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Importance and applicability of Archaeology




A  

Many thousands of cultures and societies and millions of people have come and gone across the millennia of which there simply is little or no written record - no history - or for which written records may be misrepresentative or incomplete. Writing as it is known and understood today did not exist anywhere in the world until about 5000 years ago, and only spread among a relatively small number of technologically advanced civilizations.

B  

These civilizations are, not coincidentally, the best-known; they have been open to the inquiry of historians for centuries, while the study of pre-historic cultures has arisen only recently. Even within a civilization that is literate at some levels, many important human practices are not officially recorded. Any knowledge of the formative early years of human civilization - the development of agriculture, cult practices of folk religion, the rise of the first cities - must come from archaeology.

C  

In many societies, literacy was restricted to the elite classes, such as the clergy or the bureaucracy of court or temple. The literacy even of an aristocracy has sometimes been restricted to deeds and contracts. The interests and world-view of elites are often quite different from the lives and interests of the rest of the populace. Writings that were produced by people more representative of the general population were unlikely to find their way into libraries and be preserved there for posterity.

D  

As such, written records cannot be trusted as a sole source. The material record is nearer to a fair representation of society, though it is subject to its own inaccuracies, such as sampling bias and differential preservation. In addition to their scientific importance, archaeological remains sometimes have political significance to descendants of the people who produced them, monetary value to collectors, or simply strong aesthetic appeal. Many people identify archaeology with the recovery of such aesthetic, religious, political, or economic treasures rather than with the reconstruction of past societies.

 

Even where written records do exist, they are invariably incomplete or biased to some extent.

However, these endeavours, real and fictional, are not representative of the modern state of archaeology.

Often archaeology provides the only means to learn of the existence and behaviours of people in the past.

Thus, written records tend to reflect the biases, assumptions, cultural values and possibly deceptions of a limited range of individuals, usually only a fraction of the larger population.

5. In contrast Homo sapiens have existed for at least 200,000 years, and other species of Homo for millions of years.

 


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