Who Are Archeologists? The Many Kinds of People Who Study the Past

Archeologists at work at Fort Vancouver. NPS.

Archeologists study old things and places to learn how people lived in the past. They are a hardy bunch, digging anywhere, old rubbish heaps and toilets included, for clues, and they seem to know something about everything people once did: how they made tools, why they moved, what they ate.

• Do they study dinosaurs? No. Paleontologists study those very ancient animals and their environments, long before humans.
• Do they study rocks? Yes: they can identify rocks, soils and landforms, though geologists are the real experts.
• Do they study people? Yes: archeologists are anthropologists, people who study people.

The kinds of archeologist

• Field crew. A team that excavates sites, led by someone with a graduate degree in archeology and long field experience, and made up of field technicians, students, and volunteers wanting to see what archeology is like. Members take turns surveying, digging, recording and sifting.

A field crew at work. NPS.

• Collections specialists, also called curators or archeological technicians, look after excavation records and artefacts in museums, historical societies, universities and parks, preserving them and helping researchers and the public learn from them.

In an archeology lab, things not seen for hundreds of years come back into view. NPS.

• Zooarcheologists study animal remains (fauna) from sites, showing what people ate, which animals they hunted and raised, and how healthy they were, and how ecosystems changed. At Yellowstone Lake, archeology showed how much fish and other animals mattered to past peoples.

Fish were an important food in many cultures, which makes them a focus of archeological study. NPS.

• Underwater archeologists use much the same methods as those on land to excavate rock shelters, shipwrecks and even aircraft, revealing seafaring life, warfare and the cargoes of trade. They solved the mystery of the English China Wreck.

Archeologists working underwater find shipwrecks and other remains. NPS.

• Historical archeologists compare documents (family records, diaries, letters, maps, paintings) with what they find in the ground, sometimes uncovering the very events or objects the texts describe. Comparing historical sources with oral history, archeologists and Native American descendants located the site of the Sand Creek Massacre.
• Environmental archeologists study how people and the earth have shaped each other, through ecofacts, the natural remains of wild and domesticated plants and animals. On the Kuka'iwa'a landshelf at Kalaupapa, people living with Hansen's disease built a life and culture from the resources around them.

The landscape at Kalaupapa, Molokai. NPS.

• Oral historians ask people what they remember about growing up in a place, how they lived and worked, and how they used the objects archeologists find. At Manzanar, Japanese Americans incarcerated there in World War II shared their memories, some at the Barracks Exhibit, and helped archeologists locate sites.

Sources

• National Park Service, "Who Are Archeologists?" https://www.nps.gov/articles/who-are-archeologists.htm
• Two artworks from the original, a historical drawing of the Sand Creek Massacre and a drawing from Manzanar, are not reproduced here, as their makers are not named.