What does the future of archaeology hold?

Being relatively clueless about the subject, but interested in history, I was wondering if any Dopers had any thoughts about the future of archaeology.

I ask, because it seems like the field would have to change focus based on the world today. For instance, in the past, record keeping/written accounts/etc were less common, so to learn about the past it became important to be able to find it, preserve it, and interpret it.

Now, since there is so much media and people have a higher level of education, it doesn’t really seem like the archaeologist of the future will need to do the same types of things. It would seem to be more about sifting through an over abundance of information to determine what is fact vs. fiction vs. opinion.

As it is, archaeology already has an important part to play in our understanding of Western society over the past two or three centuries, even although written records exist in abundance from that period. The importance of industrial archaeology has long been recognised, even if it remains less glamorous than some other fields. Twentieth-century archaeology is fast developing as an area of study in its own right. For example, the Council of British Archaeology’s Defence of Britain Project has in recent years been recording the UK’s fast-disappearing twentieth-century military infrastructure. Archeological techniques have also been used to investigate the Nazi death camps. Similar projects will no doubt be devised by future archaeologists. Surviving material remains will always be at least as useful to historians as any written records of those same structures or artifacts.

I’d also add that even looking at our “present past”, there’s still plenty to do to keep archaelogist busy for a long, long time. As an example, in one area I’m familiar with (Big Bend Ranch State Park in west Texas), state archaeologists have done recons of the park and identified hundreds of sites, all in need of and waiting for a detailed archaelological study. I’m sure this park is typical of the American West, Northern Mexico, etc., in general.

Archaeology has always been more about looking at the facts that haven’t, for whatever reason, been transmitted through the more “normal” historical means. I don’t expect this to change any in the foreseeable future. And we leave behind so much evidence these days, I doubt archaeologists will have a lack of things to study.

There is already an emerging field of information archaeology. It seems that NASA has reels and reels of information collected since the 1960’s that has never been studied. The tapes need to be secured and archived. Also, the main problem is the fact that the equipment needed to read the reels is obsolete.

Archaeology is all about preservation of materials and interpretation of said materials.

What does the future of archaeology hold? An entire stratum of AOL disks… :smiley:

I always wondered if, with enough computing power, you could retrieve sounds recorded in things like drying pottery. Wouldn’t it be cool if one day we developed a technique to play back voices recorded in pottery 3000 years ago?

Decoded from potsherd found in a potter’s spoil heap, Troy, 1182 BC:

Regular thumping noise.
Female voice: “Ooh, Aleksandros, what a stallion you are, oh yes, oh yes…”
Assorted crashing and sounds of breaking pots, regular thumping noise stops.
Male voice: “Bugger, that’s one, uh, two, uh, many days’ worth, all ruined all for a quickie on the drying table.”

Yup, really cool, Sam, really cool. :smiley:

Slight hijack:

Are there sites of great archeological significance that are yet to be discovered? What are we actively looking for but haven’t found yet? For example, we knew of Troy from Homer but didn’t know where it was until Schliemann (sp?) found it in the 18th Century. Are there any more Troys to be discovered? If so, what? And I’m talking about the whole planet here, not just Western Civ.

adam yax, it’s worse than that. In the basement of our old building is a room full of unique data tapes from the early moon landings. The emulsion is falling off. Very soon they will all be unreadable. The guy who did the photomontage of Jupiter and its moons that NASA circulated for many years said that at JPL the same thing was true.

APB points out an interesting trend, which is that so much knowledge has been lost about 19th and 20th century industrial techniques, it’s now necessary to recover that information with archeological techniques. Broadly, I think we’re learning to treat non-written forms of evidence as more important.

sam stone, sounds are not recorded by any simple medium like drying pottery. Go alien hints at why: at most a material aligns to an instantaneous sound: for example waves in water. The next sound along erases the previous one, or mostly obliterates it. The thousandth sound, as the material is drying (at very best) obliterates the earlier sounds. Since a sentence is hundreds of frequencies, nothing’s going to remain. But the bigger problem is that materials dry according to strong chemical forces, and in a limited way. Example: cement that’s being agitated (at a set frequency) to remove the air bubbles while it’s hardening just has fewer air bubbles. Microscopically, what it looks like is… cement.

What excites me about archeology with computers is the trend that’s been started reconstructing buildings and cities from ruins. We used to do this by artistic guesswork, now it’s turning into hard data, overlaid by understanding of tools and methods. To answer the OP, the end isn’t even vaguely in sight. Now, the situation is that we have conclusions from data from a multitude of sources, in the future, those sources will be composited to provide a bigger picture.

Trying to think of some not-too-implausible near-term possibility, supposing that, given the calorie intake and build of horses, the condition of roads, the typical seasons, one could establish reliably the speed at which rumors and news travelled. This has been done very roughly by saying things like “a horse can travel X miles a day on a fairly good road”. But that’s nothing like saying “This horse, used to travel from London to Dover, over a road of these qualities in March, would travel a maximum of X miles in 1066.” Great stuff.

The past, of course.

(I couldn’t help it. Somebody had to say it. I’ve been resisting, hoping that somebody else would. But they didn’t, so I had to. )

D & R

“Are there sites of great archeological significance that are yet to be discovered? What are we actively looking for but haven’t found yet?”

I saw a PBS program the other day where Bob Ballard (the Titanic rediscoverer) opined that ships on the bottom of the ocean are effectively time capsules “freezing” when they sink a little chunk of a particular society at a particular time. With new technology like side-scanning sonar and remotely-operated underwater vehicles, more wrecks deeper down can be found and studied in detail without the potentially destructive process of raising them out of the water.

Well, they just found a new pyramid in Egypt within the last 8 months. Within the last few years there was that BIG honking find of burials of the children of Ramses II. It is hard to imagine that any part of Egypt is unknown, but it isn’t easy to miss a pyramid.

If these things can still be found in an overworked region like Egypt, it is fair to assume that the jungles of Central and South America and the Andes still have a lot of secrets to give up.

Tremendous amounts of archaeological finds have been uncovered from old privies and dump sites.

We probably won’t have too much to offer the future in our present day flush toilet plumbing, but the dump sites are going to be priceless! Toxic waste! Used Pampers! Newspapers up the wazoo! And disposable EVERYTHING, from surgical tools to unwanted babies.

The deterioration of our storage media is something that frightens me. I’ve read where VHS tapes have a lifespan of something like 15 years. That means all those tapes of my daughter’s infancy have probably turned to goo.
~VOW

No, Dr Meacham. The future of archeology holds the present.

The future of archeology lies in ruins…(boom boom)

Actually it doesn’t.

It depends on what one believes the purpose of research is. If one has a “KIngs Queens and Battles” view of history then castles etc are important. On this line we could attempt to locate the battlefield of Bannockburn, King Johns Crown Jewels, or the grave of King Alfred. (THis is a necessarily brit-centric example)

If one wants to know about the people who lived in them then their middens are important. These will tell us about their diet, health, social structures, trading links and technological accomplishments.

The sea is another obvious unexplored area.

There may well be some developments in our understanding of the human story from discoveries under the sea which could prove people such as Graham Hancock right (although I doubt it)

There is also the field of social archeology, tracing the movements of people through DNA testing. For example; where did the Australian Aborigines come from?

And of course Atlantis is out there somewhere.:stuck_out_tongue:

Re the OP: US

I just read that Cambodia is looking into installing an escalator at Angkor Wat. I guess they feel the future of archaeology includes lots of tourist sightseers.