ABSTRACT
Archaeology reaches into the remote past, into what is sometimes called “deep history.” As we’ve seen, our archives include everything humans have left behind, this quite apart from environmental and other non-human data that bears on such topics as climate change. We not only describe what happened in the past, we also seek to explain and understand how human societies changes and functioned in the past. This is the hardest task of all, venturing as it does into such intangibles as social organization, religious beliefs, and language – among others. Now that we have described how archaeology works, we must now look at ways in which archaeologists try and answer the whys of the past.
