Archaeology ??!!

ARCHAEOLOGY :-

             Archaeology has been defined by many people in many different ways since the formal study began 150 years ago. This difference reflects the dynamic nature of the field. Archaeology is partly the discovery of the scientific analyst of the treasures of the past and partly the exercise of the creative imagination. Archaeology is both a physical activity out in the field and an intellectual pursuit in the study or laboratory.

              The word "Archaeology" derived from the Greek word "archios" meaning "ancient" and "logos" meaning "knowledge". Thus collectively it's referred to as "the study of antiquity" or "the science of ancient things". Archaeology takes every trace of human activity into account. More appropriately it can be defined as "the science of ancient remains".

              Thus according to Larry j. Zimmerman," Archaeology is the scientific study of people's of the past .........their culture and relationship with their environment. The purpose of archaeology is to understand how humans in the past interacted with their environment, and to preserve this history for present and future learning ".

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                   According to State Historical Society of South Dakota, " Archaeology is our way of reading that message and understanding how these people lived . Archaeologists take the clues left behind by the people of the past and, like detectives, work to reconstruct how long ago they lived, what they ate, what their tools and homes were like and what become of them".

SCOPE OF ARCHAEOLOGY :-

                 The main aim of archaeology is to aid to the reconstruction of human past, especially when written records are absent. Today archaeology is a broad church, encompassing numbers of different "archaeologies" . The chronological division in archaeology is accentuated by further subdivisions so that the archaeologists specialize in , say , the earliest periods (The old stone age or Paleolithic) or the later ones (The great civilizations of India , America and China ; Egyptology; the classical archaeology of Greece and Rome). Few archaeological fields that help us to know about the past are as follows:-

• ARCHAEOASTRONOMY : It is generally defined as the study of beliefs                                                   and practices concerning sky in the past,       particularly in the absence of written records, and to know about theirs understanding of  the sky was put. For example, Archaeoastronomy was progressing in a more productive direction among Mesoamericans and particularly Mayanists. The written data in the form of monumental inscriptions and documents ( 'Dresden Codex') showed the possible significance of astronomy and interpreting the meaning of such alignments.

• ARCHAEOGENETICS :  It's the study of human past mainly using the techniques of molecular genetics. It's also helping to resolve some of the problems in the origins and history of world Linguistic diversity. 

• COGNITIVE ARCHAEOLOGY: It's the study of past ways of thought as inferred from the surviving material remains. It naturally falls into two sub-fields - one deals with the evolution of the cognitive capacities of our pre-sapients ( before Homo sapiens sapiens) ancestors, While other deals with the subsequent emergence within our species , notably development of writing independently in different parts of the world.
• ARCHAEOLOGY OF CULTURE AND RELIGION: It almost wholly deals with people's beliefs, both individual and collective and thus it is remarkably complex.
• ENVIOURNMENTAL ARCHAEOLOGY: Field where archaeologists and specialists from other sciences study the human use of plants and animals and how past people adapted to the ever-changing environment.
• UNDERWATER ARCHAEOLOGY: It demanding great courage as well as skills. In last 30 years it has become a highly scientific exercise, yielding time capsules from the past in the form of shipwrecks that shed light on ancient life on land as well as at sea.
• ETHNOATCHAEOLOGY:  It helps us to understand ancient lifestyle or societies by studying and creating parallel with the present day societies. It generally involves field work or the analysis of museum collections.
• EXPERIMENTAL ARCHAEOLOGY: It is the investigation of archaeological issues using experiments . As artifacts were identified and sorted into chronological sequences.
• FEMINIST ARCHAEOLOGY: It refers to an approach that uses feminist critique as the basis for archaeological work. It developed from the women's movement in the 1970's- 1980's together with gender archaeology.   

                          Many other fields of archaeology are there..Like Historical archaeology, Osteoarchaeology etc. Which have gained lots of interest in present day world . Thus archaeologists can be best described as 'Detective of The Past Cultures '.