Archaeology is the study of the material remains of the past. Classical archaeology, which is concerned with the Greeks and Romans, differs from the archaeology done on other peoples, usually in connection with anthropology departments. One reason for this is that the classical world, once one gets out of the Bronze Age, is better known through textual sources than are most other peoples traditionally studied through archaeology (as, for example, the Missippian civilization whose most impressive remains are at Cahokia Mounds jst outside of St. Louis).

It is classical archaeology that I will introduce here. It includes a vast range of specialities: experts on pottery, sculpture, architecture (who sometimes consider themselves art historians rather than archaeologists); numismatists, who study coins; and epigraphists, who study inscriptions on stone, are often considered archaeologists as well, though they are sometimes classed with the historians; experts in some scientific approach, as paleobotanists who study ancient plantlife, or dendrochronologists, who study what tree rings can teach us about chronology. Most archaeologists spend most of their time not digging; but as it is digging that is responsible for the recovery of most archaeological remains (and as digging is what we think of when we think of archaeology), it is perhaps best to begin with it.

Where to dig? Assuming you're not digging where someone else has already found an interesting site, you must find one for yourself. The traditional method is to wander the countryside, especially in an area where some textual evidence has indicated there may be some important settlement. You may well find bits and pieces of ancient walls still in place. Failing that, you look for bits of pottery, which, in ages before storage materials such as cardboard, plastic, and metal, was much used. It isn't as hard to find as you may think, particularly in the relatively arid climate of Greece where there isn't a great deal of vegetation. When you find lots of sherds in one area, especially if they seem to date from the period you are interested in, you begin to dig.

Digging is destructive. You must destroy things near the surface to get things beneath them. It is therefore essential that you keep careful records of what you have dug. The key to tracing what you've found is stratigraphy. As the Greeks built mainly out of perishable materials--wood and mud brick (unfired bricks), structures were continuous worn away, destroyed, and rebuilt. One can, with a bit of practise, locate different layers in what one is digging, and recognize the most frequent causes of vertical disturbances of the basic pattern: walls, foundation trenches, wells, and the like. Cut to overhead.

What one looks for is obviously dependent on what one is interested in: one can't record and save everything. Early archaeologists were interested primarily in two things:

This lead them to dig rather quickly. They sketched the walls that bordered major structures--especially temples and other buildings of obvious artistic merit. This allowed them to find the cities and major buildings they had read about in their texts. They preserved artifacts mainly when they were the sort of thing people would put in museums or pay to own: sculpture, jewelry, and the like. This won them glory, fame--and the money to continue digging (still an essential concern for archaeologists today).

E. What to look for, if you are a modern archaeologist

But modern archaeologists have gone quite beyond this rather old-fashioned approach, and have come up with a new goal:

Where early archaeologists may have simply thrown out anything other than artwork, more recent archaeologists are more likely to carefully sift the dirt they have dug for the slightest pieces of evidence, things like seeds or small bones which show what people ate. They study the layout of interior walls of houses, for example, in an attempt to figure out the sort of details about peoples' lives that texts may not always give us: Did women live in separate quarters? Did the housing conditions of slaves differ from that of poor, free citizens?

F. Corinthian corpses

When I dug at the ancient site of Corinth, for example, the director, who had been incharge of the site for years, told me that he had for a long time found the recovery of skeletal remains rather a bore. (Which rather shocked me, as I had been mighty excited when we found a skeleton in my trench.) He was more interested in fine pieces of pottery, which would allow him to date the structures he was looking at and, if imported, trace trade routes. But he had recently had help from people with the scientific training to find out a great deal of information from skeletal remains: Where did this person come from (in the medieval level we were digging, the elite in Corinth came from Italy)? What sort of diet did this person live on? How old was this individual at the time of death, and what was the cause of death? Such study can tell us much about the social life of Corinth that one could not hope to discover from pottery alone. So skeletons are now more exciting at Corinth.

G. Survey archaeology

Archaeologists may also move beyond the study of obviously important sites through a method known as survey archaeology, in which archaeologists do not dig, but merely closely examine the ground for sherds of pottery and other evidence of inhabitation. Once these sherds are dated, the archaeologists can come to some conclusions about how populated the countryside was at a given date, and whether people lived in individual family groups or clumped in villages, for example.

While the modern technique is clearly superior in some ways, and modern students often have good reason to deplore the fact that earlier archaeologists destroyed much good evidence in their more care-free search for museum pieces, all archaeologists must decide how intensively they can afford to study a given piece of land. Digging with a toothbrush and sifting everything may produce more evidence, but one can't excavate any large amount of territory with such techniques. Survey archaeology allows one to cover large areas, but does not recover most of the material remains that can be recovered.

Relative dates are, most often, a fairly straightforward affair, once one realizes the things that can upset what the basic top-down scheme. One must keep in mind that older items are often tracked into newer levels--otherwise one would never find ancient pottery sherds at the surface. But it is more unusual for modern pieces to be found deep in older levels (though sometimes rodents play some nasty tricks). Experts in pottery are able to agree, most of the time, on the relative dating of pots, whose shapes and decoration change over time. A modern expert in coke bottles--or automobile hoods--could presumably do the same.

Absolute dates are also fairly easy to come up with, after, say, 500 B.C., and so long as one doesn't mind the error of a few years one way or the other. Coins are often fairly easy to date, especially if they contain portraits of rulers, or provide other obvious clues. Other, more complicated devices are also used. Historical events--firmly dated by texts--sometimes provided fixed points with obvious archaeological ramifications. We know, for example, that the Greek city of Olynthus was destroyed in 348 by Philip II of Macedon, Alexander the Great's father. Any pottery style found in Olynthus, then, must have been in use by 348 (though it could have been in use for many years before that, for all we know). We know the Persians burnt Athens in 480: anything found in that layer of burnt materials, or lower, must date before 480.

C. Difficult dates

But there is often room for debate, sometimes for even tens of years, even after 500. More significantly, as one gets further back in history before 500, absolute fixed points like the destruction of a given city in a specific year, are few and far between. What fixed dates we have come from Near Eastern civilizations, where chronology is more secure. As the Egyptians and Mesopotamians traded with the Greeks, we occasionally find artefacts from one society in remains of other, allowing us to callibrate dates. But often one must make educated guesses, sometimes on matters as subjective as how quickly a pottery style would change. Scientific dating techniques would seem to offer a ready way out of this conundrum, but there is always room for debate here as well. Radiocarbon dating, for example, isn't of much value until one gets to tens of thousands of years. Tree rings require that complicated inferences about the ancient climate.

The resulting confusion has led to major disagreements among scholars. Sometime near the end of the Bronze Age, for example, a huge volcanic eruption destroyed much of the Greek island of Santorini (leaving, it must be said, an amazingly attractive island much visited by tourists). But neither the precise date of this eruption (despite the huge impact it had on closer settlements) nor its role, if any, in the decline of Bronze Age civilizations, has been agreed upon.

Still, once one puts together the various different ways dating early events, one can usually of dealing with such dating techniques, one can come up with a scheme close enough for our purposes.

What little we know about Bronze Age society comes largely from archaeology, and archaeology can not always offer answers to the questions we would like answered. Like any other sort of inquiry, archaeology can only address the questions addressed by its evidence. Archaeologists can tell us much about what people ate at a given time, and what they ate it in, for example (and this can tell us surprising things about a people: the Classical Greeks, for example, considered fish a great delicacy, but didn't think all that much of beef. They drank wine out of cups shaped like saucers, apparently in an attempt to moderate their intake of alcohol. But archaeologists have a harder job studying what people were thinking or saying when they were eathing. Generally speaking, archaeologists can tell us quite alot about the material conditions of a society, but less about its religion, politics, and non-material culture in general. And what archaeologists tell us about non material matters like religion must be taken with a grain of salt, as we'll see in a minute.

Archaeology and myth: silent individuals

While archaeology can reveal much about Greek society of the Bronze Age, it can only rarely do much to confirm the truth, or falsity, of Greek myths of the sort we read in Homer. For myth is essentially about individuals, and it is a very rare individual who leaves any archaeological record. We don't find swords with "Achilles" written on them, or ships with graffitti by Odysseus.

Archaeology and Troy

What archaeology can confirm are the existence of cities at a given time, and, just perhaps, the destruction of one particular city at about the right time: Troy. It was once thought that mythical Troy--the most famous city and subject for Greek myths--was purely mythical, had no historical foudnation. Then a German amateur archaeologist named Heinrich Schliemann dug it up, rather embarassing the so-called experts. If the city he found in NW turkey is in fact Troy–as most, though not all, scholars are willing to admit–Schliemann did in fact prove the reality of at least one aspect of the Trojan War: there was a Troy.

Some scholars believe we can prove more: that Troy was destroyed by an army sometime around 1200, which is about the date that myth would assign to the destruction of Troy by the Greek army made up of heroes like Achilles and Odysseus. But while it is certainly true that the city identified with Troy was destroyed several times in its history–as were most cities–and that at least one of those destructions could have come at about the right time for the destruction told of in myth, it is not clear just which level of destruction should correspond to the Trojan War, if any. For when one is digging up 3000 year old rubble, if is hard to distinguish between destruction due to earthquake or fire from that due to war. And even when one is sure that the destruction was caused by war, it will usually be impossible to tell who the attackers were. Some archaeologists think we have reasonably good evidence for a man-made destruction of Troy; some disagree. But even on the best case scenario we do not have much evidence for who destroyed the city. There is some evidence that the people living in this part of Turkey had contact with the Greeks, but we cannot be sure it was those Greeks who destroyed Troy. Certainly we cannot know the names of those Greeks, or just what historical truth, if any, could stand behind myths like those of the Trojan Horse.

Diamond, a biologist by training, wrote his book in response to a question asked him by one of the inhabitants of the island of New Guinea, where Diamond was studying the evolution of birds. A man named Yali asked him this:

We could broaden the question to ask why it is that peoples from Europe (and Asia, especially eastern Asia) colonized and conquered Africa, the Americas, and Australia and the Pacific islands, subjugating or exterminating the native peoples in the process, and leaving the survivors far behind and wealth and power. Why wasn't it the other way around?

The answer Diamond came up with has nothing to do with race. In fact, inasmuch as he addresses the issue of race, he comes up with a conclusion which may be uncomfortable to the whites, despite all their cargo. Diamond makes an evolutionary argument that peoples from more "primitive" cultures will probably be more intelligent than those lucky enough to live in more advanced socieities. For people in harsher conditions will have to be smart and resourceful to live long enough to produce children and raise them to adulthood: evolution will thus select for such traits. People in advanced western societies will do so without much in the way of advanced smarts, so long as they have the genes to protect them from the disease which strike dense human populations. Evolution has thus selected for immunity to smallpox, rather than intelligence. So when European settlers arrived in the new world, they may have been dumber than the native Americans they found: but the Native Americans were killed off by the smallpox the Europeans had been bred to survive.

A big part of the story lies in the presence of plants and animals suited to domestication. Among the easiest plants to domesticate are those grasses which have large seeds; the mediterranean climate of the so-called fertile cresent naturally supports such crops. In fact, of the 56 grasses in the world with the largest seeds, 32 are found in the fertile crescent, far more than in any other zone of similar size. And often even when a plant outside of Eurasia could be domesticated, it was only after a long, difficult process. Corn's wild ancestor was tiny: wild grains of the fertile cresent required very little evolutionary work to be domesticated.

Domestication of animals

A similar situation exists when it comes to domesticated animals. Of the large domesticated animals, five are most important: sheep, goats, cattle, pigs, and the horse. The wild ancestor of each of these lived in Eurasia. Diamond's study of potential mamals for domestication (defined as any mamal over 100 poinds on average, and not predominatly a carnivore, as these are difficult or impossible to domesticate by humans living largely on plants) shows that of the four continents as Diamond counts them, Eurasia had 72 species, Sub-saharran Africa 51, the Americas 24, and Australia just 1. The disparity is still larger when one considers success rates of domestication. 13 of the Eurasian species have been domesticated, or 18%; 1 of the species of the Americans (the llama), for 4%. None of the 51 animals native tosub-saharran Africa have been successfully domesticated.

This isn't the fault of Africans: European settlers tried to domesticate animals like the Zebra, but have failed. And Africans (and others) readily became quite adept at raising domesticated animals (and plants) first domesticated in Eurasia. But at the time Eurasian societies came into contact with the native inhabitants of the Americas, Africa, and Australia, they were so far ahead that the native peoples have still to catch up. Thus the dominance of Eurasian, a.k.a. Western, civilization, is a matter of geographical luck, not of special racial gifts.

What does this have to do with the Greeks? Well, the Greeks enjoyed a climate similar to that of the Fertile Crescent, where so many crops and animals were first domesticated. But the climate of the so-called fertile cresent is actually rather fragile. If the land is worked too hard, as it was in antiquity, its agricultural value declines. Greece was once covered by forests: they were mainly gone by the time of Christ. The center of Western Civilization thus moved first from the fertile cresent regions of Mesopotamia and Egypt to Greece, then further west to Rome, and then, finally, to Northern Europe. Why did the Northern Europeans fare better? I.e., why are the richest parts of Europe in the north, not the south? Not because northern Europeans were wiser, but because their climate was less fragile: abundant rainfall meant that Europe's forests recovered quickly after being cut, and that European farmland remained fertile after hundreds of years of farming, while lands further south and east did not.

Thus the fertile crescent provided Europeans, first in Greece, then in Rome, then to the North, with the main tools they needed to succeed; but the less robust climates of the Near East, Greece, and Italy, while they were suited for quick adoption of agriculture, lacked the staying power to sustain it over the longer haul.