10 Big Misconceptions About Archaeology

For regular videos on ancient cultures and forgotten civilizations, please subscribe. Today we're looking at 10 of the most misunderstood concepts in archaeology. Sometimes we just make assumptions based on what we see and we get it wrong. So I'm going to take this opportunity to debunk 10 popular misconceptions about archaeology and explain why they are mistaken. Let's get started. Stone structures can't be dated. You can't carbon date stone. People say this when archaeologists discuss the dates of ancient buildings. And when it comes to radiocarbon dating the building stone itself, it's true. But the age of stone buildings can be dated scientifically. A building may have been altered many times in its lifetime. The foundations, walls, additions, and repairs don't necessarily have the same date. So before we ask how old it is, we need to be clear about which part we're actually trying to date. The physical relationships can establish a sequence. Builders sometimes dig foundation trenches through the remains of an older building. The new building must be later than the one beneath it. And dating those earlier remains can help establish how early the new construction could have begun. Position and sequence determine which event a measurement can help date. Some building materials can also contain suitable samples for carbon dating, even though the stone does not. A radiocarbon project on Egyptian monuments examined charcoal incorporated in mortar between the blocks. The mortar comes from the same time as the placement of the blocks. Mind you, some have argued that the mortar could have been put in later, but in these cases, no, because they were covered over by the outer casing of the pyramids, which happened during construction. And that's the key point. If archaeologists find datable samples that can be demonstrated to have been put there At the time of construction and sealed. And this is what they aim to do. Then you remove the problem of the organic material coming from a later time. But there, the sample could produce a date too early. The wood that was burned and used for mortar came from a tree that may have had a long life. An old tree can produce a carbon date earlier than construction. The further inside the tree that the wood is, the older the carbon date it will produce. So this is always something to keep in mind. There are also methods that don't require organic material. Optically Stimulated Luminescence, or OSL, uses mineral grains in stone, such as quartz, to date when the stone was put beneath the ground. Great for foundations. Mineral grains, such as quartz, store some of the energy they receive from this radiation, but exposure to daylight releases that stored energy. Specialists can measure the stored energy and estimate the radiation received each year to calculate how long the stone has been buried. Related luminescence methods can also date the burial of a stone's surface. If a surface was sufficiently exposed to daylight before builders covered it within a wall, the signal can help establish when it was covered. Later disturbance can complicate the result, but if you can find an undisturbed wall... Sometimes we can date construction quite closely, sometimes we can give only a range, or establish that it happened before or after another event. The point is that archaeologists can date stone buildings scientifically. Age labels tell us how advanced a society was. You've heard the terms Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age. When you see them in sequence on a timeline, you might get the impression that you're looking at the general advancement of an ancient society. That isn't quite true. Archaeologists, who in times past created these labels, are now finding reasons to question them. Societies using similar materials can have very different economies, settlement styles, political arrangements, which the labels tell us little about. And a change in technology doesn't mean everything else changed with it. The arrival of iron doesn't by itself tell us that people adopted other new tech, or even a different way of life. Also the arrival of bronze didn't eliminate stone technology and neither did the arrival of iron eliminate bronze tech or stone tech. If you look at these ages and their dates in different parts of the world, you will see that they vary considerably. So the bronze age in one region is not necessarily the bronze age in another. Archaeologists have found stone tools belonging Belonging to a society with writing, skilled artists, and kings. Do you see how saying it comes from the Stone Age would tell us very little about it and produce associations in our heads that aren't correct? This framework developed from European archaeology, but when exported elsewhere it can force other regions' histories into categories that fit them far less well. Heck, scholars have even called living communities Stone Age, treating them as survivals of earlier stages of humanity, but we are now less certain that we're even looking at any kind of survival These are societies with histories of their own. Archaeologists still use these terms where they help describe a region's chronology, but the average person may not be aware of some of the issues inherent in them. Foreign artifacts prove foreign visitors. An apparently old-world object turns up in the Americas. Does that mean someone sailed across the Atlantic in ancient times? Depends. Where was the object made? Could be in a foreign style, but made with local materials. If it was made outside... When did it reach this location? Who could have brought it? What kind of interaction occurred when it was brought there? Just knowing the object is foreign isn't enough. Even a genuine ancient object might have arrived much later. Manufacture and deposition are two different things. And that is why the circumstances of discovery are important. If the object is found out of its archaeological context, we might not even be able to determine how long it was there. But even a secure ancient arrival Doesn't automatically identify the people who delivered the object to its final destination. Objects can pass through intermediaries. The place where something was made and the place where it ended up do not by themselves reveal the exact route between them or the hands that touched it. Did you hear about the 11th century Norwegian penny that was found at Maine's Goddard site? There's a great uncertainty about how it got there. Movement through indigenous networks from farther north has been suggested. The point is that the find on its own does not establish that Norwegian sailors visited that spot in Maine in the 11th century. Now compare L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland. Norse buildings, artifacts in the buildings, and evidence of ironworking establish activities at the site. This is a much stronger case of Norwegian presence. The scale of the claim matters too. One object doesn't establish that there were repeated voyages or that there was widespread cultural influence. Those larger claims require more evidence. How much more? There's no magic number of objects that settles the issue. It just depends on what the preponderance of evidence indicates. An archaeological culture is an ethnic group. An archaeological culture is a name archaeologists give to recurring patterns in material remains. Such as objects and burial practices, things like that. But similar artifacts don't necessarily mean that the people who use them shared the same ancestry, language, or ethnic identity. Shared material practices can have different histories. People may move and take practices with them. Objects and ideas may also circulate between communities. Nor is every shared practice necessarily a statement of ethnic belonging to establish a social boundary. We need to investigate what a practice meant in that particular setting, rather than assume its distribution maps a people. Bell-shaped pottery and associated practices spread across parts of Europe in the 3rd millennium BCE. Is that because people migrated? Or is it because populations adopted the practices? An ancient DNA study found that the answer differed by region. In Britain, substantial incoming ancestry accompanied the Beaker period. Population movement really was part of that history. But Beaker-associated people in Iberia and Central Europe did not share one homogenous ancestry. The spread of the pottery couldn't be explained as one population expanding identically across the whole distribution. There isn't one population history behind all these Beaker finds. Migration explains an important part of the phenomenon. But treating every Beaker object as the possession of a single expanding people would erase the regional differences. Shared ancestry even doesn't necessarily mean a shared ethnic identity. It provides evidence about biological relationships. A people's sense of common origins, their language, and their political affiliations are different questions. Shared ancestry is not a complete account of how people understood membership in their community. That doesn't make identity impossible to investigate or material culture irrelevant. People can use objects and practices to express belonging and distinguish themselves from other people. Archaeologists examine those patterns in context and over time alongside other evidence. Rather than treating... Every stylistic boundary as an ethnic frontier. You know what I mean? Calling those objects beaker helps us compare them. It doesn't establish that everyone who used them thought of themselves as the Beaker people or something like that. Excavation doesn't harm an archaeological site. To all appearances, an excavation is a process of carefully uncovering things. Archaeologists brush soil away, expose walls, and lift out objects. That can give the impression that they are simply revealing the site, helping to preserve it rather than harm it. But excavation removes parts of the site being investigated, and it has no choice. Even the most careful of excavations takes apart the remains, deleting the relationships between the parts. Excavation is, by its very nature, destructive. To get to a building underneath another building, what do you think you have to do? You have to remove the building on top. This is why archaeologists record that evidence as they work, because once those deposits are removed, those records may be all that survives of their original arrangement. Once an excavation is done, there's no chance for a do-over. That is not to say that excavation never preserves anything. Excavation can recover objects and information before they're lost. But careful planning and decision-making is necessary. Sometimes a site may be threatened by nature or human activity, and excavation could save it. Other times, logistical problems might indicate that leaving the site buried can protect it better. There are other forms of archaeology that are less destructive that are also of value, and they can be considered. But burial alone is no guarantee. Understanding the ground conditions and the threats to the site are very important. And there's a separate decision that needs to be made after excavation. Should the surviving remains stay exposed, visibility can bring educational benefits. On the other hand, this could create conservation problems. At Culverwell in Dorset in the UK, part of an excavated Mesolithic site was kept under a shelter. Weathering, burrowing animals, and deterioration of the shelter damaged the remains. They decided to take limited samples and rebury the area beneath a monitored, grass-covered surface. Excavation can be worth the loss, especially when a site is already threatened. But no matter how carefully it is done or recorded, it doesn't leave the site intact. Many ancient remains are destroyed in the process. Hunter-gatherers couldn't build large structures. The term hunter-gatherer describes how people obtained food. That's it. It doesn't refer to anything else. It cannot tell us if they were nomadic or settled, or whether they had the skills or abilities to organize the work needed to build large structures. Even people who wander can find the need to build. If they move between places they use repeatedly, structures can be useful. Consider Watson Brake in Louisiana. Beginning around 3500 BCE, people built 11 earthen mounds connected by ridges. Construction continued in stages over centuries, and the tallest mound reached about seven and a half meters. Food remains show a hunting, fishing, and gathering economy. At Castelli in coastal Finland, people built a large stone enclosure with six openings in its perimeter. It belongs to the tradition known as the Giant's Churches, built within the region's hunter-gatherer societies. Calling these people hunters and foragers clearly doesn't mean they lack the skills or organization to erect large stone buildings. In southeastern Turkey, we can look to the communities represented across Taştepeller, or Stone Hills. These early Neolithic sites include Göbekli Tepe, Karahan Tepe, and Sibircik. Their inhabitants built communal spaces, as well as homes, quarried limestone, erected pillars, and carved human and animal figures. Similar architectural features at several settlements show that large stone construction was part of a wider regional tradition. There are practical questions about how people obtained enough food so that they could devote time to construction. A farming economy is not a requirement, though. If food collection and storage is sufficient, then you can feed your workforce. Hunter-gatherers didn't all live alike, and they didn't all build monuments, but we can't decide what people were capable of building simply by knowing how they obtained their food. A scan tells us exactly what is underground. Archaeologists can use instruments to investigate ancient sites without digging them up. Ground-penetrating radar, for example, sends electromagnetic pulses into the ground and records reflections. Archaeologists process those measurements into images that help them locate possible buried structures. But too many people get the idea that they can look at a scan and understand what's there. A reflection that resembles a wall does not automatically establish that a wall is there. First, there is interpretation. One has to compare the arrangement of the reflections with what they would expect from a building and consider other explanations for why those reflections occur in that pattern. Archaeologists need to understand exactly what the radar detected. Buried materials produce reflections because their properties differ from those of the surrounding ground. The time the reflections take to return helps estimate the depth. By comparing images at successive depths, archaeologists can investigate whether the reflections form a pattern consistent with walls and other parts of a building. They can also compare evidence from different instruments. At the Roman town of Faleri Novi, north of Rome, researchers compared ground-penetrating radar with magnetometry, which measures variations in the magnetic field. The two methods revealed different aspects of the buried remains. Comparing the results helped the team assess what those remains might be. The next step after taking a scan and interpreting it is for archaeologists to go in there and look. That's called ground truthing. It's the only way to verify the interpretation of the scan. And even when there is good evidence for a building being there that doesn't establish when it was built or how it was used, walls shown on the same plan may belong to different periods. The Faleri researchers explain that excavation can supply chronological detail unavailable from the survey. Scanning can reveal a lot without excavation, but it would be foolish to ignore the expert interpretation of the scans and rely on our own amateur judgment to decide what the images are really showing. A successful experiment proves how ancient people did it. One way to investigate ancient techniques is to try them. Archaeologists can make and use replica tools and test ancient methods for making things. These experiments help them understand how a technique works, what skills it requires, and what traces it might leave in the archaeological record. They can then compare the results with the ancient remains to see if they match up. That's what we call experimental archaeology. If someone reproduces an ancient-looking object or successfully moves a heavy load using a proposed method, what have they demonstrated exactly? They've demonstrated that the method can work under the conditions tested. But to establish that the ancient people actually used this method, they have to somehow connect the result with evidence from the past. If not, it's just a possibility. There can be more than one way to do a job, so success alone can't tell us which method ancient people used. You ever hear of Kon-Tiki? In 1947, a crew crossed the Pacific on a balsa raft from Peru to Polynesia. The voyage demonstrated that it was possible for ancient peoples to cross with the technology that they had, but it did not establish that a particular migration had occurred. A failed attempt needs to be approached with the same caution. If an experiment fails, it might expose a problem with the proposed method, but it doesn't necessarily prove the ancient people didn't use that method. Failure might be due to the use of unsuitable materials, insufficient skill of those performing the experiment, or the conditions of the attempt. Just as a successful reconstruction might not hold up because it relied on modern substitutions, a failed attempt might not hold up for the same reason. The conclusion depends on whether the test actually represented the explanation it was meant to examine. Experimental archaeology compares the results of documented actions with surviving archaeological evidence. So, for example, that might be the marks of a tool, the waste a manufacturing process produces, or the way a structure deteriorates over time. The question becomes whether a method accounts for the traces, not merely whether the modern team replicated the ancient method exactly. When a civilization collapses, its people disappear. When we hear about the collapse of an ancient civilization, we are sometimes told that its people mysteriously disappeared. The Anasazi are sometimes described as a people who mysteriously vanished, leaving abandoned settlements in the American Southwest. But the Anasazi were ancestral Pueblo peoples, whose descendants live in Pueblo communities today. A 2025 DNA study found a genetic link between living members of Picuris Pueblo and ancestral Puebloans buried at Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon. At Aztec ruins in New Mexico, people left around 1300 and moved to communities along the Rio Grande and in the Zuni and Hopi areas. They left those settlements, but they didn't disappear. The Hittites get similar treatment. A recent National Geographic article introduces the end of their empire with the blurb, Then the Hittites vanished. The end of the Hittite empire didn't erase everyone associated with it. Dynasties established under the empire continued at places such as Carchemish, maintaining Hittite traditions for centuries after the imperial collapse. They call them the Neo-Hittites. A settlement can lose inhabitants because people move elsewhere. A royal court can cease to function while the former leaders continue to live in the surrounding region. A similar claim is made about Egypt, that after the Arab conquest in the 7th century, the Egyptians were replaced and the people living there now are simply Arabs with no connection to the ancient population. But DNA studies show that modern Egyptians retain ancestry from ancient Egyptian populations alongside ancestry from later migrations and intermarriage. Letters and tax receipts written in Coptic show Egyptian communities continuing under Arab rule. Coptic, the latest phase of the ancient Egyptian language, remained in use for centuries as Arabic gradually became more widespread. A change in language and identity does not mean that the population was replaced. Modern Egyptians can be Muslim and also have Egyptian ancestry. When a major urban society collapses, archaeologists need to investigate what happened to the people who lived in those settlements. They look at the surrounding region and compare evidence from before and after the abandonment. Where did habitation end? Where did it continue? Did other settlements grow? Were activities once concentrated in a political center reorganized somewhere else? The collapse of prominent classic period Maya urban centers. was real but an archaeological synthesis shows a process extending over roughly two centuries during which maya peoples continued to build cities and other locations maya communities exist today with continuing histories of their own The end of a particular ancient political order was not the end of Maya history. Of course, continuity does not mean that the collapse is harmless, or that surviving communities remain unchanged. Institutions can break down, people can die or relocate, and ways of life can change considerably. But a devastating end to a political order doesn't by itself establish the disappearance of the culture. Without names or written history, we cannot identify a people. I've recently heard folks online say that if we have no recorded history of an ancient people, and do not even know what they called themselves, then we don't know who they were. This is placing too much importance on names. Names are only one thing we might want to know, and not even among the top elements to know. A society may have left no surviving written records that we can read, and we may not know what people called themselves. But we can know enough about them to be able to establish the distinguishing character or personality of that people. Yes, their identity. We have human remains. Bones and teeth can preserve signs of disease, injury, and diet. Chemical differences in teeth can help investigate where someone grew up. While ancient DNA can reveal biological relationships and population movements, we may learn about a person's health, origins, and relatives, even when their name is unknown. Burials, images, and objects placed in particular settings can reveal how people treated the dead, what their afterlife beliefs were, and what symbols they used. We can learn more about their beliefs from their sacred spaces and how they were used. Repeated practices can help us ascertain what their ceremonies were, what some of their beliefs were, even when we can't recover the names of their gods or the words spoken during a ceremony. We can know how they lived. The remains of houses, hearths, storage pits, and workplaces can show how their society functioned. Animal bones, seeds, and chemical traces in pottery can tell us about the food they ate and how they prepared it. Tools, manufacturing waste, and wear on objects can reveal how people made things and used them. We can investigate their technology and skills without knowing a single craftsperson's name. And we can learn how their society was organized. Did some households have larger homes or access to goods that others lacked? Were particular crafts concentrated in certain buildings? How much work went into public construction? Differences in buildings, possessions, and work areas can help us learn about wealth, specialized occupations, and the organization of labor. Nor are we limited to describing a way of life at one moment in time. Archaeologists establish sequences. You know, a house was built, altered, destroyed, rebuilt. A settlement expanded, contracted, or was abandoned. Dating the remains helps place those changes in time. Evidence of warfare and conquest can be determined through material remains. A written chronicle is not the only way to establish that events happened, or to work out their order. When we compare archaeological sequences across a region, we can learn a longer and wider history. When did new settlements appear? When did particular crops or technologies arrive? Did exchange with another region influence the culture? Did people rebuild after destruction or did they move somewhere else? We can also investigate connections between communities. Identifying the sources of stone and other raw materials can show that goods moved between regions. Comparing where materials were obtained, worked, and discarded helps us reconstruct production and exchange. So yeah, written records can supply names. Explanations, events that material evidence alone may not recover, but they also leave out much of what ordinary people did. Without the stories, some questions remain unanswered, but others can be researched in considerable detail, enough to be able to say that we do, in fact, know who lived there. So there you have them, ten of the most misunderstood concepts in archaeology. If you enjoyed the video, please give it a thumbs up. What other archaeological misconceptions do you think could have been covered in this video? Let me know in the comments below. You might like my little e-booklet, Why Ancient History Matters. It's designed to persuade people that the subject is important, even in the modern world. You might also wish to use it to help spread the word. So feel free to share it with someone you know. It's free for anyone who wants it. I've left a link in the description box below the video for you to grab a copy. Catch you later.