Digging at the Lott House, Brooklyn, New York.
Archaeology
Archaeology studies the past using the artifacts (material objects) that were made, used, modified, and discarded by people. Archaeology can tell us how the environment and cultures changed over the long term by investigating the relationships between artifacts (technology) and nature and other nonmaterial aspects of cultures (social, economic, or political). Archaeologists have looked for the earliest cities, the transitions from hunting and foraging to agriculture, the peopling of the Americas, and the art of the Paleolithic (Old Stone) Age to try to complete our picture of the human condition in the past and how it became that in the present. The quest is not so much for things as for information.
To get the information about how people live(d) in the world and the rules for generating their behavior, archaeologists usually excavate. Sites may range from mounds in the Near East to caves in France to construction sites in New York. Like all digs, they are done to exacting standards and precisely documented in order to preserve as much information as possible to investigate the archaeologists' research problem. Excavation is time-consuming, costly, and sometimes excruciatingly tedious work, and not undertaken lightly. It is a primary way of satisfying the intellectual problems of "What happened?" "How did it happen?" "Why did it happen?" "When did it happen?" and more rarely, "Who was involved?" These questions shape the archaeologists' research design and interest.
At Brooklyn, we have archaeologists with varying research foci. Although the curriculum provides courses in the archaeology of distinct areas, time periods, and theory, the Department of Anthropology has always had a faculty who stressed the importance of fieldwork for shaping our majors' education. Field archaeology is never done alone; it is always a group effort. Brooklyn College faculty have taken groups of students to work in Egypt, Israel, Cyprus, Iceland, Antigua, Barbuda, Bulgaria, and Serbia. We also dig in Brooklyn. While fieldwork can be as varied as the sites that are excavated, uncovering the past to find evidence for how people lived is exciting in ways that are hard to believe.
