For a straight forward answer, ‘Archaeology, or archeology is the study of past human societies, primarily through the recovery and analysis of the material culture and environmental data which they have left behind, which includes artifacts, architecture, bio-facts and cultural landscape.’ However, in reality the meaning of Archaeology is elusive. It is difficult to have a straight forward answer because of the following points.
One is due to diversity of modern archaeology and constantly emerging new specializations and sub-disciplines. Archaeology has become multi-disciplinary involving sciences such as Botany, Ecology, Geology, Geography, Zoology and other more branches of science. Hence, the meaning of the word become flexible and has variable meaning. We may takes into consideration how rich the cultural-historical activities of human antiquity then.
Secondly, often times archaeology relate to disciplines such as Anthropology, History, and Science; and were used interchangeably. Anthropology is an extensive discipline and generally broken into smaller disciplines. There is a thin layer that divides Archaeology to its predecessor disciplines.
Since, Anthropology focused on the study of humanity its physical characteristics and culture. In these sense, Archaeology is the ‘past tense of cultural Anthropology’. For History; since Archaeology deals with past, likewise the History. It only differs on aspects and methods. To Archaeology, it studies all cultures and period whether with or without writings. Furthermore, and In spite of, Archaeology provides data to Anthropology or History it’s no way to make it a sub-discipline because Archaeology has it own subject with its own theory and methodology and goals.
And while for Science; ‘the Archaeologist has to develop a picture of the past, just as the Scientist has to develop a coherent view of the natural world. Archaeology, in short, is a science as well as humanity.’
Lastly, some author of Archaeology books circulates sometimes has different perspective as to the definition of Archaeology; one is we cannot discard the possibility of the author tend to utter their respective discipline (eg Anthropology); Moreover, Archaeology study past. Past has different meaning for different people, and often personal perspective is defined by the past.
While there is a lot of overlap in these discipline and scholars themselves sometimes give contradictory definitions. Since, Archaeology is a diverse discipline and so as human being are as diverse species. And therefore, there is no single approach to encompass our diversity on one hand or another.
Undoubtedly, specific definition of Archaeology pertaining to specialize discipline and; also theories and methods may change from time to time; another theory or methods will emerge and will being argued but the “intellectual curiosity” will remain constant to those people who want to convert the curiosity in the past into knowledge of today like an….Archaeologist.
