1. What’s Left? Material Evidence and Their Preservation

2. Basic categories of archaeological finds:
1. artefacts: portable objects used, modified or made by people: tools, pottery, metal weapons, jewellery etc.
2. features: non-portable objects, so humanly modified parts of a site that are non-portable: hearths, postholes, storage pits, ditches, etc.
3. organic and environmental remains or ‘ecofacts’ that are not objects: textiles, animal bones, skeletons, plant remains, soils, sediments (material deposited in the earth’s surface)
Archaeological site: place where all these characteristics are found or where significant traces of human activity can be found
Region: group of sites

3. Tell Halula, Syria

4. Sedgebury Camp,
Iron Age site, England

5. Context Matrix Primary Context: Secondary Context: Context Provenience
original context
Secondary Context:
Context disturbed by
humans/nature recently
or in the past
Matrix
Context
Provenience
Other finds

6. Formation Processes
Cultural formation processes (C-transforms): ‘deliberate or accidental activities of human beings’
a. original human behaviour: tools, buildings
b. deliberate burial: hoard/burial of the dead
c. human destruction of archaeological record
2. Natural transformation processes (N-transforms): ‘natural events that govern burial and survival of archaeological record’
Inorganic materials
Organic materials: only survival in exceptional circumstances – natural disasters, extremely dry, cold or wet conditions (waterlogged environments)

7. Quiz! 1. Cultural or natural formation process?
2. If cultural formation process:
a. original human behaviour
b. deliberate burial
c. human destruction
If natural formation process:
a. is the find organic?
b. is the find inorganic?
and: How has it been preserved?
a. Dry conditions
b. Wet conditions
c. Cold conditions
d. Natural disaster
e. Other

8. gold coins found in London, 1st century CE (Roman)

9. gold coins from ship wreck, 1865

10. Lindow Man (C-14 date: 2 BCE-119 CE), found at Lindow Moss, England in 1984

11. Iron Age burial

12. Caves of Lascaux, France (17,000 years old!), discovered in 1940

14. Vindolanda tablets (wood), Roman period,
England
Discovered in 1973

15. Plough marks, Etruria, Italy

16. Tollund Man, found near Silkeborg in Denmark in 1950 (C-14 date: 350 BCE)

17. Man found in desert sand of Egypt, 3000 BCE

18. Dead Sea scrolls, Qumran, Israel
(third to first centuries BCE)
Found in 1947

19. Discovery of thousands of papyri at Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, from 1896 onwards

20. Buddha statues of Bamiyan (Afghanistan) destroyed by Taliban March 1, 2001

21. Ötzi the Iceman, found in 1991 (c. 3300 BCE)