Hi my name is Rebecca and I am Professor of
archaeology here at St Andrews and I am now
going to answer your questions that you
have been submitting for the last week
about archaeology. Unfortunately I won't
have time to answer all the questions
but what I've done is looked at all
questions and try to group some together
to see if I can get as many answered as
I possibly can
So Lisa asked how do old things end up
being buried and actually her question
relates to questions that Rebecca,
Hannah and Sam asked about burial
processes and things like that and also
Karen so to answer this question how do
things end up being buried what
archaeologists are working on is rubbish
essentially so what we're studying is
people's old rubbish things that people
threw away: blades, used pottery like you
see in the picture here and stuff like
that that's what we're looking at in
terms of archaeology and that's the clue
that gives us an insight into our past
and so how do things actually wind up
there well it's rubbish that people
throw them away and they get discarded
we can look at buildings too and if you look
at this photograph you'll see that when
buildings are abandoned or they've been
destroyed they first of all the first
thing that you usually happens to it an
abandoned or destroyed building is that
the roof collapses in and then weeds start
to grow things start to take over and in
this photograph you can see that grass
is even growing in the inside of the
house and then over time the soil builds
up over and over again now in places
like Greece the soil build-up isn't very
much because there's a high level of
soil erosion but in places like Britain
and in particular in Scotland because
there's so much rain there's huge
amounts of soil so you have to take
really quite far in some places to be
able to get down to the archaeology
other reasons why things might wind up
back being buried are for example it
actually burials themselves so when a
body is committed to the ground in a
grave that's a deliberate burial of that
body and Sam asked whether I'd excavated
in cemeteries excavated buried bodies and
the answer is yes I actually have lots
of them I've even excavated a
and an individual who'd been decapitated
and then put in the grave burials are
fantastic sources of evidence and this is
one of the questions that Rebecca asked
source of evidence for how people lived
in the past so for example from a body
that's been in the ground as you can see
from the photograph we can tell a little
bit about their diet for example from
their teeth and from their bones so for
example if they're not eating enough
fruits and vegetables their bones will
be able to tell us much we can even tell
their occupations sometimes for example
if they're doing a repetitive job that might wind up creating muscle attachment sites on the bone
so burials give us lots of
information also from the actual style
of burial and about the grave goods -
they can tell us about what kind of
religious practices people may have
had and what kind of beliefs people
had and indeed lots about the community
system -
Peter and Sophie asked me about how we
can figure out how old an object is?
there are lots of different ways of being able to do
this if the material that we're looking
at is organic material so for example
wood particularly burnt wood or even things like hair
from your head or bits of other kind of
material that will regrow naturally
therefore have carbon in it, like seeds as well
what we can do is date that material
using a method called carbon-14 dating
and this is a scientific process where
we would take our sample say for example
soil sample which has seeds in it and
then send it away to a lab and then
they'll be able to give us a range of
dates in which that material lies in
dating but actually we don't always have
the opportunity to test organic material
in this way and so what we would rely on
for all other kinds of materials are
things to do with stratigraphic dating
and now you can see I've got a stratigraphic image here
and you can see we are relying on relative data here where the oldest layer is the layer on the bottom
And the most recent layer is the layer at the top now we can tell the
different layers by how the soil feels
so for example if the soil is quite
compact and really a different colour
than we know it's a soil change and a
different layer relating to a specific date but
that's all relative in terms of the soil layers.
What you can see as well from the
stratigraphic dating chart is that each
layer will have different objects in it
and so as I said we know that the the
the deepest layer would have the oldest
objects in it and what we now know for
the most part is the date of things
like pottery and that's because there have
been pottery sequences worked out
from as early as the 18th century.
And  people like Flinders Petrie
you see here he did huge amounts of work
working out the sequence of various
different types of pottery that he found
in Egypt so you can see an image of that
here and other people in other parts of
the world did similar things. So for example
Arthur Evans did the same for the
Minoans in Crete so he worked out the
pottery sequences for the Minoans with in
Crete and what that means is that if you
find a piece of pottery in a particular
layer and you know the date of that
pottery then you can date that layer
and you can also date anything else that
is in the layer too because all associated
with the single context in the same way
we could help date buildings through pottery
Or carbon 14 if we have organic material
So for example if we find a foundation trench with pottery we can date that.
Jamie asked whether archaeologists have
ever actually excavated museums and the
answer is yes they have indeed and in
fact one of the earliest possible
museums that's been excavated comes from
Iraq and the archaeologist Leonard
Woolley
in 1925 was excavating a Babylonian
Palace and when he was, this is an image of it
here, and when he was excavating this
Babylonian Palace he came across a room
and within the room which dated to the
6th century BC he found a whole range of
different objects that didn't really
seem to be part of this particular date
and when he further excavated so he
found bits of statue bits of a boundary
stone and other things like that but
importantly he also found lots and lots
of little tiny tablets which had in
three different languages, and you can
see them here, descriptions of different
artifacts and what they reckon was that
the Babylonian princess Ennigalbi, she
collected this material from the local
area and then put it in this room in, in
fact one of the earliest possible
museums
Euan asked what if anything can
archaeology do to help us fight climate
change and this is a really excellent
question
and in fact two of my colleagues in St Andrews, Andrea and Reuben are working
on precisely this Andrea is for example
taking cores from the forum borarium in
Rome and Reuben is using a combination
of long term landscape change and literary
resources from the classical and later
period, Hellenistic period in order to be
able to put this evidence together and
tell us something about climate change
in terms of practicality, what can I
guarantee tell us well archaeology is
really the study of society over a long
period of time and what we're looking at
is how society changes or continues over
that period of time and what we can
really see in the archaeological record
is how people adapt to change and so
with things like environmental change
which we can see in the record so for
example we can see when there's been
lots and lots of crop failures or we can
see coastal erosion we can see when
there's been disease as well in the
archaeological record what we can then
tell afterwards is how people adapt to
these new circumstances so the value of
archaeology really is in the ability to
see the kind of long event happening and
to see how people adapt over time to the
various different changes that they have
to face as a result of environmental
stresses and so that's where we get the
help because you know when we're living
the climate change it's not so easy to
take ourselves out of it and see these
big differences that are taking place
I hope you enjoyed these answers. If you'd
like to know more about archaeology do
you get in touch because we could always
try and arrange a school visit. Next week
we'll be answering your questions about
finding bombs with bees and plastic if
you haven't already sent us
your questions about finding bombs with
bees and plastic email here or you can
put them in the comments below
by Friday 22nd of May thanks for
watching
 
