Archaeology: A Very Short Introduction

Citation

Bahn, P. (2012). Archaeology: A Very Short Introduction (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press. Very Short Introductions 10. Illustrations by Bill Tidy.

Chapter Summary

Context and Argument

Paul Bahn, a freelance writer, translator and broadcaster in archaeology who led the project that found Britain's only known Ice Age cave art in 2003, wrote this pocket introduction to the discipline as a whole: what archaeologists study, how they date and analyse evidence, what they can say about past lives, societies and minds, and how the past is presented, protected and threatened today. The second edition (2012; about 120 pages of text with 22 illustrations, including cartoons by Bill Tidy) updates the first, adding new discoveries and the impact of developments such as DNA and stable-isotope analysis of teeth. The publisher also notes that the book shows how archaeologists contribute to debates about climate change, rising sea levels and global warming. The tone is informal and frequently humorous, and Bahn does not hide his opinions, for instance about archaeological theory. An unnumbered introduction precedes ten chapters, each of roughly 7–14 pages, followed by further reading and an index.

Introduction

The introduction presents archaeology as a subject that appeals as pastime, career and academic discipline, and that draws on a very wide range of skills, from languages to the study of animal behaviour. It also notes archaeology's popularity on television and its importance for tourism.

Chapter 1: The Origins and Development of Archaeology

Bahn asks where the "archaeology of archaeology" begins, tracing interest in the past from early antiquarian curiosity to nineteenth-century barrow digging and the rise of modern techniques. The chapter stresses how much more can now be learned from a single object such as a potsherd, warns of the backlog of unpublished excavations and uncatalogued finds in museums, and notes archaeology's new relevance to questions such as climate change, sea-level rise, earthquakes and tsunamis.

Chapter 2: Making a Date

A compact survey of dating methods: relative dating by typology and stratigraphy, then absolute methods including tree-rings and varves, radiocarbon (with calibration curves and accelerator mass spectrometry) and thermoluminescence. Bahn emphasises that archaeologists need to know which methods exist and which materials and age ranges they suit, rather than the physics behind them.

Chapter 3: Technology

Starting from the tools people left behind, the chapter discusses stone tools and how their classification has changed, the likely importance of wood in the "Stone Age", microwear analysis, experimental archaeology and the technology of other materials such as textiles, pottery, glass and metal. It also touches on past environmental damage, such as deforestation on Easter Island.

Chapter 4: How Did People Live?

This chapter covers the "lifestyles of the dead and buried": what people looked like, how healthy they were, what they ate and what killed them. Topics include food-residue analysis, collagen and isotope studies (oxygen and strontium can indicate where a person grew up), and well-preserved bodies such as Tollund Man, Lindow Man and the Alpine "Iceman". Bahn criticises introductions that discuss tools and dwellings but say little about the people themselves.

Chapter 5: How Did People Think?

Bahn calls getting inside past minds much harder than reconstructing technology or subsistence. The chapter discusses cognitive archaeology, religion, the difficulty of defining "art", Ice Age and rock art (Lascaux, Altamira and the claim that rock art makes up most of art history), megalithic monuments and astronomical interpretations. It is sceptical of fashionable readings such as the view that rock art is largely trance imagery.

Chapter 6: Settlement and Society

The chapter considers types of settlement, "from dungheaps to palaces", and how archaeologists infer social organisation, using a sequence from segmentary societies (tribes) to chiefdoms and states. Site hierarchies, central places, craft production and monuments such as Stonehenge and the surrounding burial mounds serve as examples.

Chapter 7: How and Why Did Things Change?

This is the book's chapter on explanation and theory. It reviews early evolutionary thinkers and figures such as V. Gordon Childe and Grahame Clark, the American "New Archeology" or processual archaeology, and its post-processual critics. Bahn welcomes theoretical diversity but is openly sceptical of theoretical posturing and of the "mock battles" of the New Archeology.

Chapter 8: Minorities and Sororities

Two challenges to archaeology's traditional practice are treated here. The first is the demand by indigenous peoples, notably Native Americans, for the return and reburial of ancestral remains, with the adoption of codes of ethics requiring consultation. The second is the neglect of women in the archaeological record and in the profession, and the rise of feminist and gender archaeology.

Chapter 9: Presenting the Past to the Public

Bahn discusses how archaeologists' own backgrounds have shaped interpretation (with the nineteenth-century French prehistorian Gabriel de Mortillet's rejection of Altamira as an example), museum displays that still reflect nineteenth-century views, the growth of museum studies, and popular presentations such as the Jorvik Viking Centre in York. Tourism and its pressures on sites, notably in Egypt, are also discussed.

Chapter 10: The Future of the Past

The final chapter looks ahead: a likely decline in research excavation in favour of rescue work and the study of existing collections, threats to famous sites and rock art, conservation efforts, and looting, including the losses from the Iraq Museum and Cairo, which Bahn ties to the antiquities market.

Key Concepts

Introduction and Chapters 1–3: The Discipline and Its Tools

• Relative and absolute dating: ordering finds in sequence versus assigning them an age in years, by methods such as tree-rings, radiocarbon and thermoluminescence.
• Calibration: correcting radiocarbon ages against tree-ring ages to obtain calendar dates.
• Microwear and experimental archaeology: studying wear traces on tools and reproducing ancient techniques to learn how artefacts were made and used.

Chapters 4–6: Lives, Minds and Societies

• Residue and isotope analysis: chemical study of food remains, bones and teeth to reconstruct diet and origins.
• Cognitive archaeology: the attempt to infer past beliefs and ways of thinking from material evidence such as art and monuments.
• Segmentary societies, chiefdoms and states: a sequence of increasingly hierarchical forms of social organisation used to interpret settlements and burials.

Chapters 7–10: Theory, Ethics and the Future

• Processual and post-processual archaeology: the scientific, process-oriented New Archeology and the interpretive approaches that criticised it.
• Reburial: the return of human remains to descendant communities, and the ethical codes that followed.
• Gender archaeology: research that recovers women's roles in the past and questions male bias in interpretation.
• Rescue archaeology and looting: salvage work ahead of destruction, and the illicit trade that drives the plunder of sites.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• The whole field in about 120 pages. Ten short chapters cover history, dating, technology, daily life, belief, society, theory, ethics, public presentation and the future, which gives a beginner the full outline in one sitting.
• Concrete and wide-ranging examples. Index and text cite cases from Lascaux and Stonehenge to Easter Island, Tollund Man, the Terracotta Army and the Jorvik Centre, so methods are always tied to sites.
• Ethics and the present take real space. Three of ten chapters address reburial, gender, museums, tourism, conservation and looting, issues that a student meets quickly in practice.
• A lively, opinionated voice. Bill Tidy's cartoons and Bahn's wry asides make the book easy to read; his scepticism towards some theories models the critical attitude a student should bring to interpretations.

Limitations

• Very brief on methods. Dating gets about seven pages; survey and excavation technique are not given their own chapter. Students who need method in depth must move to a textbook.
• Theory is treated sceptically and briefly. Chapter 7 summarises processual and post-processual archaeology in a few pages and with evident impatience; it is not a fair or full introduction to archaeological theory.
• Dated in places. The text reflects research up to about 2011, before many later advances in ancient-DNA and isotope work.

Where It Fits in the Course

This is the shortest way into the archaeology course. Its natural companion is Renfrew and Bahn's Archaeology: Theories, Methods and Practice, a large textbook co-written by the same author and recommended in the further reading here as a "brick-like" textbook; it covers the same ground (dating, technology, diet, cognition, society, explanation, the public) with far more detail and case studies. Durrani and Fagan's In the Beginning is another long-running introductory textbook with a global perspective. Read Bahn first for orientation, then one of these two for depth.

For theory, Bahn's chapter is only a starting point. Matthew Johnson's Archaeological Theory: An Introduction explains the schools from the New Archaeology onward in plain language and gives a much more balanced picture; Bruce Trigger's A History of Archaeological Thought and Hodder and Hutson's Reading the Past are more demanding works for later study.

How to Use This Book

The book assumes no previous study of archaeology or history and suits students beginning a first module, prospective applicants and readers from other disciplines.

• Read it whole, early. It can be read in an evening or two before a course starts.
• Core for an introductory course: Chapters 1–6 give the basic vocabulary of dating, technology, subsistence, cognition and social organisation.
• For ethics and heritage topics: Chapters 8–10 are a short introduction to reburial, gender, museums, tourism and looting, useful before seminars on these themes.
• Treat Chapter 7 with care: read it as one author's view, then use Johnson for a fuller account of theory.

Use the further-reading list to find the next book on each topic, and when a chapter mentions a site or method, look it up in Renfrew and Bahn to see the full case study.