Archaeology is partly the discovery of the treasures of the past, partly the meticulous work of the scientific analyst, partly the exercise of the creative imagination. It is toiling in the sun on an excavation in the deserts of Central Asia, it is working with living Inuit in the snows of Alaska. It is diving down to Spanish wrecks off the coast of Florida, and it is investigating the sewers of Roman York. But it is also the painstaking task of interpretation so that we come to understand what these things mean for the human story. And it is the conservation of the world?s cultural heritage - against looting and against careless destruction.

Archaeology, then, is both a physical activity out in the field, and an intellectual pursuit in the study or laboratory. That is part of its great attraction. The rich mixture of danger and detective work has also made it the perfect vehicle for fiction writers and film-makers, from Agatha Christie with Murder in Mesopotamia to Steven Spielberg with Indiana Jones. However far from reality such portrayals may be, they capture the essential truth that archaeology is an exciting quest - the quest for knowledge about ourselves and our past.

But how does archaeology relate to disciplines such as anthropology and history that are also concerned with the human story? Is archaeology itself a science? And what are the responsibilities of the archaeologist in today?s world, where the past is manipulated for political ends and "ethnic cleansing" is accompanied by the deliberate destruction of the cultural heritage?

Archaeology as Anthropology

Anthropology at its broadest is the study of humanity - our physical characteristics as animals, and our unique non-biological characteristics that we call culture. Culture in this sense includes what the anthropologist Edward Tylor usefully summarized in 1871 as "knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society." Anthropologists also use the term culture in a more restricted sense when they refer to the culture of a particular society, meaning the nonbiological characteristics unique to that society which distinguish it from other societies. (An "archaeological culture" has a specific and somewhat different meaning, as explained in Chapter 3.) Anthropology is thus a broad discipline - so broad that it is generally broken down into three smaller disciplines: biological anthropology, cultural anthropology, and archaeology.

Biological anthropology, or physical anthropology as it used to be called, concerns the study of human biological or physical characteristics and how they evolved.

Cultural anthropology - or social anthropology - analyzes human culture and society. Two of its branches are ethnography (the study at first hand of individual living cultures) and ethnology (which sets out to compare cultures using ethnographic evidence to derive general principles about human society).

Archaeology is the "past tense of cultural anthropology." Whereas cultural anthropologists will often base their conclusions on the experience of actually living within contemporary communities, archaeologists study past humans and societies primarily through their material remains - the buildings, tools, and other artifacts that constitute what is known as the material culture left over from former societies.

Nevertheless, one of the most challenging tasks for the archaeologist today is to know how to interpret material culture in human terms. How were those pots used? Why are some dwellings round and others square? Here the methods of archaeology and ethnography overlap. Archaeologists in recent decades have developed ethnoarchaeology, where like ethnographers they live among contemporary communities, but with the specific purpose of understanding how such societies use material culture - how they make their tools and weapons, why they build their settlements where they do, and so on.