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.