Lesson One: Archeology is About People

Archeology is a social science that employs the methods of science. Archeologists study the human past by looking at the objects that people made, lost, discarded, or left behind. They employ the scientific method, or systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, along with the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses. Archeologists use physical tools, like trowels, measuring tapes, line
levels, microscopes, and GPS units. They also use conceptual tools, like observation and inference, context, stratigraphy, and chronology to understand culture and deep time. This lesson introduces students to archeology and some of the conceptual tools that archeologists use.

Archeologists do not study dinosaurs. People often confuse archeology with paleontology because archeologists employ some of the same methods and concepts used by paleontologists. But paleontology is the study of prehistoric plant and animal fossils, including dinosaurs. Archeologists study animal remains, but only when they are related to human activity. Dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago, so humans and dinosaurs only coexist in the movies (Brief Timeline of Life on Earth).

Popular movies like “Indiana Jones” and “Lara Croft Tomb Raider” depict archeology as destruction, adventure, and the discovery of rare objects. Cartoons, like Calvin and Hobbes, depict archeology as mind-numbing, tedious excavation. It is true archeologists do often travel to exotic locations, but they also conduct research closer to home. They sometimes find one-of-a-kind artifacts, but more frequently they find people’s broken things or the trash people discarded long ago. It is a careful science. An archeologist is like a detective who employs the methods of science to piece together a puzzle. Archeologists document their findings systematically, because archeology is destructive and once the artifacts are dug up that information is gone. Archeologists develop and test hypotheses, record their observations, and take careful measurements to learn what life was like in the past.

People did not begin writing until 5,000 years ago, so archeology is one of the few ways to learn about people who left no written records. In North America, this is 97 percent of human occupation and for the rest of the world the percentage is even higher. This makes archeology particularly important for learning about the history of Arkansas prior to 1541 when the first Europeans (with writing) traveled to the state.

Chronology and context are two important conceptual tools archeologists use. When trying to understand the past the proper sequence of events must be known. Chronology is a tool we use everyday. When someone tells a story or when we watch a news report, the story is told in the order that it happened. Archeologists, like historians, are especially interested in understanding the order in which things happened in the past. When did people first occupy a site or region? When did they leave? When did the bow and arrow replace the spear? When did Indians begin to make and use pottery? When did they domesticate their first plant foods? When did Arkansas Indians start growing plants, like corn, that were domesticated in other regions? When events like these are arranged in order of occurrence, an archeologist has established the chronology. A timeline is used to display events visually in chronological order. Archeologists have established a timeline of Native American history. It is divided into five cultural periods that are based on similarities in the way people lived over time (see p. 15). Through this curriculum, students will explore and recreate this timeline.

The second concept is context. For archeologists, context is similar to “context clues” in language arts. By paying attention to the clues in a sentence, a reader can figure out the meaning of an unfamiliar term. Similarly, archeologists learn about artifacts and sites, by carefully documenting the clues nearby. The things a person owns provide clues about the owner. If an archeologist looked inside a student’s bedroom, the things in the room could provide clues to that person’s age, gender, and interests. For example, a baseball bat and a football jersey in someone’s bedroom suggest that the owner likes sports. Paints, colored pencils, and an easel could mean that the person is an artist. The artifacts tell a story if they are found together, where their owners left them (in context). Archeologists rely on the artifacts and where people left them (context) to learn about the past.

Archeologists preserve the context of artifacts they recover from sites by recording the location of everything they find. The artifact and its context provide more information to the archeologist than the artifact alone. When context is lost, information is lost. In this lesson, the tape measure activity helps students understand deep time and the “Context Is Everything” worksheet demonstrates that removing artifacts from a site removes them from their context and makes it very difficult to get a complete understanding of what people did in the past.

For each student: A copy of “Context Is Everything” worksheet; three copies of the “Key Terms”; a pocket folder to store unit materials.

For the teacher: Index cards; a 20-foot tape measure; paper clips or clothespins; “A Brief Timeline of Life on Earth”  and a  spear point image to project and a copy of the “A Spear Point” scenario; a copy of “Telling Time with Telephones”; chart paper or board space for the student’s “Curation Shelf ” questions.

Archeologists name time periods in Native American history, based on changes in American Indians’ cultures. Cultures differ based on the environment, the type of foods people ate, the tools they used, the sites they lived in, and what their communities looked like. By studying American Indian’s ways of life and how they changed over time, archeologists identify cultural periods, or lengths of time when people share similar ways of life. In the southeastern United States, there are five broad time periods.

Paleoindian Period (11,500 – 8500 BC): This is when Indians first arrived in Arkansas, at the end of the last
Ice Age. They hunted large animals including mammoths and mastodons using atlatls, or spearthrowers, but
gathered only a little plant food.

Archaic Period (8500 – 600 BC): Archaic Indians hunted, fished, and gathered many wild plants. They
camped in a different place every year.

Woodland Period: (600 BC – AD 900): Woodland Indians lived in small villages all year long. They grew
garden crops during the summer. They made and used pottery. They hunted with the bow and arrow instead of
a spear thrower and collected nuts and berries.

Mississippi Period: (900 – 1600 AD): Mississippian Indians lived in large towns. They grew corn, beans,
and squash in large fields. They hunted and fished, and collected a little wild plant food.
Age of Discovery (1500 – 1700 AD): The era of European discovery and exploration of North American,
when Native Americans and Europeans first met

In Lessons 2 through 5, students will complete a timeline for each of these periods and the important changes
that take place.