ABSTRACT
It is now time to meet the archaeology. Exposure to the evidence is the most important aspect of doing archaeology. However, I resisted opening this book with an account of how we go about finding things and, once found, how we organise them for a good reason. Until I had given you a taste of the varieties of archaeology, which includes both themes (Chapter 1) and theories (Chapter 2), there was no point in discussing how we handle data. There is nothing more silent than a piece of archaeological evidence. Pots, stones, bronzes and bones do not speak to us. They make no sense by themselves. They only acquire significance when interpreted. It is always necessary to appreciate the themes and theories if any useful answers are to be forthcoming. We now have some of the basic framework that structures
archaeological enquiry. What I have shown is that there are many ideas about the past, usually several interpretations of the same data, as we saw in Chapter 1 with Çatalhöyük, and definitely more than one answer to the same question. What all this is telling us is that archaeologists can disagree because they have developed ways of gathering and organising data that allow them to differ. Fieldwork and analysis run to a set of conventions. Participating in the excitement of archaeology requires knowledge of the concepts that underpin those conventions. In this chapter I will look at those that deal with
data gathering and analysis. Later chapters will expand on other issues, but in the present one I will concentrate on a framework for practical archaeology which will lead us into a consideration of the structure of archaeological evidence.
