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♪♪ Got questions? We got the answers. Frequently asked...with ranger Ben.♪♪
hello all welcome to frequently asked a new video series here at hopewell culture
national historical park that is going to try to address some of the frequently asked questions
as well as some of the misconceptions that we hear at the park now my name is benjamin cross
and i'm an archaeological technician here at hopewell culture national historical park and i'm super
excited to be on this journey with you and trying to discover more about the past as well as what we
can learn about our present as well now hopewell culture national historical park is dedicated
to protecting archaeological sites in the chillicothe ohio area and i am an archaeologist
however whenever i tell people it what it is that i do for a living there are a lot of ideas that i
hear regarding what people think archaeologists do now one of the biggest misconceptions is that
archaeologists study dinosaurs that would actually be paleontology while we do have some similarities
including excavation for example paleontologists studied dinosaur bones such as you see on the
screen here archaeologists on the other hand study the human past our goal is to understand
how humans behaved in the past and why they did things in the past how they did them
however we obviously can't see what these people are doing or why they're doing it at least not
until we invent a time machine and until we can marty mcfly ourselves back into the past
archaeologists are stuck with just studying things that humans have left behind
and anything that is left behind by past cultures helps us better piece together what happened at
the past much like a detective at a crime scene the more context clues the clear things might get
about the archaeological site including at mound city the burial site that our
visitor center sits at or hopeton earthworks which you can see a map of right behind me
the basically by studying all of the things in the past and trying to piece them together
we can try to figure out what happened in the past and hopefully a little bit as to the why
now another common misconception archaeologists here is about indiana jones now our whip cracking
fedora wearing friend here is probably the most famous example of an archaeologist that the
public sees and most archaeologists will even tell you that indiana jones was probably their first
exposure to the field as a discipline however indy isn't necessarily a great archaeologist what with
all the destruction he causes escaping his foes or the artifacts that he snatches out of their
context to put into museums and going along with the indiana view of archaeology is the concept of
treasure hunting a lot of movies and tv shows that deal with archaeology unfortunately show people
trying to find treasures to make them unbelievably wealthy as an archaeologist i will tell you
right off the bat i do not do this to get rich archaeologists ask very specific questions trying
to understand how the past happened and why did people do the things that they did in the past
the wealth we get from this isn't monetary but rather it's through the knowledge that we create
we don't dig to get artifacts to sell we dig to find things to answer our very specific questions
about the past we also must be incredibly careful whenever we we formulate these questions because
every time someone digs at a site they are destroying a part of it that we can never put back
so it is very important to archaeologists that we disturb the archaeological record as little
as possible however archaeologists haven't always been very good stewards of archaeological sites
and some of the misconceptions that we just discussed like treasure hunting and indiana
jones comes from very real people and very real problems from archaeology's dirty past
so in our next episode of frequently asked we'll dig just a little bit deeper and explore some of
that his history of archaeology as a discipline and how we got to where we are today quickly
though i'd like to thank you for joining us in this first episode of frequently asked if you have
any questions that you'd like to see addressed in future videos please reach out to us on any
of our social media pages with the frequently asked hoku or that would be frequently asked
hocu until next time stay safe and stay healthy i look forward to seeing you at hopewell culture
national historical park in the near future. ♪♪ Musical jingle ♪♪
got questions we got the answers frequently asked