ABSTRACT
Prehistory is the period before writing became the common medium to convey historical information about past societies. The aim of prehistoric archaeology is to describe the life of our ancestors and to explain it as well as possible so that we may begin to understand their social and cultural behavior. To achieve this, archaeologists use data revealed through excavation to describe people and cultural events in the past and to test explanatory hypotheses. The subject is therefore by necessity multi-disciplinary encompassing a broad range of methods and techniques from other disciplines, including botany, zoology, environmental sciences, chemistry, anatomy, genetics, linguistics, art history, and cultural anthropology. Archaeologists tend to specialize in a particular field, for example: archaeobotany, zooarchaeology, geoarchaeology, archaeometallurgy underwater archaeology, or ceramic and lithic analysis. They may also have a preference for a particular period or region, or both, for example: Paleolithic, Archaic, ancient Egypt, classical, or historical. In this chapter we look more closely at how archaeologists work.
