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Archaeology reconstructs past human behavior from material remains — artifacts, features, ecofacts, and their spatial relationships. Stratigraphy (the law of superposition: deeper layers are older) provides relative chronology; absolute dating methods include radiocarbon dating, dendrochronology, and potassium-argon dating. Archaeologists infer behavior from patterns rather than individual finds: distribution of hearths, refuse middens, storage pits, and architectural features reveal subsistence strategies, trade networks, and social organization. The discipline spans prehistoric hunter-gatherers to historical archaeology of recent centuries.
Work through the interpretation of a hypothetical site profile: given a stratigraphic cross-section with artifact distributions, reconstruct the sequence of occupation, infer economic activities, and identify the limits of inference.
Archaeology is fundamentally an inferential science: you never directly observe past behavior, only its material residue. The basic unit of analysis is the artifact — any object made or modified by humans — but artifacts mean almost nothing in isolation. What matters is context: where an object was found, at what depth, alongside what other objects, and in what spatial relationship to features like hearths, postholes, and refuse pits. Removing an artifact from its context is like tearing a sentence out of a book — the word survives, but its meaning is gone.
The chronological backbone of any excavation is stratigraphy, which applies the law of superposition: undisturbed layers accumulate from bottom to top, so deeper is older. By reading a stratigraphic profile — the cross-section visible in an excavation trench — archaeologists reconstruct the sequence of occupations, abandonment events, and natural deposits at a site. Stratigraphy gives *relative* chronology (layer A is older than layer B), but not absolute dates. Absolute dating methods assign calendar years: radiocarbon dating measures the decay of carbon-14 in organic materials and is reliable up to about 50,000 years ago; dendrochronology matches tree-ring patterns in preserved wood to master chronologies; potassium-argon dating works on volcanic rock millions of years old, useful for early hominin sites.
Recall from your study of sampling methods that patterns in a population reveal more than individual cases. This principle is central to archaeological inference. A single ceramic sherd tells you that pottery existed; a *distribution* of sherds across a site tells you about food storage, feasting areas, trade networks, and household organization. Similarly, the spatial clustering of animal bones, carbonized seeds, and grinding stones around a central hearth is evidence for food preparation — no single item proves this, but the pattern does. From the assemblage — the total collection of artifacts and ecofacts from a site or layer — archaeologists reconstruct subsistence strategies, social organization, and long-distance exchange.
An important limit on all archaeological inference is preservation bias: not everything survives. Organic materials — wood, fiber, skin, most food — decay rapidly in many environments but survive in dry, frozen, waterlogged, or anaerobic conditions. This means the archaeological record systematically underrepresents certain materials, regions, and practices. A site with no evidence of plant use may simply have had poor preservation, not an absence of plants. This is why "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" is more than a cliché in archaeology — it is a methodological imperative. Every reconstruction must account for what the depositional environment would and would not preserve, and conclusions should be stated with appropriate uncertainty about what has been lost.
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