Archaeology is, among human sciences, the discipline with the strongest importance for the rediscovery, but also for the preservation and protection of cultural heritage, as Humankind’s universal patrimony. You will be introduced to the way we ourselves reflect on and are engaged with the study of human past: from the practical and material recovery of ancient traces in the field to the study and interpretation. On the other hand, the discovery of human past implies the correct conservation and presentation for both experts and general public: the study and protection of the past we share every day prevent from any possible destruction, misuse, abuse and thus cancellation of human memory. “Recovering the Humankind's Past and Saving the Universal Heritage” presents to a large public Archaeology as a historical discipline: through an inter-disciplinary perspective you will follow the evolution and change of archaeology to the moment when natural sciences contributed to make the historical reconstructions scientifically sound; the aid of informatics and of virtual reconstructions gives new fascination to the already strong suggestion of Archaeology, as the discipline of discovery par excellence. Within this frame, Ebla, which is the glory of the Sapienza school of Oriental archaeology, will have an exemplary meaning in the course development as a long lasting experience on the field and an excellent example of the scientific results of combined researches and disciplines. Moreover, the course will focus on actual, innovative instruments to preserve, monitor and give value to cultural heritage through a multidisciplinary approach, based on a deep archaeological and historical knowledge but also on ICT technologies. The wide adoption of ICT technologies in our daily life is also impacting in the way in which we interact with our cultural heritage in particular in terms of preservation and dissemination of cultural objects. In this course you will learn the basic techniques to digitize cultural objects and obtain 3D digital copies of a physical objects such as statues, vases or archaeological sites. We will also discuss how to structure the raw data in order to facilitate and make effective the access to digital contents. In particular, we will present the European Data Model, a framework for collecting, connecting and enriching data on cultural objects provided by a number of museum, archives, sites and libraries in Europe.
Section 4.2 - Stratigraphical Archaeology .... - (min. 15:28)
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Recovering the Humankind's Past and Saving the Universal Heritage
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Sapienza University of Rome
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À partir de la leçon
Week 4 - The birth of archaeology and its role in the contemporary world.
Material remains of the past and their state of recovery vary according also to environments. Surface surveys lead to a more intense knowledge of territories, visualizing archaeologicallandscapes in a variety of ecological situations. The objectives of archaeological research have been moulded in the historical development of the discipline. Historical sources have always been a sourceof inspiration for research, opening new problems. Chronology is a construct depending on dating tools, and scientific methods have been employed in determining an absolute chronology.
Homework available since
Rencontrer les enseignants
Paolo MatthiaeEmeritus Professor of Archaeology
Dipartimento delle Scienze dell'Antichità
Davide NadaliPhD in Near Eastern Archaeology
Andrea VitalettiPh.D. in Computer Science
Computer Science
Emanuel DemetrescuPhD candidate
In one of the previous lessons, we recalled that we may single out three main phases
in the development through the years of archaeology as an historical discipline of
humanities during the 19th, and most recently, the 20th century.
We called them respectively pioneer, historical, and global archaeology.
For what concerns methods one of the most important conquests of historical
archaeology is what we may define the invention of stratigraphic archaeology.
The first theoretical elaboration and practical experimentations of
this method date from the 30s and 40s of the 20th century.
On the other hand, its success and diffusion took place during the 50s and
60s of the same century.
Two great British scholars are the authors of this discovery.
Sir Mortimer Wheeler, one of the protagonists of the archaeology of
India and one of the discoverers of the early urban culture in the Indus Valley.
On the other hand Dame Kathleen Kenyon is one of the most
important scholars of the archaeology of Palestine who became famous for
her excavations in particular at Samaria, Jericho, and Jerusalem.
This stratigraphic method in field archaeology, which faced some
improvement and deepening in the years since the first intuitions by Wheeler and
Kenyon, is the method universally applied today in all modern excavations,
although with some variant, in any scientific excavation in any country of the world.
The main characteristic of the stratigraphic method is that it put
at the center of the attention the excavation of the archaeological deposit,
namely the earth, which must be excavated and removed in order to
recover any kind of artifacts that the soil conceals and hides.
Paradoxically, modern scientific excavations does not give the maximum
attention to what is discovered but to the way in which it is discovered.
So archaeology passes from what is the excavation to how it is excavated.
From the considerations we made in the previous lessons therefore,
it seems clear that in a modern stratigraphical excavation the greatest
attention is turned to the archaeological deposit, namely the earth:
the true protagonist of scientific archaeology, even more
than the recovered artifact itself.
It is not by chance that the first handbook of stratigraphic archaeology, written by
Sir Mortimer Wheeler, was called Archaeology from the Earth.
The aim of stratigraphic method is to recover the largest possible amount of
information from the archaeological context, keeping in mind,
as already maintained, that precisely the archaeological deposit is fatally and
irreparably lost during the excavation.
The modern scientific excavations carried out according to the stratigraphic method,
whichever variant of practical procedure is applied, is, in general terms,
based on the principle that observation, registration, and
interpretation of the earth of the archeological deposit are necessary.
The observation of the earth, of the archeological deposit during
the excavation should keep accurately into account the color, structure, and
placement of the soils one meets when excavating.
Moreover, only an excavation conducted following a stratigraphical method,
guarantees the conditions for a correct interpretation of the excavation results.
Even in the centers of great historical importance, in quite a number of
excavations carried out before the discovery of the stratigraphic method,
clamorous mistakes were made in the dating, precisely because the archeological deposit
was not given attention and it was simply removed.
In order to better understand this problem we may make two classical examples,
well known to Wheeler and Keyon thanks to their experience in Oriental Archaeology.
These examples concern, on the one hand, the excavation of a modest quarter of
house with mudbricks structured on stone foundations, destroyed by fire,
and on the other hand, the excavation of a monumental area, abandoned, and later on
transformed in a waste place, for a poorer settlement not far away.
In the first case, it is quite likely that inside the houses rooms, one finds, from top
to bottom, a thick layer of earth, relatively packed with fragments
of collapsed bricks, more or less damaged, or quite poor of ceramic fragments,
and, down lower,and on the floor, quite a thin grayish layer of soil, packed with ash and
burnt wood, usually quite rich in pottery.
Usually, if one knows the
pottery of this site, one will observe that, quite astonishingly,
the pottery from the upper-level of collapsed mudbricks contains fragments
from a phase older than the pottery of the lower-level with burnt beams.
Of course, as it's quite patent, it is quite peculiar that an upper level
contains pottery older than that of the lower-level, because, in general terms,
in a normal stratification and so in the stratigraphic archaeology,
the soil placed lower down is usually older than the soil placed above.
The explanation for this apparent peculiar anomaly cannot be obtained if
one doesn't observe, with care during the excavation, the structure, color and
placement of the soils met, as explained earlier.
In general terms, in fact,
the explanation for this apparent peculiar phenomenon is the following:
The pottery from the lower grayish level with ashes is the more recent one, because
it belongs to the time of the destruction of the settlement or the building.
The pottery from the upper-level of the fragmentary mudbricks is older, because it
comes from the soil with which the mud bricks of the walls were made,
which collapsed after the destruction of the rooms or
the abandonment of the building,
leading to the accumulation of the soil much poorer in
ashes over the level of the burnt beams of the roofs.
We may also say that, while the pottery from the level of ashes and
burnt materials date the destruction of the building, the pottery fragments from
the mudbricks of the walls may point, in general, to a phase immediately before
the erection, and so the construction, of the building itself.
In the second case, over a thick level of soil with fragments of
collapsed bricks, which had heaped up inside the rooms of a monumental complex,
there is a level of soil with a much more uniform color and texture, where the mudbrick
fragments become rarer, and at last, evenly disappear.
These soils from the lower and upper-levels, are quite different in
structure, color, and placement, yet they both feature irregular perturbations
of grayish soils with ashes, with frequent pottery fragments, and bone remains.
If the excavation is carried out without following the principles of stratigraphic
archeology, it is however possible to notice that the pottery from the excavated
soils, even from the similar levels with regard to a horizontal plane,
is peculiarly mixed up, and that it belongs to quite different periods.
If, on the other hand,
the excavation is carried out according to the principles of stratigraphic archeology,
so following each strata accordingly,
one will easily observe that, in the first place, the homogeneous and
older pottery are relatively frequent in the soil of the lower-level of
collapses of the walls, after the monumental complex was abandoned.
In the second place, that the non-homogeneous pottery, dating from
different periods, is quite rare in the homogeneous soil void of mudbricks,
from the upper-level of aeolian accumulation over the abandoned ruins,
dating from a time when the site was not regularly frequented.
In the third place, finally, that the homogenous and
later pottery is more abundant in the soils thick with ashes, located even
at quite different heights, scattered in limited places of the excavations area.
These three soils belong respectively to a lower one,
to a short phase of abandonment of the settlement,
characterized by the collapses of the structures no more in use,
the upper one to a longer period of accumulation of
soils brought from wind and rain,
with sporadic and inhomogeneous materials, not due to a regular human frequentation,
and the third one to the phase of waste pits from a probably not far away settlement,
which penetrated, sometimes relatively in depth, both older levels of occupations.
In one word, the events which in the pre-stratigraphic archaeology appeared
as inexplicable perturbations in the accumulation of levels of soils in
a settlement,
in stratigraphic archaeology in the other way,
one finds always an explanation, precisely because the strongest attention is given
to the ways in which archaeological soils were created, and came one after the other.
In very simple terms, an excavation carried out according to
stratigraphic method is a scientific excavation,
So not only what we excavate but how we excavate.
This minimizes the possibilities of interpretation mistakes, while
an excavation carried out ignoring the stratigraphic method leads to
several interpretation mistakes and
misunderstandings of the arcaeological context.
However, it was rightly pointed out that in the different historical archeologies
of the planet the classification of the chronological sequences of
different kinds of artifacts of material culture were made in the phase of
historical archaeology, previous to the discovery of stratigraphic method.
Just to make one famous example: by the end of the 19th century, during his quite
crititicizable excavations, Heinrich Schliemann
defined nine successive strata, corresponding to nine towns,
coming out, one after the other for more than two millennia,
on the hill of Hissarlik in Western Anatolia,
quite likely the famous Homer's Troy.
The succession of towns, albeit with important clarifications and
corrections, was confirmed by the American excavations led by Carl Blegen in the 30s
of the 20th century, and by the recent German excavation by Manfred Korfmann.
How could it happen that ancient methodological, quite rudimentary
excavations, though neglecting the attention for the archeological deposit
peculiar to the stratigraphic method, in Palestine at
Megiddo, in Mesopotamia at Nineveh and Uruk, in Syria at Ugarit, for example,
these excavations reached acceptable results several decades
before the invention of the stratigraphic method.
The explanation, in fact, for this peculiar event lies in
the fact that when, during the first phase of historical archeology, they carried out
excavations where the archeological deposit was not paid too attention,
they often followed two criteria which allowed,
although without a great precision, to avoid serious mistakes in the identification of
the succession of archeological strata.
The two criteria where the following:
On the one hand, they usually worked over very large areas.
And on the other hand, they removed the strata,
characterized by architectural structures, one after the other.
By this I mean
that, by paying attention not to the soils of the archaeological deposits but rather to
the architectural superimposition and working over large areas,
even the continuous, yet episodic anomalies of the so-called
stratigraphic perturbations, were statistically inclined to be cancelled,
because attention was rather paid to the succession of architectural strata.
In fact, in such a way, if the observation and
registration of the succession of architectural strata and
of the archaeological materials related with the relative soils were accurate,
results were often satisfactory, because they obtained a kind
of macro-stratigraphy, while they missed, of course, the micro-stratigraphy.
Therefore, when the excavation attention was paid only to
architectural succession of strata, and not yet
to the structure, color, and placement of archeological deposits, so the earth,
they were able to identify the great periods of the archeological sequences.
But the definition of the phases in which those main periods were
articulated was almost completely missed.
And for these reasons it was maintained, on the one hand, that the great "invention" of
stratigraphic archaeology had to be defined "stratigraphic archaeology on
geological base", because in it the soils of the archaeological levels were dealt with
like geologists studied the geological levels of the earth history.
And on the other hand, that it was preceded by a "stratigraphic archaeology on
architectural base", because in it, they did not pay attention to the succession of
archeological deposits, but only to the succession of architectural strata.
So, building instead of simple soil deposit.
And in fact, in conclusion, these considerations about the progressive
success of the stratigraphic method make us understand that the great phase of
"historical archaeology" was called in this way because,
with gradual improvements, which knew moments of major and more decisive improvements
like those linked to Wheeler and Kenyon, it allowed, in many of the
planet's archeologies, a sound chronological classification of all main artifacts of
material culture of different civilizations taken into account.
And by means of these method improvements of the archaeological discipline, which in
general terms took place by the half of the 20th century,
the study of the remains of the material culture of
humankind's history entered the proper scientific phase.
And for that reason, archaeology became a true historical discipline, capable to
bring basic contribution to the historical reconstruction of
the civilization of the ancient world.
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