What is archaeology?

Archaeology is exciting. The excitement comes from using our archaeological imagination to go where we can never travel, to the past, and to think about time and objects in very different ways from those of our everyday experience; to understand better who we are by knowing where we have come from. Humans have always had an archaeological imagination. At one

level it is that taken-for-granted ability to reconstruct in our daily lives what went on from the evidence left behind; footprints in the sand point to visitors, a room littered with glasses and bottles adds up to a party. At another level this imagination has been sharpened and refined into a professional discipline over the past 300 years, and this is the sense in which I will use the phrase throughout this book. We now routinely excavate, catalogue, measure, describe and analyse the objects and monuments of the past. These standard archaeological techniques are widely accepted and understood. They have even become metaphors to investigate our inner selves. Every time we ‘dig into the subconscious’ or ‘peel back the layers of personality’ we are imitating archaeologists. Most importantly, these methods have assisted archaeologists in developing a way of thinking about things long gone.