Case Studies:Case study 8

SASSA Home Page &#8658; Case Studies Home Page &#8658; History of soil and sediment investigation in archaeology

How has the study of soils and sediments developed within archaeology?
Pollard’s (1999) introduction to Geoarchaeology: exploration, environments, resources (a Special Publication from the Geological Society in London), discusses the history of geology in archaeological research. The beginnings of scientific archaeology in the 19th century are intimately tied to the parallel development of geology. Sir Charles Lyell (1797-1875) established the principle of uniformitarianism in geology, and also published The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man in 1863. Increasing attention was paid during the first half of the 19th century to the mixing of the bones of extinct animals with hand axes as evidence of human activity in either cave deposits or the gravel terraces of major European rivers. As a result of careful stratigraphic observation of such deposits, the widely accepted biblical interpretation that these deposits reflected the remnants of Noah's flood, and that the Earth had been created in 4004 BC -- gradually gave way to an evolutionary model, requiring considerably longer time periods. The need to provide a chronological framework for the evolutionary development of the human species, as proposed by Charles Darwin in 1859, against the background of the advance and retreat of the great Ice Ages lead directly to the development of Palaeolithic archaeology as a scientific discipline intimately associated with geology and palaeontology. Towards the latter half of the 19th century, popular imagination was caught by excavations in Egypt and Mesopotamia such as Nineveh and Babylon. This shifted attention away from the Palaeolithic and rekindled the debate about the veracity of the biblical account of the Flood.

One of the fundamental research questions in New World Archaeology - when, and how, did humans come to colonize the American continent - have been vigorously debated for at least a hundred years, with the issues polarizing around the presence or absence of humans before the last deglaciation and the opening of the 'ice-free corridor'. The ephemeral nature of the archaeology of crucial early Paleo-Indian sites has created the necessity for close collaboration between geologists and archaeologists in order to interpret the evidence. It is in this context in particular that the skills of geomorphologists and sedimentologists have been essential to understanding the archaeological record. The earliest evidence for the New World presence of humans in the Pleistocene came from the finding of fluted stone tools with the bones of extinct bison during excavations in New Mexico in the late 1920s. The stratigraphic studies required to prove the Pleistocene nature of these deposits were carried out by the geologist Kirk Bryan, and the results were presented at a Geological Society of America meeting in 1929, thus symbolically establishing the close connection between geology and archaeology.

The full article can be found at http://sp.lyellcollection.org/cgi/reprint/165/1/7

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