The Five-Minute Archaeologist in the Southern Levant - Cynthia Shafer-Elliott
30. Where's the science in all this?
The Five-Minute Archaeologist in the Southern Levant - Cynthia Shafer-Elliott
Shira Gur-Arieh [+]
The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Max Planck Research Group on Plant Foods in Hominin Dietary Ecology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Description
Although the field of archaeology is science based, like many other scientific disciplines it borrows techniques developed in the “hard sciences”, which are then applied to archaeological questions. Within the world of archaeology such applications are still considered by many, a subfield called “archaeological science”. This brief review highlights some of the core sub-disciplines within archaeology that are considered archaeological science and gives examples of how the “hard sciences” are used to interpret archaeological finds, from radiocarbon dating, to site formation processes, to environmental and dietary reconstruction.