Do you want to be an archaeologist? Think twice. Shovel bum, dig bum, hobo field crew are some of the names people call us. There are many drawbacks to making archaeological technician employment a full time occupation. In most other sciences, research jobs live and die by whatever contract is being worked, and conditions are not always [more...]
Nighthawking is a word used in the UK to described the illegal activity of trespassing on land and using metal detectors to remove finds from archaeological sites. The activity is often carried out at secretively at night, hence the use of the word. It is also described as a ‘heritage crime’, they are stealing the [more...]
Radio-carbon dating is a system for getting age estimates for organic materials. “Estimates” is the key word because there is an amount of uncertainty in the procedure. Each sample type has problems with its use for dating, including contamination and environmental effects. The reason the method works as well as it does, is because the [more...]
The pyramids of Teotihuacán make up the most visited and well-known archaeological site in North America, and it’s popular with good reason. The larger of the pyramids, the Pyramid of the Sun, is the third tallest in the world, and the site is one of the most accessible sites in the hemisphere where visitors can [more...]
Throughout history, we have looked to the skies for a wide variety of reasons. Archaeoastronomy is a fairly new field of study which allows us to find out more about our ancestors history of viewing and trying to explain the cosmos. Archaeoastronomy is a combination of two words (archaeology and astronomy) and is the study of [more...]
The temples of Angkor were erected by the Khmer Civilization between 802 and 1220 AD. From there the Khmer kings ruled over a region that reached from Vietnam, to China, to the Bay of Bengal. Angkor Wat, was built during the early 12th century by Suryavaram II. It honors the Hindu god Vishnu and is a [more...]
The simple definition is that dendrochronology is the dating of past events and objects by means of tree growth rings. Each year a tree adds a layer of wood to its trunk and branches thus creating the annual rings we see when viewing a cross section. The climatic changes in a designated geographic areas can be traced [more...]