call artifacts, which are objects manufactured or modified by humans. Sometimes it can be tough to tell a worked stone tool from a stone that just tumbled down the creek bed for a mile or two, but usually it’s obvious when something is an artifact. That is, unless it’s the first day of the dig—virtually everyone who hasn’t been on a dig before comes running up to the square supervisor approximately fifty times on the first morning, waving something and saying, “Is this a piece of pottery? Is this pottery?” “No,” comes the answer. “It’s a rock—but it’s a nice rock.” After a while, it becomes second nature to tell at a glance a broken piece of pottery from a nice little pebble or rock.

Since pottery and stone are not biodegradable, you’ll find lots and lots of such pieces. Remember, pottery and stone are also found during a survey and mark the existence and location of a site; on a dig they are being uncovered still in context, within the site itself.

There will also be animal bones, plenty of dirt, and lots of rocks—lots and lots of small rocks and larger stones. Some of them are just random; others are parts of walls and buildings. The trick is to figure out which is which before picking one up and throwing it away—there’s nothing worse than realizing that you’ve just thrown away half of an ancient wall; that’s usually a rookie mistake, but even experienced excavators do it on occasion. On the other hand, it is an amazing feeling to start uncovering a line of rocks in an excavation that were clearly set there deliberately by someone long ago.

All in all, it will be important to keep in mind that real archaeology is usually not as romantic as it is portrayed, especially by Hollywood. Each moment of discovering something remarkable involves many days or weeks of dirt, sometimes blood (and blisters), always sweat, and occasionally tears. The rewards are great, however, whether having a unique experience digging for the first time ever, returning to a dig for the second time, or publishing the results. There is something majestic about an archaeological project, with all the planning that is involved and all the hard work that goes on during and after the season. In a way, it is a bit like a symphony orchestra performing a major piece; it doesn’t work unless everyone plays his or her part.

DIGGING DEEPER 3

HOW OLD IS THIS AND WHY IS IT PRESERVED?

A journalist once asked me during an interview, “All of what you excavate, study, and write about took place so long ago. How can you be so certain of your dates?” My short answer to him was “radiocarbon, Egyptian texts and other written records, synchronisms, dendrochronology, pottery typology, a plus/minus factor, and a willingness to acknowledge that none of it is fixed in stone.” I was a bit surprised at his question, which was asked in a rather aggressive manner, but then it occurred to me that maybe this is something that a lot of other people wonder about as well but are afraid to ask.

In fact, one of the questions that I am asked most often at dinner parties and other social gatherings is simply a variation of the question that the journalist asked me: “How do you know how old your finds are?” People also want to know how it is possible that things which are so old are still preserved. “Why haven’t they crumbled to dust?” they ask. So here, let’s address the topics of how archaeologists date ancient artifacts and what kinds of conditions it takes for such things to be preserved.[1]

The first question is probably the easiest to answer: How do we know how old something is? As I said to the journalist, it can be as simple as reading an Egyptian text, especially if it says something like “year 8” of a particular pharaoh’s reign and we know from other sources what the dates of his rule were. Other times we have synchronisms between cultures or civilizations that interacted, so that we know, for example, from a letter found in the Amarna archive in Egypt that Amenhotep III lived at the same time as Tushratta of the kingdom of Mitanni (in northern Syria) because they were writing letters back and forth … and we know from other evidence that Amenhotep lived during the early fourteenth century BCE, so Tushratta must have as well. And in that manner, we can often put together chronological lists of rulers, events, and so on, often using the king lists and astronomical observations left to us by the ancient peoples themselves in Babylonia, Egypt, Assyria, and elsewhere.

A variety of scientific dating methods are also now available to the archaeologist. Common methods used to date ancient objects are radiocarbon dating, thermoluminescence, and potassium-argon analysis.[2] They are what we use to determine the “absolute date” of an object—in other words, its date in calendar years, like 2015 CE or 1350 BCE, as mentioned in a previous chapter. It’s not always possible to do this, and so sometimes we have to settle for a relative date—for example, saying that Level 3 lies below Level 2 at the site and is therefore older. The archaeologist might not yet know the absolute date for either level, especially at an early stage in the excavations, but he or she already knows where they are relative to each other.

Probably the most commonly used dating method is radiocarbon dating, otherwise known as carbon-14 dating (C-14 for short).[3] This, like all the chemical methods, has a “plus-minus” factor, as in “1450 BCE plus or minus twenty years,” and a statistical probability that the date will fall into the suggested range. Because of this, C-14 dating isn’t particularly useful for relatively recent items, but it is good for dating objects that are at least several hundred years old; several thousand years is even better.

The basic idea, discovered by a scientist named Willard Libby who won a Nobel Prize for his work, is that all living things ingest, either through breathing or through eating, a small amount of a radioactive isotope of carbon while they are alive, along with all the normal carbon. C-14 is constantly being created from radiation in the atmosphere. It combines with oxygen to form a radioactive version of carbon dioxide.

Plants incorporate this C-14 into their system during photosynthesis; animals and humans then ingest it by eating the plants. Since it is radioactive, C-14 decays, as do all radioactive materials. It has a known half-life of a bit more than 5,700 years—that is, half of the original amount will have decayed and disappeared in a bit more than 5,700 years. Since it is fairly easy to determine how much carbon would have originally been in a particular sample, and since the ratio of C-14 atoms to normal C-12 atoms is fairly constant, one can measure the amount of C-14 that is still left in a sample and thereby figure out the date when that organism died (in the case of a human or animal) or was chopped down (in the case of a tree that became a piece of wood) or otherwise ceased to exist (as in short-lived plants and weeds).[4]

Organic materials like human skeletons, animal bones, pieces of wood, and burnt seeds can be C-14-dated. Burnt seeds are especially good, because they usually had a very short shelf life before essentially ceasing to exist. Similarly, short-lived brushwood is good.[5] Radiocarbon dating is relatively cheap to do, at least compared to other dating procedures.

The technique can’t be used to directly date stone tools or pottery, since those items never ingested C-14. It can, however, be used to date organic items that might have been found in the same context as such stone tools or pottery, thereby helping to date stone and pottery by association.

There are also some known difficulties and problems associated with the technique, including the fact that it requires the destruction of at least part of the object in order to sample it, and that the amount of C-14 in the atmosphere has not always been constant but has fluctuated. Calibration curves accounting for such fluctuations have been created, as have other means of correction, and so radiocarbon dating has been one of the most frequently used methods to date ancient sites. We use it at both Kabri and Megiddo, the sites where I have worked most recently.[6]

In addition, if a large fragment of wood is discovered, like a beam that was once used in a ceiling or wall or even as part of a ship, another technique can be applied besides C-14 dating. This is dendrochronology, or tree-ring dating, which involves counting the rings that can be seen in the wood.[7] This technique may be familiar to those who have visited places like Yosemite or Sequoia National Park, where often a very large stump of a tree is on display, with little markers attached to some of the rings, saying things like “1620: Pilgrims land at Plymouth Rock” and “1861: Start of the Civil War.” The rings in those trees have been interpreted in terms of a master sequence that has been constructed painstakingly by scientists over the years. If a piece of wood with visible rings is discovered during an excavation, it is sometimes possible to fit it into such a sequence and determine its probable date, but even such master sequences do not extend back in time more than ten thousand or twelve thousand years.

The same basic principles can be used to date other materials with various chemical methods, if the age of the site being excavated is appropriate for them. For instance, when one is trying to date a stone tool from Olduvai Gorge in Africa, which is a crucial site for understanding human origins, potassium-argon dating can be useful. This method measures the difference between the amount of potassium in the rock and the amount of argon in it, because potassium decays and becomes argon over time. But it takes a very long time for the decay to happen, and so this method is best used when something is between two hundred thousand and five million years old. In such cases, it would be impossible to use radiocarbon dating, which works on organic remains but not stone tools and is useful only for dating things within the last fifty thousand years.

Thermoluminescence might be used on certain objects found at “younger” sites. This technique can determine the absolute age of something made from clay, like a storage pot, by measuring the amount of electromagnetic or ionizing radiation still in it. Specifically, it can indicate how long it has been since the object was baked or fired in a kiln. Researchers have found that the object has to have been heated up above 450 degrees centigrade or the technique won’t work.

A similar, but newer and still experimental, method is rehydroxylation, which measures the amount of water in a piece of pottery. I first heard about it in 2010, at a miniconference held at Megiddo during our summer excavations that year, and I thought it was a really interesting—and promising—procedure. It seems that when a piece of pottery is fired in a kiln, all the water in the clay evaporates during the process. As soon as the piece of pottery is taken out of the kiln and cools off, it begins to absorb water from the atmosphere again at a constant, slow rate, regardless of the vessel’s environment.[8] Thus, by measuring the amount of water in a sherd, we can determine the last time that it was fired … and thus probably its age.

There can be problems with measuring rehydroxylation. We were told about how the original researchers were given a medieval brick from Canterbury; when they tried this method on it, repeatedly, the rehydroxylation analysis dated the brick as only about sixty-six years old, although they knew it had to be much older than that. It eventually turned out that the brick had been in an area of Canterbury that had been bombed during World War II and was caught in the ensuing incendiary fire. The fire had reset the water content of the brick back to zero as of the 1940s, and so the dating method clearly worked, but it no longer measured the date of the brick’s original firing back in the medieval period.[9]

It is possible to do something similar with a piece of obsidian, a technique called obsidian hydration. Obsidian is volcanic glass that was highly prized in antiquity for its sharpness and in fact is still used in some surgical scalpels today. It also absorbs water at a constant and well-defined rate once it is exposed to air, and so measuring the amount of water in a particular piece of obsidian can be used to date obsidian tools.

Stratigraphy, pottery seriation, and object association can also all be used as relative dating methods, especially if it is not possible to generate a precise absolute date otherwise. We have discussed all these in a previous chapter, and so here it is simply worth remembering that one way to date something can be as simple as seeing what was found with it—in other words, in association with it or in the same context, like a stone tool found with a datable organic object.

For example, if an excavator finds a coin minted by the Roman emperor Vespasian in a grave, clearly the grave cannot date from before Vespasian’s time. Thus everything in the grave along with the coin should be from about the same period, unless it was an heirloom at the time that it was buried, which does happen. Similarly, if an Egyptian scarab with the cartouche of the pharaoh Amenhotep III is found on the floor of the room in an ancient house or palace that is being excavated, then everything else on the floor probably dates to the fourteenth century BCE, when Amenhotep III was ruling Egypt.

At Tel Kabri, for instance, on the floor of one of our rooms in the palace, we found a type of scarab that dates specifically to the Hyksos period, that is, the seventeenth to sixteenth century BCE. This gave us an indication of the date for that room, which was then confirmed by the radiocarbon dates that we got from some of the charcoal samples that we submitted for analysis.

At the Uluburun shipwreck, found off the coast of Turkey in 1982 and excavated for the next fourteen years, the excavators were able to use no fewer than four techniques to date the ship: radiocarbon dating, dendrochronology, the type of Minoan and Mycenaean pottery on board, and the fact that they found a scarab of Nefertiti. All these combined to point to a relative date in the Late Bronze Age and an absolute date of about 1300 BCE for the time that the boat sank.[10] Each dating method has its own limitations and uncertainties, and so when four separate methods point to the same approximate date, the archaeologist can offer that date with a great degree of certainty.

The other questions are a bit more complicated to answer—“How can things that old still be preserved? Why haven’t they crumbled to dust?” The answer is that a lot of ancient things have crumbled to dust or have been otherwise destroyed and have not been preserved. In fact, only a small percentage of what once existed has survived to the present. Inorganic materials like stone and metal frequently survive, though silver will turn purple in the ground, bronze will turn green, and so on. It’s only gold that stays the exact same color. I’ve found gold only a few times in my career, but I’ve found a lot of bronze, which is probably to be expected since my particular period of interest is the Late Bronze Age.

Other items that are made of organic or perishable goods are not as durable, and it can be rare to find things like textiles or leather sandals at most archaeological sites. Happily, though, sometimes such items, and human bodies, are preserved. Usually this happens in conditions of moisture and temperature extremes—in other words, places that are very dry, very cold, very wet, or without oxygen.[11] A few interesting examples from each such location can be readily discussed.

For example, perishable objects have survived in the very dry conditions within King Tut’s tomb in Egypt, where all the wooden furniture and boxes and chariots were found still completely intact. The wooden boats buried near the pyramids have survived for the same reason, as have so many mummy coffins and pieces of papyrus from ancient Egypt.

Other mummies preserved by dry conditions in a desert come from much farther away, in China. These, some as much as four thousand years old, were first reported to the rest of the world by a professor of Chinese studies at the University of Pennsylvania named Victor Mair. He spotted them in a museum in the city of Ürümqi, in a remote part of China north of Tibet, known as the Tarim Basin. He began to study them, as did Professor Elizabeth Barber of Occidental College in California. Mair and Barber have both published books about the mummies, which were extremely well preserved because of the very dry conditions of the desert environment where they were buried.[12]

What is unique about some of the mummies is that, even though they are found in China, they have Causcasoid or European features, including brown hair and long noses. They were buried with textiles and cloth that looks a lot like plaid. Furthermore, their DNA suggests that they may be of western origin, with links to Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and possibly even Europe.[13]

Studies of these mummies are still ongoing, but perhaps we should not be particularly surprised by these initial findings. The Silk Route, which connected China in the east to the Mediterranean in the west from the second century BCE on, is known to have run through the Tarim Basin. In fact some of the mummies were brought to the United States in 2010, as part of a traveling exhibition on the Silk Route.[14]

In contrast, the bodies of Ötzi the Iceman, the Siberian Princess, and Juanita the Ice Maiden, discovered in 1991, 1993, and 1995, respectively, were all found preserved in extremely cold conditions. Ötzi especially has been the subject of much analysis and discussion since he was accidentally discovered by hikers in the Alps, on the border between Austria and Italy.[15] He spawned a worldwide craze, especially in the region where he was found, where one can now purchase Ötzi wine, Ötzi chocolate (think chocolate Easter bunnies, but in the shape of Ötzi), and, perhaps most relevant of all, Ötzi ice cream.

At first it was thought that Ötzi was a recent murder victim, and so the police were called in. This was most definitely a cold case, though, since not only was Ötzi encased in ice, but it turns out that he had been lying there for more than five thousand years. In fact, it now looks as though Ötzi died in about 3200 BCE, which is more than six hundred years before the pyramids in Egypt were built.[16]

FIG. 13. Ötzi the Iceman, after discovery (photo by Robert Clark, courtesy of National Geographic)

Ötzi’s body lay wedged in a hollow formed by some rocks. A glacier creeping down the slope swept right over the rocks and his body, so that he was preserved under many feet of ice and snow for thousands of years. In 1991, a sandstorm in faraway North Africa sent sand up into the atmosphere that eventually settled on the ice above Ötzi. The sand, absorbing the sun’s rays, melted the ice and exposed Ötzi’s head, shoulders, and upper body.

The police, unaware that this was an ancient body, hacked Ötzi out of the ice, damaging his body as well as his belongings, which were scattered around him. Once scientists realized this was not a modern-day wayward hiker but far more ancient, scientific archaeological excavations were carried out in 1992. These retrieved additional artifacts, including his bearskin cap. Ever since then, detailed studies have been made of Ötzi and his belongings, including a complete workup of his DNA.

It turned out that Ötzi had indeed been murdered, as the police who were called to the scene had first thought, though the killing had taken place several thousand years earlier. It was ten years before murder could be proven, but the evidence was eventually quite obvious. Though it hadn’t been noticed before, in 2001 an alert radiologist examining X-rays and CT scans that had been taken of Ötzi saw a foreign object embedded in his back, just below his left shoulder. It turned out to be an arrowhead, with a corresponding entry wound several inches below, which means that whoever shot him was standing below Ötzi and shooting upward.[17]

It was subsequently determined that the arrowhead had severed an artery, meaning that Ötzi had probably bled to death. It also means that he was shot in the back, which implies murder rather than an accident. The fact that he has a defensive cut on his hand as well indicates that some sort of fight had taken place, and that he may have been fleeing from the battle when he was fatally shot.[18]

However, as mentioned, Ötzi is not the only ancient person to have been found on ice. In 1993, a mummified body known as the Siberian Princess or Ice Maiden was found on the Ukok Plateau in southern Siberia, near the border with China. Dating to the fifth century BCE, she was about twenty-five years old when she died, perhaps from breast cancer. She was buried with six horses, all saddled and bridled, probably meant to accompany her into the afterlife. This perhaps makes a great deal of sense, because it is thought that the princess was a member of the Pazyryk people—a nomadic group described by the Greek historian Herodotus in the fifth century BCE—who spent most of their lives on horseback.[19]

She is also known for her numerous tattoos. These, primarily on her left shoulder and arm, include a mythological animal, which looks like a deer with a griffin’s head and antlers that also have griffin’s heads at the ends. Other bodies buried nearby, of men identified as warriors—some of whom were dug up decades earlier—have similar tattoos; one has them on both arms, his back, and his lower leg.[20]

Two years later, in 1995, anthropologist Johan Reinhard found a mummy of a twelve- to fourteen-year-old Inca female on Mount Ampato in Peru. She too is occasionally called the Ice Maiden, but since that causes confusion with the mummy from Siberia, more usually she is simply Juanita.[21]

Reinhard found her near the peak of the mountain, at a height of more than six thousand meters (eighteen thousand feet) above sea level, where she had been buried more than five hundred years ago. He had climbed the mountain to photograph a nearby volcano that was erupting, thinking he could get a good picture from that vantage point. It didn’t seem to be a likely place for an Inca sacrifice, and yet there she was, exposed to the elements because the ash from the volcano had melted some of the ice that had protected her. In his book The Ice Maiden, Reinhard describes carrying her down the mountain in his backpack: she weighed only eighty pounds.[22]

She is not the only such Inca mummy. Others include two more that Reinhard also found on Mount Ampato, a boy and a girl located a thousand feet below the summit, when he returned with a full team to explore the mountain systematically. One television show, broadcast by PBS, estimated that there may be hundreds more such Inca children encased in what are now ice tombs on top of peaks in the Andes, where more than 115 Inca sacred ceremonial sites have been found.[23] The question of who these children were and why they were left to die on mountaintops still engages anthropologists and archaeologists working in the region today.

As for finding objects and bodies that have been preserved in waterlogged conditions, a small wooden writing tablet that dates back to the eighth century BCE was found submerged in a well at the site of Nimrud in Iraq. Pieces of two more were found in the Uluburun shipwreck, where they had been preserved 140–70 feet below the surface of the Mediterranean Sea for more than three thousand years. However, it is the so-called bog bodies, which have been found in places like Denmark and England, that are among the best-known examples of organic material to have been preserved in a waterlogged environment.

These bog bodies have been so well preserved that it is possible to see individual whiskers in a beard and the strands of the rope around a victim’s neck. Several hundred such bodies have been uncovered in a variety of places in England and Europe within once-swampy areas, called bogs or fens.[24] Bogs contain peat: a deposit of dead and decayed plant material, usually moss. Peat can be used as fuel or as insulation on cottage roofs. The workers who dig in these bogs occasionally find human remains, of which the soft tissues have been almost completely preserved because of the acidic conditions and the lack of oxygen in the bogs, even though the bones themselves are long gone.

FIG. 14. Tollund Man (photo by Robert Clark, courtesy of National Geographic)

One such body, known as Lindow Man, was found in northwestern England in 1984, in the Lindow Moss bog.[25] The autopsy indicates that he was about twenty-five years old when he died. He had been hit twice on the head with a heavy object, then strangled with a thin cord, which also broke his neck, and finally had his throat cut for good measure. It is not clear whether he was murdered or ritually sacrificed. This is definitely what we would consider a cold case, because he was killed about two thousand years ago, sometime during the first or early second century CE.

A similarly preserved body was found in 1950 by two workers cutting peat in a bog in Denmark, not far from the town of Silkeborg. Known as the Tollund Man, he dates to the fourth century BCE, and so he is about five hundred years older than Lindow Man. In his case, we can see every detail of the leather cap that is still on his head and the belt around his waist, as well as the stubble on his face and the rope around his neck that was used to hang him.[26]

The two workers who found him thought that he was a murder victim, and he may well have been, but his death occurred nearly twenty-five hundred years ago, and it is unclear why he was killed. He was probably about forty years old at the time of his death.

As for examples of artifacts and bodies preserved in areas with little or no oxygen, obviously such places are pretty rare in the world, but they do exist—for instance, deep in the Black Sea, below two hundred meters (650 feet), where the water is very still and oxygen doesn’t circulate to the bottom.[27] Since there’s no oxygen, there’s no reason for anything to disintegrate, because there’s nothing alive there even at the microscopic level that could damage the artifacts. This is why Bob Ballard found amazing things when he sent a remotely operated vehicle down into the depths of the Black Sea in 1999 and again in 2007.[28]

Ballard may be best known as the discoverer of the Titanic, but in archaeology he is perhaps better known for his discoveries in the Black Sea. He found a Neolithic settlement, an ancient shoreline, and a beach that are now far below the surface of the sea—meaning that the whole area probably flooded sometime in antiquity; two Columbia University professors suggest that such a cataclysmic event may have taken place about seventy-five hundred years ago, around 5500 BCE. Ballard has also found several shipwrecks from the Roman and Byzantine periods, dating from between one thousand and fifteen hundred or more years ago. In at least one of them, the wood of the boat is so well preserved that the tool marks of the original shipbuilders on the individual pieces of wood are still visible. And one of the jars that they brought up had the original beeswax still sealing the top closed.[29]

Not all ships have been as well preserved as the one that Ballard found in the Black Sea or the Egyptian ships near the pyramids. Other ships have left only their imprints in the soil. Their poor state of preservation is far more typical of artifacts that have been found simply buried in the earth rather than in extreme environmental conditions, but these examples also show how even those badly preserved remains can be interpreted by savvy archaeologists working from the pattern of what has been left behind.

Take, for instance, the Sutton Hoo ship in Suffolk, England. It is twenty-seven meters long and was found in 1939 by an archaeologist named Basil Brown. The owner of the property had invited Brown to excavate a large mound, one of many on her land, in southeastern England. Within the mound, he found the remains of this ship.[30]

The ship, which is of interest for many reasons, probably dates to sometime between 620 and 650 CE.[31] This was during the Anglo-Saxon period, which began about 450 CE—after the end of Roman occupation, when new immigrants arrived from continental Europe—and lasted until the Norman Conquest in 1066 CE.

Perhaps most interesting is that the ship isn’t actually there anymore, and yet its components can still be seen perfectly well: although the wood of the ship is completely gone, it is very clear where it once was. The dirt had stains where the wood has disintegrated; there are raised ridges in the soil running the width of the ship, spaced just a few feet apart for its entire length; and there are rusted iron nails that once held the pieces of wood together.[32] What Brown discovered is the shadow of the boat, rather than the boat itself.

So why bury a boat on land? Most archaeologists think that the boat was buried with its owner; that is, it served as a final resting place for a warrior, or a king, or some other notable deserving of such an honor. But no remains of the body have been found in the boat or anywhere near it. That seems strange: If this was a burial, where is the body? One possibility is that the body and the bones have decomposed so much that they have simply vanished, just like the wood of the ship.[33] If so, they left no mark at all. That’s the scenario that most people believe.

Another possibility is that there never was a body. If that’s the case, then this is what is known as a cenotaph—that is, a monument to someone who is buried elsewhere. A lot of war monuments today are basically cenotaphs, and it might be that the Sutton Hoo ship is an ancient war monument—perhaps a commemoration of a battle fought by the Anglo-Saxons in this part of England.[34]

But even though it didn’t yield a body, the Sutton Hoo ship proved to be a treasure trove in other respects. The center of the boat held a number of objects: shoulder clasps made of gold and with enamel inlays, which were probably attached to a cloth tunic or shirt that has perished; a solid gold belt buckle with an intricate design and a metal lid with enamel inlays, which is all that remains of what was once probably a purse, with the cloth or leather part now gone; and drinking horns inlaid with fancy designs. These artifacts again indicate that this is no ordinary burial; one can only imagine the celebrations at which they were once used.[35]

FIG. 15. Iron helmet from Sutton Hoo (courtesy of the British Museum)

Among the objects that have stirred the most interest is an iron helmet, complete with a faceplate with holes for the eyes and both a nose and a mouth made of metal.[36] Parts of it are overlaid with decorative gold. It must have been very expensive back in the day and probably belonged to someone either wealthy or powerful or both.

In 2011 a similar discovery of a phantom ship was made on the western coast of Scotland, on the Ardnamurchan Peninsula. Here, in a burial that dates to the tenth century CE, is what appears to be a Viking warrior buried in his boat.[37] At that time, this region was located along a primary north–south sea route between Ireland and Norway, and Viking houses have been found on the nearby Hebrides Islands.

The grave is five feet wide and about seventeen feet long, which is just large enough to hold the entire boat. As with the Sutton Hoo boat, the wood of this boat has decayed and is now completely missing, apart from a few remnants here and there. Again, the archaeologists found the iron rivets that had once held the boat together—about two hundred of them—and they could easily see the shape of the boat because of the impression it left in the earth.[38]

In this case, we do know for certain that there once was a body here, because the archaeologists found a few teeth and some fragments from an arm bone. They also found the remains of an iron sword and parts of a shield—which had been placed on top of the body chest. The boat contained the Viking’s spear, a bronze pin, and a bronze piece from what may have been a drinking horn.[39]

In this chapter, I have elaborated upon my answer to the journalist who asked how we archaeologists can be so certain of our dates. I hope it is now a bit clearer how we date things, but it should also be clear that we aren’t always able to pin something down to a specific year, and why there is frequently some wiggle room, especially in radiocarbon dating, in which dates are always given with a plus-or-minus factor and a statistical probability. New techniques are being invented and applied fairly often, and so I suspect that our ability to date things from the past will continue to get more accurate in the future.

I have also touched briefly upon how some things have been preserved for us to find, especially in the case of organic materials that may require extreme conditions in order to survive. It will almost certainly also be possible to improve our methods in the excavation of organic objects or materials, including those that do not take kindly to being exposed by archaeologists after centuries or millennia of burial.

DIGGING DEEPER 4

HOW DO WE KNOW WHAT THEY ATE, WORE, AND LOOKED LIKE?

In this “Digging Deeper” chapter, I will briefly try to answer questions like these: “How do we know what they ate, what they wore, and what they looked like?” as well as “How do we know what their environment was like?” In other words, how are we able to approach reconstructing what life was like for a person living at a particular time and in a particular place in the ancient world?

Sometimes it’s very—or relatively—easy to know what people ate in antiquity and even what they looked like while they were alive. For example, because of the conditions in the bog where Lindow Man lay for all those centuries, as described in the previous chapter, his skin and hair are very well preserved, including his beard and mustache. His fingernails are also so well preserved that we can tell they were manicured. Some of his internal organs are also preserved; they contain parts of what was probably his last meal, including a piece of unleavened bread made from wheat and barley, which had been cooked over a fire.[1] Similarly, because Tollund Man’s stomach and intestines were preserved, the archaeologists who were called in to examine him were also able to do analyses and to determine that his last meal had been a sort of porridge.[2]

However, among such accidentally preserved bodies, Ötzi the Iceman has turned out to be the most important. The scientific discoveries, emerging one after the other, have been published in a series of peer-reviewed and prestigious journals, including Science, the Journal of Archaeological Science, and The Lancet.

Among the discoveries that were made, scientists determined that Ötzi had brown hair and deep-set brown eyes, a beard, and sunken cheeks. He was probably about five feet, two inches tall and weighed about 110 pounds at the time of his death, which occurred when he was between forty and fifty years old. The strontium isotopes in his tooth enamel, which can be used to determine where people lived during their childhood years, indicate that he probably spent his whole life near where he died, within a sixty-kilometer radius and most likely in a nearby valley in Italy.[3]

Ötzi’s lungs were blackened, probably from inhaling smoke from campfires, either inside caves or outdoors. He suffered from tooth decay and had been ill several times in the months just before he died. Scientists and archaeologists were able to analyze the contents of his intestines, including pollen, which indicated that he had probably died in late spring or early summer. His last meal included red deer meat, bread made from einkorn, and some plums. In addition, his second-to-last meal included ibex meat, cereals, and various other plants.[4]

In 2016 scientists who were continuing to study the contents of Ötzi’s stomach also announced that they had mapped the genome of the oldest known pathogen, a bacterium named H. pylori that can cause ulcers. The bacterium may provide a clue to human migration patterns, for it is an Asian strain, and not the more usual Asian-African hybrids present in today’s European population. This discovery suggests that the additional migrations that brought African strains to Europe had not yet taken place by Ötzi’s time.[5]

More and more such genetic studies are taking place, investigations ranging from King Richard III’s body, discovered under a parking lot in England, to King Tut’s mummy.[6] It is likely that such studies will become even more important to archaeology in the future, as we will discuss further in a moment.

FIG. 16. Reconstruction of Ötzi the Iceman (photo by Robert Clark, courtesy of National Geographic)

Ötzi also had sixty-one tattoos, which he or a companion made by rubbing charcoal into cuts made in his skin. These are the oldest tattoos known; they are mostly lines and crosses rather than designs or images. In an interesting, and unexplained, related piece of trivia, the actor Brad Pitt now reportedly has a tattoo of Ötzi on his left forearm—Hollywood meets archaeology? Personally, I think that a tattoo of Achilles would have made more sense, since he (Pitt, not Ötzi) played the role of that Greek hero in the 2004 movie Troy.[7]

Ötzi was apparently quite the well-dressed man, with three layers of clothing. He wore undergarments made from goatskin, leggings made of fur, a coat of leather, and a grass cape over it all, plus a hat made of fur from a brown bear. On his feet, he had leather shoes insulated with straw. In 2004 a professor in the Czech Republic made a pair just like them and went hiking; he said that he didn’t get blisters, and that the shoes were more comfortable than his normal hiking footwear.[8] All this has now been re-created in several places, including the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in northern Italy, which is Ötzi’s current home.

Among his other possessions and equipment were a number of objects that shed additional light on Ötzi, his environment, and his way of life. He had two arrows with flint tips and a kit to repair them, plus a quiver full of half-finished arrows; a partly finished longbow; a dagger with a flint blade; and an ax with a copper blade. Archaeologists also recovered a firestarter kit, a birchbark container for embers from his fire, and a bone needle. And Ötzi had a backpack in which he carried many of these possessions.[9]

We know all of this, in rather incredible detail, because Ötzi and his possessions were preserved by the ice that buried him, as mentioned in the previous chapter. His unfortunate demise proved most fortunate for us.

Other ancient catastrophes have also turned out to be gold mines and treasure troves for archaeologists trying to reconstruct the lives of ancient people. For example, the catastrophe that enveloped Pompeii when nearby Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE quite literally stopped the city and its citizens in their tracks. The ash and pumice mixed with the rain that fell, blending into a cementlike concoction that quickly hardened and impeded attempts by survivors to come back and retrieve their belongings. In addition, dozens of bodies, as well as the rest of the town and everything in it, were entombed. Over time, the perishable materials, ranging from wood to bread to body parts, slowly decayed. Hollow cavities formed, with each cavity bearing the shape of the object, or body, that had once been there.

In 1863 Giuseppe Fiorelli, the Italian archaeologist in charge of excavating Pompeii at that time, figured out what the hollow cavities were, or rather what they had been. He realized that his workers could borrow a sculptor’s technique, using what is known as the lost-wax method, treating the hollow spaces as if they were molds for making bronze statues.[10]

So whenever his team came across a cavity while digging, Fiorelli poured plaster of Paris into the opening. When the ash was then excavated away, an exact duplicate in plaster remained of whatever had been there originally. They were able to recover the remains of numerous bodies, including entire families huddled together, as well as everything else organic, such as wooden tables and other furniture, and even loaves of bread.[11] They also recovered some of the pets, including a dog still chained where its owner had left it. It was found upside down in a contorted position, with the impression of its collar still plainly visible in the plaster.

Although Fiorelli’s method worked well for things like loaves of bread and wooden objects, it had a major flaw when it came to the human bodies, for his plaster casts made it impossible to see the bones and other artifacts that had remained in the cavity after the body disintegrated; these were now encased within the newly created plaster cast. One solution would be to use some sort of transparent material, like resin, instead of plaster, but that is a much more expensive process. It has been used for only one victim of Vesuvius, in 1984. This is the so-called Resin Lady, who is still wearing her gold jewelry and hairpin.[12]

Archaeologists also realized that it was possible to restudy the plaster casts themselves, including the bones and other materials that Fiorelli’s workers had unintentionally incorporated. In September 2015, a team that included specialists such as radiologists, archaeologists, and anthropologists began doing laser imaging, CT scans, and DNA sampling of the plaster-encased remains. The CT scans especially revealed amazing details, one from a four-year-old boy who was found with his parents and a younger sibling. It is possible to see how scared he must have been just before he died, although it is not clear what killed him. The scans also show that many of the victims had suffered head injuries, perhaps from collapsing buildings or falling rocks, and that they included people of all ages, not just the young, old, and sick city dwellers, as had previously been thought.[13]

After three hundred years of nearly continuous excavation, archaeologists have unearthed a large amount of ancient Pompeii, though much more remains to be dug. The plan of the city has become clear so that we can tell that prosperous inhabitants lived in some of the areas, and middle- or even lower-class inhabitants were the primary residents in other sections.[14] Today it is possible for tourists to see the various quarters of the town and the buildings that went with them: bathhouses, tanneries, shops, and other dwellings.

For instance, in 2014 Dr. Steven Ellis and a team of archaeologists from the University of Cincinnati who were digging by the Porta Stabia, one of the main gates into the city, announced that they had found ten buildings with twenty shopfronts from which food and drink were sold or served.[15] Such an arrangement seems typical in Pompeii, where even the private houses frequently had shops installed on the street side.

So what did the inhabitants of Pompeii eat and drink? The answer comes from a variety of contexts, which, upon reflection, makes sense. Ellis and his team have excavated a number of drains, latrines, and cesspits. The thought of excavating such places may seem disgusting to some, but the truth of the matter is that the material found within such areas can sometimes be worth more to the archaeologists than gold, if it means being able to reconstruct what life was like for the inhabitants two thousand years ago. In eras before trash collection, the garbage of the city was frequently thrown into the latrines, where it remained for the archaeologists to find it.

This was exactly the case for Pompeii, for in these areas Ellis and his team found the remains of “grains, fruits, nuts, olives, lentils, local fish, and chicken eggs, as well as minimal cuts of more expensive meat and salted fish from Spain.” In a drain on a more centrally located property that may have belonged to someone wealthier, they found the remains of “shellfish, sea urchin, and even delicacies, including the butchered leg joint of a giraffe.”[16] Not only does this give us clues about what people were eating in Pompeii at the time of the eruption, but it also confirms the unsurprising fact that the different classes ate different types of food.

In a somewhat similar fashion, we were able to discover what type of wine the inhabitants of our site at Tel Kabri were drinking nearly four thousand years ago. As I mentioned briefly above, in 2013 we uncovered what turned out to be the oldest and largest wine cellar yet discovered in the world, dating to about 1700 BCE. Within a single room in the Canaanite palace, we found a total of forty jars, each about three feet high. It turned out that each jar would have held more than one hundred liters of liquid. In subsequent seasons (2015–19), we have discovered nearly one hundred more such jars within additional nearby rooms in this area, which seems to have been a storage complex for the palace.

Andrew Koh, our associate director, tested the sherds to determine what had been in the jars. He used Organic Residue Analysis (ORA), which operates on the principle that a ceramic jar that once held some sort of liquid probably absorbed some of that liquid into its walls over time. If you are able to extract that organic residue from within the ceramic and test it, then you might be able to figure out not only what the liquid was, but also what additives it may have contained.

When Koh tested sherds from each of the jars, most came back positive for syringic acid, which is found in red wine. A few came back positive for tartaric acid, which is found in both red and white wine. They also came back positive for acids that are found in things like honey, juniper berries, and mint, all of which would have been used to flavor and sweeten the wine, as well as substances like resin, which would have helped to preserve the wine, preventing it from going bad right away.[17] One of these days we hope to partner with a winery to try to re-create the wine, but we have yet to find a partner willing to experiment with us.

However, other archaeologists have had similar ideas. Dogfish Head Brewery in Delaware has worked with archaeologist Patrick McGovern to create several beers based on ancient recipes, including Midas Touch (my favorite), which is based on ingredients that were found in the so-called tomb of Midas, at the site of Gordion in Turkey. More recently, Israeli archaeologists worked with local breweries to re-create ancient beer and mead, or as close an approximation as they could get.[18]

It used to be that studying ancient diet and the environment was reasonably simple, at least with the proper background and training … and sometimes it still is. For example, if you are a physical anthropologist studying the human remains from a site and there are six right femurs in the pile of bones that you are sorting through, then you know that there were at least six individuals present, since each person only has one right femur. This is known as the minimum number of individuals (MNI), since there might have been more than six people represented in your pile of bones, but there cannot have been fewer. The same holds true if you are an archaeozoologist studying the animal remains from that site.

At the heart of it all, what we are trying to do is to reconstruct the lives of the ancient people. For example, to figure out what people were eating, we need to ascertain not only their actual diet but also how they got their food, and what kind of food was even available to them at particular moments in history.[19]

So one of the things that we have to determine is what the environment was like at that particular time and in that particular place. This is why we now need interdisciplinary teams, and it’s where all of the experts who visit the dig, or look at our material afterward, come into play. We need, for example, to know what the archaeobotanists and palynologists can tell us about the plant remains; what the archaeozoologists can tell us about the animal remains; what the osteologists and/or physical anthropologists can tell us about the human remains; and what all of them together, plus other experts, can tell us about the ancient climate and environment in the region. And occasionally we end up studying things that we never thought we would, such as ancient feces (which can tell us more than you might think).[20]

So, one way to figure out what people were eating in antiquity, and what animals lived in their local environment, is to study the animal bones that come up during your excavations. These require the expertise of archaeozoologists, who can easily tell the bones of a horse from those of a pig, or lion, or bird, or a sheep or goat (though sheep and goats can be so hard to tell apart that they are sometimes jokingly referred to as “geep” or “shoats”).

Retrieving these bones can often be quite straightforward, especially if they are large enough to be picked up and put into a “bone bag” during excavation, but just as frequently recovering them requires wet sieving the soil, using running water to help flush away the dirt and then picking out the bone fragments from among the pebbles and small bits of pottery that remain. It’s much like panning for gold, except that you’re left with animal bones rather than gold nuggets (though, for us, the bones are just as valuable). We do such wet sieving especially when our excavation is approaching a floor, so that we can gather up what might have been left there—hoping that the ancient inhabitants weren’t very good housekeepers.

FIG. 17A–B. Wet sieving soil samples at Tel Kabri (photos by E. H. Cline)

From this, you can figure out not only what kind of animals were being raised, and/or eaten, and/or kept as pets by the inhabitants at your site, but also how many of each were present in the areas that you are excavating. This usually involves some basic mathematics. For instance, we derive the number of identified specimens (NISP) by counting up the different species that are represented among the bone fragments, while the minimum number of individuals (MNI), mentioned above, is based on looking at the fragments from each type of animal and determining the minimum number that they represent.[21]

In addition to the animals, we are also interested in the plants and vegetables that people were eating. However, since we don’t usually have the actual plants left to us, except perhaps for some seeds, this generally involves studying and analyzing ancient pollen under a microscope, which takes a fair amount of expertise (specialists are known as palynologists).[22] From this, we can tell what sort of plants and trees were present in any given period and, based on that, can make educated guesses about changes in the environment and the climate during those times.

On an active excavation, this involves “floating” the soil samples. It is similar to wet sieving, but in this case the bags of soil that have been collected are dumped one at a time into a flotation machine, which agitates the water. Since the seeds and pollen float more often than they sink, the person in charge will first skim this material from the surface of the water. Then, after team members have collected the heavier material left at the bottom and let it dry, they will pick through all of this material (both light and heavy), gathering up the seeds and other plant remains (often with some small animal bone fragments mixed in as well).[23]

However, retrieving ancient pollen can also involve using a long borer to take a core sample down through the layers of a dried-up lagoon or ancient water source, since pollen will have settled to the bottom long ago. The core, consisting of a long tube of soil, will be cut into pieces, each of which will be examined by an archaeobotanist or a palynologist under a microscope to tally the grains of pollen—counting again both numbers and types, just as with the bones, as described above—that are present during each period of a site throughout its history.

FIG. 18. (a) Flotation machine (left); and (b) picking through the remains (right) for seeds and other materials at Tel Kabri (photos by E. H. Cline)

This is what was done, for example, by David Kaniewski and his team, who took coring samples in ancient lagoons and water sources located at sites in northern Syria and Cyprus. Another team did the same thing in Israel, in the Sea of Galilee and on the shores of the Dead Sea, while other studies were done in Greece. From all of these, the various teams were able to determine that there was a drought in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean regions beginning at the end of the twelfth century BCE and lasting for at least 150 years and as long as 300 years in those regions, for the pollen indicated that only trees and plants capable of thriving in an arid and barren environment were present during those years. In other words, they found evidence for ancient climate change, which may have contributed to the collapse of this entire region at the end of the Late Bronze Age.[24]

Another example comes from Jerusalem, dating to a few centuries later. After 1967, excavations were conducted near the Wailing (Western) Wall in the Old City. There the team found several ancient toilets, including one that they thought perhaps dated to 586 BCE, based on the pottery that they found and the radiocarbon dates.[25] According to textual sources, including the Hebrew Bible, this is when Nebuchadnezzar and the Neo-Babylonians besieged and then captured the city after an eight-month-long siege.

The toilet seat has two holes in it, one large and one small, through which one presumably did one’s business. There was also a small ceramic bowl next to the toilet, presumably used to dump lime into the toilet after one finished said business, which is what we used to have to do in porta-potties not so long ago. The archaeologists picked up the toilet seat and started digging underneath it, excavating what we would euphemistically call “night soil”—containing the urine and feces from whoever had been using the toilet back in the sixth century BCE.

And what they found is fascinating.

They looked at this material under a microscope and found out first that whoever was using this toilet was suffering from tapeworm and whipworm. Tapeworms usually show up when people are eating undercooked meat, such as beef or pork, while whipworms are usually the result of unsanitary conditions or the use of human feces as fertilizer. This, in turn, indicates that there was probably a shortage of wood, to cook the meat properly, and a shortage of water, to provide the proper sanitary conditions. Both might be indications that this was a city under siege at that time.

Further circumstantial evidence was provided when the team realized, in looking under the microscope at the undigested seeds and other vegetative material, that whoever was using the toilet was not eating what we might usually expect. They should have been eating peas, legumes, wheat, barley, and other grains. Instead, they were eating what we might call “backyard plants”: dandelions, weeds, and other things that grow in the yard but are not necessarily planted and not usually eaten. This might also be an indication that this was a city under siege: that the inhabitants could not get out to conduct their usual grain harvest and were reduced to eating whatever they could find near their houses.

So while we don’t have conclusive proof, it really does look as if this toilet provides evidence of what the inhabitants of Jerusalem were eating in about 586 BCE. They may really have been under siege, as the texts and tradition have long told us.

Now, with recent and rather spectacular advances in science, things can also get much more complicated and costlier, involving new sets of highly trained professionals to help extract information from what you have found. This includes, for instance, studies of ancient DNA (aDNA) from ancient skeletons, from which we can derive information about their genetic makeup.

Studying human remains is both similar to and quite different from studying animal bones and plant/pollen remains. Most skeletons are retrieved when one is excavating an ancient tomb or an entire cemetery, but bits and pieces, such as teeth, can frequently be retrieved during the wet sieving as well. Here is where many of the most recent and exciting advances in archaeological science come into play. The study of human remains used to involve primarily osteologists, who determined the number of individuals, their gender, their probable age at the time of death, whether they suffered from any diseases, and so on. Now many new types of specialists, and specializations, can be involved as well. These include geneticists (and archaeogeneticists) studying ancient DNA, who can tell us what the ancient person probably looked like and from where his or her ancestors came, as well as experts who can do strontium isotope analysis on the teeth and tell us where the person most likely grew up.

Such new studies are being done with increasing frequency, though not all scholars have embraced the findings, and many have urged caution—rightly so, in many cases, especially when the scientific results are picked up in the media and claims are made linking modern populations with ancient ones. Of great interest to many members of the general public was a study involving human remains from the Bronze Age found at ancient Sidon in Lebanon, which were then compared to the modern population in that region.[26] Another example that garnered much media attention is a study that was done of remains from ancient Ashkelon, which indicates that the Philistines (known from the Bible as well as from archaeology) may have migrated to the area of what is now Israel and nearby areas from southern Europe—most likely mainland Greece, Crete, or Spain—at the very time that the environmental problems we’ve just discussed were causing upheaval at the end of the Late Bronze Age.[27]

In the latter case, the results fit with what we already knew from the pottery and other material remains, which indicated that the Philistines probably migrated from somewhere in the western Mediterranean or the Aegean, but there has been pushback from some archaeologists. They have argued that the number of skeletons that yielded the relevant DNA—of which there were four, all infants buried under the floors of houses—is simply too small a sample to sustain the claims that were made. I happen to believe that the findings will be shown to be correct, but also agree that we need more samples and more testing before we can be fully confident of the results.

We are currently in an era that some are calling the Third Scientific Revolution in archaeology.[28] The first took place when the field was established in the 1850s, alongside (and influenced by) other fields, such as geology and zoology. The second took place a century later, with the implementation of radiocarbon (C-14) dating and other associated developments in the 1950s. The third is now, utilizing advances in the exact sciences, including aDNA, ORA, strontium isotope analysis, and other analytic techniques, which often involve big data and expensive devices in dedicated laboratories. It is a very exciting time to be an archaeologist, needless to say, but it now involves collaboration with other scientists in fields that heretofore have typically had little to do with archaeology. We shall see what the future brings, but one thing is certain—we should be able to learn more and more about the lives of ancient peoples, including garnering ever more information about what they looked like, what kind of clothes they wore, what kind of food they ate, what types of animals they raised and/or hunted, what species of plants they gathered or cultivated, and what their environment was like.

DIGGING DEEPER 5

DO YOU GET TO KEEP WHAT YOU FIND?

I will begin this final “Digging Deeper” chapter by answering another question that I am asked all the time. It has a short answer but is long on associated implications. The question is simply “Do you get to keep what you find?” The answer is very brief and to the point: “No.”

Whether you’re working in your own country or in a country other than your own, that nation’s antiquities department will have a set of rules. The best discoveries might go to a national or regional museum, as has been true throughout the history of archaeology—don’t forget that Indiana Jones once famously said, “That belongs in a museum!”—but most of the material will be put into bags and boxes and stored some place where graduate students and senior scholars can come in and study the material during the months (or even years) after the excavation. A six- or seven-week field season can yield enough material for two years or more of study and published findings.

Not only don’t I get to keep what I find, but I don’t think that other people should collect such items either. The consensus among scholars is that there is a direct correlation between private collecting and the looting of ancient sites all over the world. Looters wouldn’t bother stealing things from archaeological sites if there were no eager buyers.

More complex is the issue of museum collections. Among the questions being debated is whether the British Museum, the Louvre, the Met, and other museums should return to their countries of origin items that they obtained in the period of European colonialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—including the Elgin Marbles, the bust of Nefertiti, and the Rosetta Stone. In addition, museums have become much more careful in the past couple of decades to ensure that the objects they display have clear provenance. Many looted objects are still exhibited in museums, though, obtained decades ago when the rules were not as stringent. It is a moral, ethical, economic, and legal problem that cannot be easily resolved. It may be that case-by-case decisions would be best, but even that remains to be determined.[1]

However, right now we are seeing the greatest prevalence of looting of archaeological sites worldwide that has ever been documented, almost certainly fueled by demand from private collectors. Circumstances most favor looting in places where the policing of ancient sites is difficult because of political instability, as in Syria and Iraq at the moment. Of course, looting is nothing new; some of the Egyptian pharaohs’ tombs were looted in antiquity, perhaps even immediately after the pharaohs were buried. But now we are seeing an upsurge worldwide in Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, and even Peru and the United States; everywhere, ancient sites are now pockmarked with looters’ pits.[2]

On a small scale, illegal digging for antiquities has always been a way of life in some areas and cultures, usually done by impoverished folks hoping to supplement their meager income in some way. It is hard to blame a Syrian villager who excavates cylinder seals to sell to a middleman in order to feed his family in cataclysmic times when shops are closed, fields are burned, and travel impossible. But now, in recent years, wholesale looting operations seem to have swung into action, including in Syria, where ISIS reportedly sponsored and actively participated in the antiquities trade, looting entire sites and destroying parts of others, such as Nimrud and the Mosul Museum.[3]

I was part of a delegation of observers who went to Egypt in May 2011, after the January revolution of that year. We went to do some “ground truthing” to see whether the fresh holes dug into the ground that my colleague Sarah Parcak thought she had spotted in satellite photographs were looting pits. They were. I know. I was there and have pictures. Results of our study were published in the journal Antiquity for others to use.[4]

FIG. 19. Looting pit at Lisht in Egypt, May 2011 (photo by E. H. Cline)

In fact, looted Egyptian antiquities have shown up in auction houses in London and New York, just as looted Iraqi antiquities have. When the Iraq Museum in Baghdad was looted, some of the most famous pieces in the museum were stolen.[5] Many were returned or have been recovered, but others are still missing. Some ended up on eBay, where I and anyone else could see them, until pressure mounted and such sales were forbidden. Despite this prohibition, some looted objects can still be found for sale on eBay.

One of my favorite stories is of someone who was trying to sell a stolen Iraqi item. When examined closely, it turned out to be one of the replicas that had been for sale in the museum store. Colonel Matthew Bogdanos of the US Army, who was put in charge of recovering the items stolen from the Iraq Museum, documents many of these stories in his best-selling book Thieves of Baghdad, which was published in 2005.[6]

The looting went far beyond the museum and extended to archaeological sites throughout Iraq, with reports of men armed with both shovels and machine guns illegally digging at sites across the country.[7] At least one, the ancient city known as Umma, has been so thoroughly looted that all that can be seen in the photographs are looters’ pits, rather than ancient buildings or anything else.

The appearance of one-of-a-kind looted objects can cause a dilemma for archaeologists committed to limiting the trade in illegal antiquities. Such seems to have been the case in 2011, when the Sulaymaniyah Museum in the Kurdistan region of Iraq was advised by an Assyriologist in Britain to buy a group of clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform that he had been shown by an antiquities dealer.[8] In this case, among the tablets was one that turned out to contain a previously unknown section from the epic Gilgamesh. It fills in a large gap within the fifth tablet in the poem where Gilgamesh and his sidekick Enkidu are heading for the Cedar Forest to get timber; this is usually thought to be the same general region where the famous Cedars of Lebanon mentioned in the Bible were located. The new lines describe the noises that they hear upon entering the forest, including those of birds, insects, and monkeys.[9]

Lost for three thousand years, this tablet supplied a missing part of an important piece of one of the classics of world literature. The dilemma for archaeologists, of course, is that we don’t want to encourage looting, but we also cannot allow such a tablet with valuable information to go into the art-collecting market and disappear from public view without making some effort to save it and allow scholars to study it. Discussions on the issue have been prompted by the history of the Dead Sea Scrolls, many of which were purchased from the Bedouin who had illegally taken them from the caves around Qumran; it is frequently asked what would happen if such scrolls appeared on the antiquities market today.

In fact, something similar has happened with more than a hundred—perhaps as many as two hundred—clay tablets that apparently come from an archive that documents the daily life of Jews who were moved to Mesopotamia during the Babylonian Exile in the sixth century BCE and remained there into the fifth century BCE. The tablets appeared on the antiquities market at some point, reportedly after the 1970s, though the exact timing is debated. At least half were eventually purchased by a private collector and then published by a pair of scholars. The tablets were subsequently displayed in an exhibit at the Bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem in early February 2015, from which came a second publication by a different set of scholars.[10]

Even though it is not clear from which site they came, the tablets give its ancient name as “al-yahudu,” which, roughly translated, means “Judah-town.” They are among the first pieces of textual evidence from Mesopotamia confirming that the Babylonian Exile reported in the Hebrew Bible and elsewhere did take place, and providing information on what happened to those who were exiled. The tablets are extremely important, but they have no known context and were obviously looted—perhaps from southern Iraq, according to some reports. Should they have been published? Should they have been put on display? In this case, the importance of the texts—like that of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the find that they most closely parallel in terms of circumstances of discovery—persuaded at least some scholars that they should be published and displayed, despite the fact that they were apparently looted and acquired illegally. Not all scholars agree; in fact, the Archaeological Institute of America’s policy is to refuse to publish articles describing objects that cannot be clearly demonstrated not to have been looted.

In 1970 UNESCO approved the Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export, and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property, which was put into effect in April 1972.[11] As a result, anyone selling an antiquity today needs to have valid proof that it was found before 1970 (or sometimes 1973; that is, after the implementation of the convention), or, if found later, that it was legally exported from its country of origin—in other words, verification that it wasn’t looted. Obviously, this system is not foolproof: since the convention took effect, many more objects on the art market are purported to have been found before 1970 than after, an unlikely coincidence. On the whole, this was a good start, but the fifty-year-old convention should probably be updated.

Clearly, looting, especially during or in the aftermath of a conflict, is by no means a new problem, but unique situations can sometimes necessitate new laws.[12] Thus additional legislation is now beginning to be passed, addressing not only artifacts found in the United States but also those found elsewhere and smuggled into the United States.

Lawmakers in the United States have been passing legislation aimed at preserving ancient sites and antiquities for more than a century now. In fact, one of the earliest laws on antiquities was passed during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, an effort to control the huge trade in looted painted pots and other antiquities illegally dug from graves on Ancestral Puebloan sites in the US Southwest. Known as the American Antiquities Act of 1906, it was aimed at stopping or at least curbing the looting in New Mexico, Arizona, and elsewhere, because sites like Casa Grande in Arizona, which dates to about 1350 CE, were being looted for wooden beams and other ancient remains.[13]

Other laws followed, including the Historic Sites Act of 1935, which gave the National Park Service the right to identify, protect, and preserve cultural property, such as Native American sites or sites from the colonial era.[14] This responsibility of the National Park Service is one reason why it is the largest employer of professional archaeologists in the United States.

Some of the most important pieces of archaeological legislation have been passed since 1979. These include the Archaeological Resources Protection Act (ARPA), passed in that year, which protects archaeological sites on federal land. Taking artifacts from such a site can be prosecuted as a felony, with first-time penalties of a fine of up to $20,000 and a year in jail.[15] In one instance, federal agents arrested sixteen people in Blanding, Utah, in 2009 for digging Native American artifacts out of nearby federal lands, later charging a total of twenty-four people in the case.[16]

More recently, in 1990, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) was implemented. This required every federally funded US museum and similar institutions to provide an inventory of all their Native American artifacts, including human remains, funerary objects, grave goods, and so on, and to determine whether any living Native American tribes could claim a relationship with the inventoried objects. If so, then the institution was required to offer to repatriate to the tribe whatever it had in its possession.[17]

Such legislation has affected everything from the discovery to the excavation to the preservation, conservation, and promotion of archaeological sites. The laws are designed to help, rather than to hinder, archaeologists, and—in fact—along the way they have created innumerable jobs in archaeology. Employers include states, cities, and (as mentioned) the National Park Service; there are also cultural resource management archaeologists, who often go in just ahead of the bulldozers on construction projects.

Most recently, and in light of current worldwide problems, the US House of Representatives passed legislation in 2015 that makes it illegal in the United States to sell artifacts that have been looted from Syria. That legislation—now referred to as the Protect and Preserve International Cultural Property Act—was approved by the Senate in April 2016 and signed into law by the president on May 9, 2016.[18] Similarly, a memorandum of understanding between the United States and Egypt was signed on November 30, 2016. This placed restrictions on incoming antiquities from Egypt to help curb the ongoing looting in that country.[19]

As far as I am concerned, and I believe that I speak for many of my fellow archaeologists as well, ancient artifacts are part of our collective heritage, and so we can only hope that the new legislation and agreements will help to curtail the looting going on around the world. More can and should be done, from passing legislation to guarding excavated sites and protecting known but unexcavated remains.[20] Those outside the profession can help by not succumbing to the temptation to purchase an ancient artifact offered in a Middle Eastern market or seen on eBay. Because everything that we excavate, study, and write about had its origins so long ago, the question that should concern us all is how we can stem the loss of knowledge about our own shared past before it is too late.

EPILOGUE

BACK TO THE FUTURE

The concept of the past—that there are layers and layers of civilization, and that each culture is in a very real sense built upon the cultures that came before it—is at the very heart of what archaeologists do. As we dig down through layers of dirt, we’re not just uncovering objects. We’re uncovering our deep connection to the past.

And, of course, someday, we will be the past. Our civilization, our culture, will be long gone, and future archaeologists will be uncovering their connections to us. Our iPhones, Barbie dolls, Walmart stores, and McDonald’s arches will all be the object of study by future archaeologists. Therefore, I’d like to take this opportunity to look forward into the future and try to address two issues. One is the question of how archaeologists will interpret us—that is, our society and civilization—in the future. The other concerns how archaeologists will actually do archaeology in the future—that is, what new tools and techniques they will be using.

I’ve been talking about something that I call “future archaeology” ever since I saw two television shows that were made after Alan Weisman published his best-selling book The World without Us.[1] One was shown on the National Geographic Channel and was called Aftermath: Population Zero. The other, Life without People, was shown on the History Channel. Both of them, like Weisman’s book, considered what would happen to our cities and monuments in years to come if we humans ceased to exist. The television shows included footage of the Eiffel Tower crumbling, the Space Needle in Seattle falling down, lions roaming the grounds of the White House, and the like.

What would a team of archaeologists find two hundred years from now if all humans (besides the archaeologists themselves) disappeared today? What about two thousand years hence? How would they interpret what they found, and how would they reconstruct our society?

Leaving aside for the moment all the big administrative buildings, schools, homes, highways, bridges, roads, airports, and so on, what would remain of structures like the Washington Zoo or the Smithsonian museums, or even Starbucks and McDonald’s? What would be found in their ruins? Would they be identified properly? That is, would it be obvious that one was once a zoo and one a coffee shop? And if they were misidentified, what would archaeologists think that they had been?

The zoo might cause a bit of a problem, unless one could still read the signs that were once posted everywhere. Identification would also depend upon whether all the animals had managed to escape, in which case all the cages would be found empty, or whether they had been trapped inside and the team found their skeletons. If one found the skeletons and could read the signs, it would be pretty obvious what the site once was, but otherwise perhaps not.

The Smithsonian museums, or any large museum for that matter, like the Met in New York City or the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, will definitely present problems until it dawns on the archaeologists that they are excavating a museum. Any building that has the Hope Diamond, dinosaurs, and a large whale is sure to cause much confusion and discussion, until they realize that they have been excavating the National Museum of Natural History.

Personally, though, I think it’s going to be places like Starbucks and McDonald’s that will generate the most confusion. Specifically, I think there is a good chance of misidentifying Starbucks as a religion, complete with a crowned goddess with flowing locks, and with her shrine or temple located on virtually every block or street corner. The same thing could be said for McDonald’s, except in this case the deity being worshipped has a known name—Ronald McDonald—and has red hair and dresses in gaudy clothes. Or maybe the archaeologists of the future will conclude that Ronald and the Starbucks goddess stand at the head of a pantheon, like Zeus and Hera for the Greeks and Jupiter and Juno for the Romans.

I jest, and yet, if enough relevant records do not survive, such interpretations could be made by future archaeologists. Already when we’re on excavations and find something that we don’t immediately understand, we half-jokingly call it cultic or religious.

Future archaeology is interesting to think about, especially since we spend so much time looking at previously vanished cultures and don’t usually consider what our own culture is going to look like to future archaeologists. Consider, for instance, the fact that so many of our interactions are now online. Most of those interactions will vanish without a trace or will be inaccessible to future archaeologists, and so what will they conclude about our rate of literacy, for instance? And if they find that things halted suddenly, as they did in Pompeii back in 79 CE, what will they think about the ubiquitous rectangular blobs of metal, plastic, glass, and circuitry—many of them found clutched in someone’s hand—that seem to be associated with every skeleton? Will they have any idea that these once were communication devices?

A similar thought experiment was undertaken back in 1979, when David Macaulay published a great short illustrated book called Motel of the Mysteries. The premise of the book is this: Life in North America is basically extinguished in a single day in 1985. Then, in the year 4022 CE, amateur archaeologist Howard Carson accidentally stumbles upon an ancient site, which turns out to be the Motel of the Mysteries. He then brings in a team to help him, including an assistant named Harriet Burton.[2]

Obviously, “Howard Carson” is based on Howard Carter, and his assistant “Harriet Burton” is based on the real-life Harry Burton, who was an Egyptologist and the photographer during Carter’s very real excavation of King Tut’s tomb. Macaulay has a lot of fun with references to the discovery of King Tut’s tomb, including the famous phrase that Carter, or rather Carson in this case, utters—namely, that he sees “wonderful things.”[3] Finding two skeletons, he believes that he has discovered a tomb. Instead, as it turns out, he has found what we—the knowing readers—recognize is actually a motel room.

Carter and Burton’s misinterpretations of their finds are hilarious and include many inside archaeological jokes, but their story also illustrates what I said a moment ago—that if we don’t know what something is, we often think it might be religious. Thus, in what he calls the “Outer Chamber,” Macaulay’s Howard Carson finds everything facing “the Great Altar,” including the body that is still lying on top of the “Ceremonial Platform” and is still holding in its hand “the Sacred Communicator.” Of course, we recognize these: the “Great Altar” is none other than a television set; the “Ceremonial Platform” is just a bed; and the “Sacred Communicator” is the remote control for the TV.[4] And yet in this setting, two thousand years after the fact and with nothing else to go on, Howard Carson interprets all this as religious.

Macaulay tops it all off by having Harriet Burton put on and proudly wear the “Sacred Headband” and “Sacred Collar” that were still in place on the “Sacred Urn” when they found them. The accompanying illustration makes it quite clear that she is, in fact, wearing a toilet seat around her neck as the “Sacred Collar,” and it is the strip of paper that says “sanitized for your protection” that is wrapped around her head as the “Sacred Headband.” Two toothbrushes are dangling from her ears as “plastic ear ornaments,” and she is wearing the rubber stopper for the bathtub drain as an “exquisite silver chain and pendant.” Even better, the drawing is a dead ringer for the famous photograph that Heinrich Schliemann took of his wife, Sophia, when she was wearing all the jewelry from Priam’s Treasure that he found at Troy.[5]

This is what it may come to when someone in the future excavates Starbucks, McDonald’s, museums, zoos, and possibly even motels from our time. All humor aside, it is worthwhile thinking about the fact that our current culture may be wildly misinterpreted by future archaeologists, and that we may occasionally, or perhaps even often, misinterpret the past. That is an occupational hazard, but usually—once enough data is found—we come to a scholarly consensus about the proper interpretation of a building or a site or even a civilization.

And what about how archaeologists will actually do archaeology in the future—that is, what new tools and techniques will they be using? Of course, we have absolutely no way of knowing the answer, just as Heinrich Schliemann and Howard Carter could not have predicted the use of remote-sensing techniques that have now been employed at both Troy and King Tut’s tomb.

It is beyond doubt that there will continue to be advances in technology, which will allow us to peer even more easily beneath the earth, or beneath the tree canopies in Central America and Cambodia, before we begin digging. For instance, I am absolutely convinced, and have been saying for years, that there must be a better way to conduct remote sensing. Apart from LiDAR, most of the techniques that we are using, such as magnetometers, resistivity, and so on, are now decades old. It is time for new advances. In fact, some advances are already beginning to emerge; for example, fluxgate gradiometers and cesium magnetometers have replaced proton magnetometers on some projects.[6] As I’ve said before, using remote sensing can minimize the need for digging, allowing us potentially to destroy less and to do more work before ever breaking ground.

I wonder, for instance, whether in the future it might be possible to detect things like plaster or other specific materials through a layer of earth, just as we can now detect buried walls and ditches. Could some of the techniques being used by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) in airports, for example, to catch drug runners and find explosives, be repurposed to detect chemical compounds belonging to artifacts still buried in the earth? And would it make sense to partner with gas and oil exploration companies, to utilize new techniques that might allow us to peer deeper into a mound, or to do so in a series of slices, at specific depths? I do think that the time is ripe for another series of technological breakthroughs, but I think it is also a matter of talking to the right engineering people, perhaps someone who would say, “Wait, you want to do what? Oh yeah, we can do that, no problem.”

I also think that we will see new analytical techniques coming from chemistry, biology, and especially DNA studies, such as are emerging already. Conservation techniques will continue to improve, so that we will be able to preserve more of what we find. Above all, there should be greater sensitivity to community needs and community goals for archaeology, and an increase in collaborative projects between archaeologists and local communities, so that the people whose heritage is being explored have a greater say in what happens to the artifacts of that heritage.[7]

Moreover, I think that it is fairly safe to say that the actual process of physically digging—that is, excavating with picks, shovels, trowels, and dental tools—will continue as it has since the very first days of archaeology. The number of ways that one can dig carefully and yet quickly, without destroying the remains, is limited. Still, I could be surprised, for some new digging techniques may be invented that I cannot even begin to imagine at the moment. What will not change is the archaeological axiom that the best things on a dig are always found on the last day of the excavation season … and almost always in the balk.

In my office at George Washington University, I have two bumper stickers pasted on the wall. The first one says simply, “Archaeology: I’d rather be digging.” The second one says, “Archaeologist. The coolest job on Earth. I save the past, what do you do?” Just as bumper stickers should, they encapsulate my feelings about archaeology in a nutshell—I really would rather be digging. But they also issue a challenge to the rest of the world. Archaeology is not only about finding the remains that have been left from past civilizations. It’s also about preserving and curating those remains for future generations. I hope that this book, like my larger volume Three Stones Make a Wall, lends itself, even in some small way, to that aim. I also hope that those of you who are about to go on your first archaeological excavation have the time of your lives and the experience of a lifetime. Good luck and happy digging!

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As with the larger book from which this is derived (Three Stones Make a Wall: The Story of Archaeology; Princeton University Press, 2017), this book would not even be possible were it not for the efforts of all the archaeologists who have come before me. I remain proud to be part of a long and distinguished academic discipline, working in a field that is of interest to so many people. I’d like to once again acknowledge all of the students who have taken my Introduction to Archaeology course at George Washington University over the years and everyone who has come digging with me at Megiddo and Tel Kabri. I’d also like to again thank Rob Tempio, Matt Rohal, and everyone else at Princeton University Press, as well as Lauren Lepow, copyeditor extraordinaire. I am grateful as well to the British Museum and the National Geographic Society, for permission to publish some of the images that appear here. Last, but by no means least, I’d like to once again thank my family, as always.

NOTES

PREFACE

1. 1.    Other authors have previously discussed many of the same topics, sites, and archaeologists, of course; I find the various books written or edited by Brian Fagan and by Paul Bahn to be among the most useful and accessible. Relevant volumes are Bahn 1995, 1996a, b, c, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2003, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2014; Bahn and Cunliffe 2000; Bahn and Renfrew 1996; Catling 2012, 2013; Catling and Bahn 2010; Fagan 1994, 1996, 2001, 2003, 2004a, b, 2007a, b, 2014; Fagan and Durrani 2014, 2016; Renfrew and Bahn 2012, 2015; see also Hunt 2007; Pollard 2007.

DIGGING DEEPER 1

1. 1.    For concise discussions of much of the material covered in this chapter, see Fagan and Durrani 2014: 120–49 (chapter 8). The following will also be of interest to those seeking information beyond what is presented in this chapter: Banning 2002; Collins and Molyneaux 2003; Conyers 2013; Howard 2007; Leach 1992; White and King 2007.

2. 2.    Fagan and Durrani 2014: 92.

3. 3.    See ibid., 87, for more on these definitions of artifacts and features, as well for definitions of structures and ecofacts.

4. 4.    The following section on surveys and surveying is based on, and indebted to, the discussion in ibid., 126–36. PRAP was directed by, among others, Professor Jack Davis of the University of Cincinnati.

5. 5.    Ibid., 126–29, 144–45, 157.

6. 6.    Casana 2015; Hammer and Ur 2019; Vergano 2014.

7. 7.    Bradford 1957.

8. 8.    Fagan and Durrani 2014: 145; Lerici 1959, 1962. Lerici’s team, including archaeologists from the University of Pennsylvania in the later years, also employed very early versions of proton magnetometers as well as electrical resistivity meters to aid them in their detection of additional tombs.

9. 9.    Fagan and Durrani 2014: 135, fig. 8.10.

10. 10.  Blumenthal and Mashberg 2015; Cronin 2011; Parcak 2009; Said-Moorhouse 2013; see now Parcak 2019. For a clip of Sarah Parcak’s appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on January 8, 2016, see https://youtu.be/vK2t27FNJmU.

11. 11.  Maugh 1992.

12. 12.  Fagan and Durrani 2014: 133–34.

13. 13.  Ibid.

14. 14.  Dunston 2016.

15. 15.  Fagan and Durrani 2014: 136. On LiDAR and Roman roads in England, see Calderwood 2016; Nagesh 2016; Webster 2015. Regarding Kabri, see Koh, Yasur-Landau, and Cline 2014. On Jezreel, see http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/archaeology-today/biblical-archaeology-topics/jezreel-expedition-sheds-new-light-on-ahab-and-jezebel’s-city/.

16. 16.  McNeil 2015.

17. 17.  Fagan and Durrani 2014: 141–42.

18. 18.  Cline and Yasur-Landau 2006.

19. 19.  Fagan and Durrani 2014.

20. 20.  Ibid.

21. 21.  See, e.g., Dvorsky 2014a.

22. 22.  Fagan and Durrani 2014: 130–31; Keys 2014. See also Dvorsky 2014b.

23. 23.  Keys 2014; Dvorsky 2014b; Moss 2015. See further http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2015/09/07/superhenge-discovery-at-stonehenge/71846436/; http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-wiltshire-34156673?ocid=socialflow_twitter%3FSThisFB%3FSThisFB.

24. 24.  Keys 2016; Knapton 2016.

25. 25.  Fagan and Durrani 2014: 126.

26. 26.  Ibid., 125–26.

27. 27.  Ibid., 129–30.

28. 28.  Yasur-Landau, Cline, and Pierce 2008.

DIGGING DEEPER 2

1. 1.    See also the discussion, with a detailed list of tools, in Fagan and Durrani 2014: 160–61.

2. 2.    Ibid., 88.

3. 3.    Ibid., 89.

4. 4.    Ibid., 158–60.

5. 5.    Ibid., 156–58.

6. 6.    Bahn 2008: 57; Fagan 2014: 139 (within the entry on Petrie by Garry J. Shaw).

7. 7.    Fagan and Durrani 2014: 88, 98–100, 103; see also Bahn 2008: 56–57; Fagan 2014: 139 (within the entry on Petrie by Garry J. Shaw); Hallote 2006: 154–55, 181.

8. 8.    See, e.g., Fagan 2014: 139 (within the entry on Petrie by Garry J. Shaw).

9. 9.    Bahn 2008: 61; Fagan 2003: 144–47; Fagan and Durrani 2014: 90; see also the entry on Wheeler by Martin Carver in Fagan 2014: 152–56.

10. 10.  See http://www.harrismatrix.com/.

11. 11.  Bahn 2008: 74–75; Fagan 2003: 140–43; see also the entry on Kenyon by Miriam C. Davis in Fagan 2014: 220–23.

DIGGING DEEPER 3

1. 1.    For concise discussions of much of the material covered in this chapter, see Fagan and Durrani 2014: 96–118 (chapter 7).

2. 2.    See, e.g., Aitken 1990; Fagan and Durrani 2014: 111–17; Taylor and Aitken 1997.

3. 3.    Fagan and Durrani 2014: 111–12.

4. 4.    See, e.g., the explanation at http://www.physlink.com/Education/AskExperts/ae403.cfm, which states that it is “fairly simple to determine how many total carbon atoms should be in a sample given its weight and chemical makeup.”

5. 5.    Manning et al. 2009.

6. 6.    For an example of radiocarbon dating used as part of academic discussions, see, e.g., Levy and Higham 2014.

7. 7.    See Fagan and Durrani 2014: 108–111; also, e.g., Baillie 2014 with earlier references.

8. 8.    http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/edinburgh_and_east/8058185.stm.

9. 9.    Ibid.

10. 10.  Manning et al. 2009.

11. 11.  See Fagan and Durrani 2014: 62–69.

12. 12.  She subsequently published a book about them (Barber 1999), as did he (Mallory and Mair 2000). See also Hudson in Bahn 1996c: 152–53.

13. 13.  Demick 2010; Wade 2010; see also Hudson in Bahn 1996c: 152–53; http://factsanddetails.com/asian/cat62/sub406/item2567.html.

14. 14.  Demick 2010; Wade 2010; see also Hudson in Bahn 1996c: 152–53; http://factsanddetails.com/asian/cat62/sub406/item2567.html.

15. 15.  Bahn 1995: 84–85, 1996c: 140–45; Fagan and Durrani 2014: 68, 302–3; Pollard 2007: 232–35; Scarre in Fagan 2007a: 40–41; and http://www.iceman.it/en/; see also http://factsanddetails.com/world/cat56/sub362/item1496.html.

16. 16.  Bahn 1996c: 140–45. For the story of the years immediately following the initial discovery, see Spindler 1995, written by the archaeologist in charge of the initial scientific studies.

17. 17.  See http://www.iceman.it/en/s with further references; also http://factsanddetails.com/world/cat56/sub362/item1496.html.

18. 18.  See http://www.iceman.it/en/, with further references; also http://factsanddetails.com/world/cat56/sub362/item1496.html.

19. 19.  Bogucki in Bahn 1995: 156–57; Bogucki in Bahn 1996c: 146–51; Liesowska 2014; Pollard 2007: 236–39; Polosmak 1994; also http://siberiantimes.com/culture/others/features/siberian-princess-reveals-her-2500-year-old-tattoos/. See also discussions in Hall 2015; Mayor 2014.

20. 20.  Bogucki in Bahn 1995: 156–57; Bogucki in Bahn 1996c: 146–51; Liesowska 2014; Pollard 2007: 236–39; Polosmak 1994. See also http://siberiantimes.com/culture/others/features/siberian-princess-reveals-her-2500-year-old-tattoos/.

21. 21.  https://www.nationalgeographic.com/contributors/r/photographer-johan-reinhard/; Schreiber in Bahn 1996c: 160–61.

22. 22.  Reinhard 2005.

23. 23.  Clark 1998; Reinhard in Fagan 2007a: 100–105; Schreiber in Bahn 1996c: 160–61.

24. 24.  Fagan and Durrani 2014: 63–64; Kaner in Bahn 1996c: 164–69; Tarlow in Bahn 1995: 114–15; see, e.g., Aldhouse-Green 2015 and Glob 2004.

25. 25.  Kaner in Bahn 1996c: 164–69; Pollard 2007: 212–17; Tarlow in Bahn 1995: 114–15; https://research.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=808672&partId=1.

26. 26.  Fagan and Durrani 2014: 63–64; Kaner in Bahn 1996c: 164–69; Tarlow in Bahn 1995: 114–15; http://www.tollundman.dk.

27. 27.  http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=119824.

28. 28.  Ballard 2008; Krause 2000; Søreide 2011. See also https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2016/10/black-sea-shipwreck-discovery/.

29. 29.  See Ballard 2008; Krause 2000; Ryan and Pittman 1998; Søreide 2011. See also https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2016/10/black-sea-shipwreck-discovery/.

30. 30.  Pollard 2007: 154–57; Tarlow in Bahn 1995: 128–31. For book-length accounts, see, e.g., Bruce-Mitford 1979 and Williams 2011.

31. 31.  Pollard 2007: 154–57; Tarlow in Bahn 1995: 128–31.

32. 32.  Pollard 2007: 154–57; Tarlow in Bahn 1995: 128–31.

33. 33.  Ibid.

34. 34.  Ibid.

35. 35.  Ibid.

36. 36.  Ibid.

37. 37.  Cohen 2011; Kennedy 2011; Ravilous 2012.

38. 38.  Cohen 2011; Kennedy 2011; Ravilous 2012.

39. 39.  Cohen 2011; Kennedy 2011; Ravilous 2012.

DIGGING DEEPER 4

1. 1.    Kaner in Bahn 1996c: 164–69; Tarlow in Bahn 1995: 114–15; https://research.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=808672&partId=1.

2. 2.    Fagan and Durrani 2014: 63–64; Kaner in Bahn 1996c: 164–69; Tarlow in Bahn 1995: 114–15; http://www.tollundman.dk.

3. 3.    Bahn 1996c: 140–45. See http://www.iceman.it/en/, with further references; http://factsanddetails.com/world/cat56/sub362/item1496.html. For an excellent, and brief, explanation of strontium isotope analysis, see http://archive.archaeology.org/0705/abstracts/isotopes.html.

4. 4.    See again http://www.iceman.it/en/, with further references; also http://factsanddetails.com/world/cat56/sub362/item1496.html.

5. 5.    Barzilay 2016, reporting on an article published in Science by Maixner et al. 2016. See also Rosen 2016; http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/body/ancient-icemans-h-pylori-genome-hints-at-ancient-migrations-to-europe/.

6. 6.    On European migrations, see, e.g., Cooper and Haak 2015, with references to the original publications in Science and Nature; for Richard III, see, e.g., Kennedy 2014 and Sample 2015, reporting on the initial publication by King et al. 2014.

7. 7.    See Samadelli et al. 2015; Scallan 2015; also http://www.iceman.it/en; http://www.celebritytattoodesign.com/brad-pitt-tattoos.

8. 8.    http://factsanddetails.com/world/cat56/sub362/item1496.html.

9. 9.    See http://www.iceman.it/en/, with further references; also http://factsanddetails.com/world/cat56/sub362/item1496.html.

10. 10.  In the lost-wax method, a sculptor creates a statue in wax, then encases it in a harder material and heats it up so that the wax melts and runs out a hole in the bottom. This leaves a cavity in the exact shape of the wax within the harder material, into which molten bronze can then be poured, which creates the same shape in metal as had originally been created in wax.

11. 11.  Stewart 2006.

12. 12.  Clinton 2013; Glover 2013; Griffiths 2015; Sheldon 2017.

13. 13.  Povoledo 2015; Woollaston 2015.

14. 14.  See, e.g., Gates 2011: 356–67; MacKendrick 1960: 196–223.

15. 15.  Fuller 2014.

16. 16.  Ibid.

17. 17.  See Koh, Yasur-Landau, and Cline 2014. For media reports, see Jaggard 2014; Lemonick 2014; Levitan 2013; McIntyre 2014; Naik 2013; Netburn 2013; Wilford 2013.

18. 18.  Ben Zion 2019a.

19. 19.  See Fagan and Durrani 2014: 234–59 (chapter 13).

20. 20.  Ibid., 235.

21. 21.  Fagan and Durrani 2014: 238–41.

22. 22.  Ibid., 223–24.

23. 23.  Ibid., 248–51.

24. 24.  Kaniewski et al. 2011; Drake 2012; Kaniewski et al. 2013; Langgut et al. 2013; Cline 2014: 145–47; Kaniewski, Guiot, and Van Campo 2015; Kaniewski et al. 2019.

25. 25.  The following discussion is based upon material published in Cahill et al. 1991; Reinhard and Warnock 1996; see also previous discussions in Marcus 2000: 157; Cline 2004: 60–61; Cline 2009: 52–53.

26. 26.  Haber et al. 2017; Romey 2017.

27. 27.  Feldman et al. 2019. For media reports, see Ben Zion 2019b; David 2019; Gannon 2019; Romey 2019.

28. 28.  Kristiansen 2014.

DIGGING DEEPER 5

1. 1.    See, e.g., Anderson 2016; Atwood 2006; Cuno 2010, 2012; Felch and Frammolino 2011; Meyer 1973; Roehrenbeck 2010; Watson and Todeschini 2006; Waxman 2009. See also Bering 2016, as well as http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,1883142,00.html for Time’s list of “Top 10 Plundered Artifacts”; and http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/may/08/greece-international-justice-regain-parthenon-marbles-uk for a recent article on the Elgin Marbles.

2. 2.    Fagan and Durrani 2014: 20–22. See also Curry 2015; Dubrow 2014; Mueller 2016; Romano 2015; Romey 2015; Vance 2015.

3. 3.    Casana 2015; http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/09/world/iraq-isis-heritage/.

4. 4.    Parcak et al. 2016.

5. 5.    Bogdanos 2005. See also Emberling and Hanson 2008; Rothfield 2008a.

6. 6.    Bogdanos 2005.

7. 7.    See, e.g., Andrews 2003; Emberling and Hanson 2008.

8. 8.    George 2016.

9. 9.    Al-Rawi and George 2014; George 2016.

10. 10.  Horowitz, Greenberg, and Zilberg 2015; Pearce and Wunsch 2014; see also Abraham 2011. News reports, reviews, and discussions are gathered in Baker 2015; Ben Zion 2015; Hasson 2015; http://lawrenceschiffman.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/jews-of-babylon.pdf; http://www.reuters.com/article/us-israel-archaeology-babylon-idUSKBN0L71EK20150203; http://paul-barford.blogspot.com/2015/02/babylonian-cunies-from-private.html; http://news.cornell.edu/stories/2015/01/new-archive-jewish-babylonian-exile-released; and http://www.ancientjewreview.com/articles/2015/2/18/pearce-and-wunsch-documents-of-judean-exiles-and-west-semites-in-babylonia-1.

11. 11.  http://www.unesco.org/new/en/culture/themes/illicit-traffic-of-cultural-property/1970-convention/; http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=13039&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html.

12. 12.  Atwood 2006; Brodie and Tubb 2011; Rothfield 2008b; Rush 2012.

13. 13.  Fagan and Durrani 2014: 355–58; Harmon and McManamon 2006; http://www.nps.gov/archeology/sites/antiquities/about.htm; http://www.georgewright.org/313mcmanamon.pdf.

14. 14.  http://www.nps.gov/history/local-law/fhpl_histsites.pdf.

15. 15.  Fagan and Durrani 2014: 358; http://www.nps.gov/archeology/tools/Laws/arpa.htm.

16. 16.  See http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?

17. storyId=106091937; http://articles.latimes.com/2009/jun/17/nation/na-artifacts-backlash17; http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/21/us/21blanding.html?_r=0.

18. 17.  Fagan and Durrani 2014: 358; https://www.nps.gov/subjects/nagpra/index.htm.

19. 18.  https://foreignaffairs.house.gov/2016/5/president-signs-engel-bill-stop-isis-looting-antiquities; https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/1493/text.

20. 19.  https://theantiquitiescoalition.org/the-united-states-and-the-arab-republic-of-egypt-sign-historic-agreement-to-protect-cultural-heritage/; https://theantiquitiescoalition.org/after-long-delay-us-and-egypt-sign-historic-mou-restricting-endangered-heritage-from-american-import/.

21. 20.  Organizations that are involved in working on such measures include the US Committee of the Blue Shield (www.uscbs.org), SAFE: Saving Antiquities for Everyone (http://savingantiquities.org), the Antiquities Coalition (https://theantiquitiescoalition.org), and the American Schools of Oriental Research Cultural Heritage Initiatives (http://www.asor-syrianheritage.org/about/mission/), among others.

EPILOGUE

1. 1.    Weisman 2007.

2. 2.    Macaulay 1979.

3. 3.    Ibid., 26.

4. 4.    Ibid., 30, 52–65.

5. 5.    Ibid., 32–33, 36–37, 68–81.

6. 6.    See, e.g., https://archeosciences.revues.org/1781.

7. 7.    See, e.g., http://www.sfu.ca/ipinch/project-components/community-based-initiatives.

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INDEX

- aerial photographs, 6, 8, 52

- aerial surveys, 3, 5, 10

- Aftermath: Population Zero, 121

- Agora (Athens), 1

- Amenhotep III (Egyptian pharaoh), 61, 68

- American Antiquities Act, 116

- American Schools of Oriental Research Cultural Heritage Initiatives, 139n.20

- Ancestral Puebloan sites, 116

- Angkor Wat (Cambodia), 7, 10

- Antiquities Coalition, 139n.20

- antiquities trade, 110

- Archaeological Institute of America (AIA), 115

- Archaeological Resources Protection Act (ARPA), 117

- Ardnamurchan Peninsula (Scotland), 83

- ARPA. See Archaeological Resources Protection Act

- artifact(s), 2, 4, 17–18, 20–21, 25, 29, 33–34, 37–38, 52, 58, 61, 73, 78–79, 82, 91, 116–118, 127–128

- Ashkelon (Israel), 105

- Athens (Greece), 1, 49

- balk(s), 44, 46–52, 128

- Bible Lands Museum (Jerusalem), 114

- Black Sea, 78–79

- Boeotia (Greece), 18, 23

- bog bodies, 76

- bogs, 76–77

- British Museum, 109

- CABBAGE. See Cambridge and Bradford Boeotian Archaeological and Geographical Expedition

- Cambridge and Bradford Boeotian Archaeological and Geographical Expedition (CABBAGE), 18–19

- Canterbury (England), 66–67

- Caracol (Belize), 10

- carbon-14 dating. See radiocarbon dating

- cesium magnetometer, 14, 127

- clothes, 2, 107, 123

- Colonial Williamsburg (USA), 40

- context(s), 24, 34, 37–39, 58, 64, 67, 93, 114

- Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export, and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property, 115

- Corona program, 5

- crop marks, 8–10

- CT scans, 73, 92

- cultural resource management (CRM), 56

- Dead Sea Scrolls, 113–114

- dendrochronology, 60, 64, 68

- dental tools, 27, 30–31, 128

- diet, 96

- DigitalGlobe, 7

- ditch(es), 2, 8–9, 13, 22, 127

- DNA, 71, 73, 92, 104–106, 127

- drone(s), 11–12

- drought, 101

- Durrington Walls (England), 15

- earthwork(s), 8

- Electrical conductivity/resistivity, 12, 132n.8

- Elgin Marbles, 109

- El-Maskhuta, Tell (Egypt), 47–48

- Endeavor (space shuttle), 7–8

- Etruscan tombs/burial mounds, 6

- feature(s), 2, 8, 13–14, 17, 27–28, 36, 51–52, 70

- fens (see bogs)

- flotation, 100–101

- fluxgate gradiometers, 127

- full-coverage survey(s), 3, 18, 24–25

- future archaeology, 121, 123

- Gordion (Turkey), 95

- ground-penetrating radar, 15

- ground survey(s), 3–5, 17–18, 24

- ground truthing, 12, 111

- handpicks, 27, 30

- Harris matrix, 50

- Historic Sites Act, 116

- horizontal excavation, 40

- H. pylori, 87

- Ice Maiden 71, 74–75. See also Juanita; Siberian Princess

- infrared imaging, 8

- inorganic material, 69

- Iraq Museum (Baghdad), 111

- Jericho (West Bank), 38–39, 50

- Jerusalem (Israel), 44, 50, 102, 104, 114

- jewelry, 2, 33, 92, 125

- Jezreel (Israel), 11

- Juanita, 71, 75

- Kabri, Tel (Israel), 7, 11–12, 14, 24–26, 31–32, 35–36, 48–49, 53, 56, 64, 68, 94, 98, 101

- Kenyon-Wheeler method, 45–46, 50

- laser imaging, 92

- Lerici periscope, 6–7

- LiDAR (see Light Detection and Ranging)

- Life without People, 121

- Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR), 10, 11, 126

- Lindow Man, 77–78, 85

- Lisht (Egypt), 111

- lost-wax method, 91, 137n.10

- Louvre (Museum), 109

- magnetic field, 13

- magnetometers, 13–15, 126–127, 132n.8. See also cesium magnetometer; proton magnetometers

- Marshalltown trowels, 28–29

- McDonald’s, 120–122, 125

- Megiddo (Israel), 1, 13, 28, 31, 40–42, 45, 53, 55, 64, 66

- Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met), 109, 122

- minimum number of individuals (MNI), 96

- MNI. See minimum number of individuals

- Motel of the Mysteries, 124

- Mount Ampato (Peru), 75

- Mount Vesuvius (Italy), 90, 92

- Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), 122

- NAGPRA. See Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act

- National Park Service, 116, 118

- Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), 117

- Nefertiti (Egyptian queen), 68, 109

- Nimrud (Iraq), 76

- NISP. See number of identified specimens

- number of identified specimens (NISP), 99

- obsidian, 57, 67

- obsidian hydration, 67

- Olduvai Gorge (Africa), 65

- organic material, 27, 63, 65, 67, 69, 76, 84, 91, 95

- ORA. See Organic Residue Analysis

- Organic Residue Analysis (ORA), 94, 106

- Ötzi the Iceman, xi, 71–72, 86, 88

- pedestrian survey(s), 3, 24

- Philistines, 105–106

- photogrammetry, 36

- picks/pickax(es), xi, 27–29, 31, 33, 47, 128

- pit(s), 2, 4, 16, 22, 27, 110–112

- plaster of Paris, 91

- pollen, 87, 99–100, 102, 104

- Pompeii (Italy), 90, 92–94, 123

- potassium-argon analysis/dating, 61, 65

- pottery, 20–23, 25, 31, 33, 43, 50, 54–55, 57–68, 60, 63–64, 66–68, 99, 102, 106. See also sherds

- pottery seriation. See seriation

- PRAP. See Pylos Regional Archaeological Project

- Protect and Preserve International Cultural Property Act, 118

- proton magnetometer, 127, 132n.8

- provenance, 109

- Pylos (Greece), 3, 19, 23

- Pylos Regional Archaeological Project (PRAP), 3, 19, 21

- Qumran (Israel), 113

- radiocarbon dating, 60–65, 68, 84, 102, 106

- reconnaissance survey(s), 3, 18

- rehydroxylation, 66

- remote sensing, 3, 12–17, 126–127

- Richard III (British king), 87

- Rosetta Stone, 109

- SAFE: Saving Antiquities for Everyone, 139n.20

- Samaria (West Bank), 50

- sample survey(s), 3, 24

- satellite images/imagery/photographs, 5, 7–8, 17, 111

- seriation, 43, 67

- sherd(s), 20, 22–23, 57, 66, 94–95. See also pottery

- shovel(s), 27, 112, 128

- shovel-test pit(s), 4

- Siberian Princess, 71, 74

- Sidon (Lebanon), 105

- Silk Route, 71

- Starbucks, 121–123, 125

- Stonehenge (England), 15, 41

- stone tools, 2, 20, 22, 33, 57, 63–65, 67

- stratigraphic section, 43

- stratigraphy, 28, 41–42, 44, 46, 49–50, 67

- strontium isotope analysis, 86, 105–106

- Sulaymaniyah Museum (Iraq), 112

- Superhenge (England), 16

- superposition, 43

- survey(s). See aerial; ground; pedestrian; reconnaissance; sample; targeted

- surveying, xi, 1, 20, 25–26, 41

- Sutton Hoo (England), 80–83

- Tanis (Egypt), 8

- tapeworm(s), 103

- targeted survey, 24–25

- Tarim Basin (China), 70–71

- tel/tell, 42

- Teotihuacán (Mexico), 2

- Thebes (Greece), 18

- thermoluminescence, 61

- Third Scientific Revolution, 106

- Three Stones Make a Wall, ix, 129

- toilet, 102–104, 125

- Tollund Man, 77–78, 86

- tools, 1, 27, 29–30, 120, 126

- transect(s), 20–23

- tree-ring dating. See dendrochronology

- trowels, 27–28, 30–31, 128. See also Marshalltown trowels; WHS trowels

- Troy (Turkey), 14, 89, 125–127

- Tushratta (Mitanni king), 61

- Tutankhamun (Egyptian pharaoh), 37, 70, 87, 124, 126

- Ubar (Oman), 8

- Ukok Plateau (Siberia), 74

- Uluburun shipwreck, 68, 76

- Umma (Iraq), 112

- UNESCO, 115

- Ürümqi (China), 70

- US Committee of the Blue Shield, 139n.20

- vertical excavation, 40–41

- Vespasian (Roman emperor), 67

- wall(s), 2, 7–9, 12–13, 20, 33, 48–49, 58, 64, 95, 102, 127–128

- weapon(s), 2

- wet sieving, 32, 97–100, 104

- wheelbarrow(s), 27, 32, 46

- Wheeler-Kenyon method, 45–46, 50

- whipworm(s), 103

- WHS trowels, 28

- wine cellar, 11, 94

- World without Us, The, 121

- writing tablet, 76

- Zincirli (Turkey), 14