Twelve Millennia: Archaeology of the Upper Mississippi River Valley

Chapter One

Introduction to Archaeology Archaeologists study past human societies. Archaeologists do not study dinosaurs or fossils that date to geologic periods before our human ancestors. Paleontologists study ancient life forms before people and culture. Most of the materials made and used by past cultures have been lost to time. With rare exceptions, wood, hide, and flesh disintegrate rapidly. Because the remaining pieces are often fragile, archaeologists work with extreme care to expose, document, and recover the remains. Archaeology is often compared to detective work. The clues that archaeologists find and use to reconstruct the human past are the patterns of tools and other debris that have survived the ravages of time. Archaeologists apply methods of recovery, analysis, and interpretation that follow principles of the scientific method. Archaeological use of the scientific method requires the collection of facts or data in as unbiased a manner as possible. Initial collection and analysis often lead to perceived patterns that may reflect past human behavior. For example, artifacts from one site may include side-notched spear tips but no pottery fragments. These observations may lead to a hypothesis, such as that side-notched spear tips were made during a different time period than pottery. Hypotheses are then tested c h a p t e r o n e by collecting more data. In this example, excavation of a series of deeply buried sites may show that side-notched spear tips were repeatedly found in layers beneath pottery fragments and are therefore older. Hypotheses are never proved absolutely, but accumulated data can strengthen arguments that a particular idea is probably correct or lead to revisions in the hypothesis that require additional data gathering. Archaeology is a subfield of anthropology, defined broadly as the study of all humankind in both the past and present. Anthropology is usually broken down into four subfields: archaeology (the study of the human past); biological anthropology (the study of human physical variation); cultural anthropology (the study of traditional and modern societies); and linguistic anthropology (the study of language in its cultural context). Why We Study the Past People are unique among living things in having a conscious interest in the past and future. No other animals are concerned with questions such as where they came from, how they got here, and what the future may hold. People, on the other hand, routinely ask these types of questions. A portion of humanity ’s past can be learned from history, which is technically the period when written records exist. However, more than 99 percent of the human past occurred before written records, or in prehistory. The origins of human beings, domestication of plants and animals, beginnings of metallurgy, and rise of cities are a few of the more significant events in humanity’s past that occurred before written records. In general, writing was adopted when the number of people and the information load became too great to track necessary information in one’s mind. The first uses of writing were usually for commerce and governmental tracking of people for purposes of taxation and conscription. The first preserved written records are clay tablets documenting commercial transactions of the Sumarian civilization about 4,900 years ago in what is now Iraq. While this was the beginning of the historic era in the Middle East, the rest of the world remained in prehistory until writing was adopted. This occurred at various times, with some isolated places adopting writing only in the twentieth century. In the Upper Mississippi Valley , history began with French exploration in the seventeeth century, providing the first written record of the region and its inhabitants. All societies use oral histories to maintain traditions, and oral history is generally more important to societies that do not have writing. When handed down through generations, oral histories, often in the form of stories, may 2 | i n t r o d u c t i o n t o a r c h a e o l o g y contain information from the distant past. But oral history is flexible and adaptable, changing when advantageous, particularly during times of profound stress. Furthermore, over the past three centuries, as the world has shifted from predominantly prehistoric societies lacking writing to near total historic cultures, many oral histories have been lost. Indeed, most indigenous languages have vanished, lost as populations were decimated by diseases , war, movement, and mixing during...