Spotlight on Students: Thinking Like An Archaeologist

Thinking like an archaeologist is one of the most challenging exercises a novice or inexperienced person can do, including beginner archaeologists.  For one of the SA 202: Introduction to Anthropology assignments students were tasked with doing just that.  By viewing the familiar as the unfamiliar they gained important insights into the challenges archaeologists face, and several of them did exceptionally well in the exercise.  Here is a student's piece that was eligible for and agreed to be published.

 

Map of the site (Source: Nichole Voegeli)

By: Nichole Voegeli

 

In 2123, there was a wide-scale battle between AI and humans in the region of the world now known as Midwestia of New Europe. We do not know who “AI” was; however, they must have been powerful because they won the war, forcing the remaining humans to go underground for about a thousand years. Over the last thousand years, humans have re-acclimated to the outer world. During this re-acclimation period, our ancestors gathered some information about the world before the AI war, and they determined that the area that my team of archaeologists is examining was once known as the City of Jefferson in the Missouri region of the United States. My name is Nichole Voegeli, and I am an archaeologist tasked with creating a report detailing the site, artifacts, and interpretations of our findings.

            The site we are examining is rectangular with ten-foot walls coated in a beige substance and devoid of artifacts. I have attached a map with dimensions for reference. In the center of the room is a two-foot high, medium-sized round table with a diameter of about four feet. On the western side of the table, there is a large object, approximately six feet long and three feet wide, shaped like an elongated chair covered with dirty fabric that may have been white at one time. This long chair faces the eastern wall, and there is a set of two matching chairs on the eastern side of the table facing the western wall. The two chairs look similar to the long chair but are only two and a half feet by three feet in size. The site features an eight-foot by 15-foot structure located on the southern wall, made out of gray bricks with a hollow core that starts two feet from the floor and runs upwards through the center of the structure. The bottom two feet of this structure jut out into the room by two feet. The rest of the brick feature sticks out from the wall by six inches. At the top of the two-by-two-foot jut, there is a three-foot by two-foot by two-foot opening that gives access to the bottom of the hollow core. The floor of this hallow opening is covered in ashes, and the brick walls are lined with black dust-like material. The ashes and the black dust suggest that the brick feature was used to contain a fire, but we are not sure what the purpose of the fire was. It could be for warmth, food, or other purposes that we know nothing of.

            We recovered three artifacts from the site. The first artifact was found on the table in the center of the site, facing the brick structure. It is a one-foot-tall object made of stone and other materials with a green cone-shaped head. Its body is round and orange in color, but the bottom of the body is flat and white. The front of the body is covered with a white, triangular, hair-like fabric that tapers to a point at the bottom of the object. There is a small, round beige ball attached to the front of the object, between the upper white fabric and the green cone. On either side of the white fabric, there are red and beige arm-like appendages sticking out of the object, just below the green cone. Since this object appears to be humanoid, I hypothesize that the white hairy fabric represents a beard, the beige ball is its nose, and the appendages are its arms. This object is missing eyes, a mouth, and feet. Attached to the lower portion of the green cone, just to the right of the nose, is a set of yellow-orange leaves with three small red balls clustered in the center of the leaves. The location where we found this artifact suggests its importance and its humanoid shape leads us to believe that it represents a god. The orange, yellow, and red colors found on the artifact are reminiscent of fire, which may mean that the god it represented was a fire god.

            The second artifact is two feet wide, three feet long, and about two feet tall made out of seven black half-inch diameter metal bars. Five parallel bars spaced eight inches apart sit on top of and perpendicular to two parallel bars spaced seven inches apart. The ends of each bar are curved away from where the seven bars connect. This artifact was found on the floor of the hollow core of the brick structure. It is covered in black dust and ashes.

We found the third artifact next to the opening of the hollow core. This artifact is a black half-inch diameter metal rod three feet in length. At one end there is a seven-inch-long yellow metal piece that has smooth ridges and terminates with a ball-shaped tip. This yellow piece fits the grip of my hand nicely, which leads me to think it was made to hold the rod. The opposite end of the rod tapers to a point and at about six inches from the bottom of the point, the rod splits creating a three-inch hook that curves up towards the yellow attachment. The points of the rod have traces of the same black dust and ash that is in the hollow core and on the second artifact. Since the second and third artifacts have traces of ash and black dust and were found near the brick feature, we suspect that these items were used as tools for burning items. We sent samples of the ash and black dust to the lab for testing. Once we get the results back, we may be able to better determine what items were burned.

            Since the second and third artifacts were covered in the same ash material that was found in the brick structure, they may have been used as tools for burning various items. The central location of the humanoid object and the colors found on it are similar to that of fire, suggesting that it was used as a physical representation of a fire deity. The location of the seating, being on either side of the brick feature and the table, hints towards the idea that the room was used as a place to hold small gatherings. The combination of our findings suggests that the space was used for ritual purposes, where the individuals would gather around the table with the humanoid object facing the brick structure while they used the metal items as tools to aid in the burning of various items that could potentially have been used as offerings to their deity.

            While working on this site we had a couple of challenges with gathering artifacts and finding useful clues to provide insight to the past that we were looking at. One challenge is that the site did have signs that there were other furnishings and artifacts in the room, however, they were no longer there. We suspect these items either degraded over time, were not uncovered yet, or were stolen (Sqouros). The other challenge was interpreting the clues we had without involving our current cultural norms. When I was taking classes to be an archaeologist, I remember reading about an example of this particular challenge, I read, “Culturally today, most people drink from a cup. Therefore, if an artifact that looks like a cup is discovered, it is not unreasonable to propose that the people who used it used it as a cup as we do; however, this reasoning is flawed. Twenty-first century Western culture has developed the use of tools in a very different way to ancient societies.” (“Archaeological Interpretation”).

 

Works Cited

“Archaeological Interpretation.” Archaeology Expert, 28 Apr. 2022, www.archaeologyexpert.co.uk/archaeologicalinterpretation.html#. 

Sgouros, Rebecca. “How Archaeologists Study the Past.” Natick Historical Society, www.natickhistoricalsociety.org/how-archaeologists-study. Accessed 15 Nov. 2023.