♪♪ got questions, we got the answers, frequently asked♪♪
hello all welcome to another episode of frequently asked a series created by hopewell culture
national historical park aimed at answering a lot of the frequently heard questions we
get as well as addressing some of the common misconceptions that we see about archaeology
the peoples of the hopewell culture and about our park in general my name is benjamin cross and i'm
an archaeological technician here at the park the last episode we saw that archaeology is the study
of past human cultures but how we got to where we are as a discipline is actually what we're going
to be covering in the next couple minutes while archaeology as a discipline is still
relatively young at only about 100 to 150 years old people have always been interested in the
stuff left behind by previous groups records indicate that as far back as the babylonians
they were trying to investigate the past to understand where they had come from moving forward
quite a bit though we can really first trace archaeology's infancy to the european renaissance
many wealthy europeans wanted cool artifacts to from around the world to show off in what they
call their cabinet of curiosity which you can see a drawing of on the right
as this drawing shows wealthy europeans would set up rooms full of cabinets holding artifacts
that they'd collected however like an early museum these rooms were more to show off
collections than for educational purposes like we do today at our museum furthermore the way that
these artifacts were obtained was mostly through what we call looting today an act of destroying
the archaeological record just to get items that look cool without attempting to answer specific
questions about the past as your purpose now jumping forward a couple hundred years
and across the pond in the united states the earliest archaeological explorations
took place involving the earth and mounds found across the midwest and the southeastern united
states much like those protected here at hopewell culture national historical park
in fact former u.s president thomas jefferson as you see here is often considered the father
of american archaeology because he directed one of the earliest scientific-ish excavations
in north america however we must be clear that it was actually enslaved people that jefferson
owned who should truly be credited as the first archaeological field technicians in the united
states however the reason that jefferson decided to investigate the earth and mounds of north
america was because of this thing going around at his time called the mound builder problem
many folks at the time and some with very negative mindsets believed that the ancestors of native
americans or native peoples could never have built these impressive mounts instead they proposed that
a different group of peoples that they called the mound builders had built them and had since
disappeared in fact the very first investigations of the newly formed smithsonian and the american
bureau of ethnology in the 1800s was to figure out who built these earthenbounds and needless to say
after extensive investigations the answer was the one that was there the whole time in fact the same
result that thomas jefferson had kind of stumbled into it was that the ancestors of modern native
american tribes had built the mounds and we will be most definitely covering this in more detail in
a future frequently asked however by the early 1900s archaeology was truly starting to become
more of a concrete discipline with more cohesion as to how to do it in particular
in places such as the american southwest such as at chaco culture national historical
park archaeologists were starting to gradually find some of the best methods to use to better
understand when things happened in the past such as they figured out ways to roughly date sites
using pottery the best field methods to stay organized and how to use historical
and ethnographic sources to better explain and inform what they may be finding out in the field
finally we can truly say that archaeology is a discipline stabilized by the 1940s and 1950s
in particular thanks to the gi bill as this ad from the for the gi bill shows it helped many
returning veterans go to college this wave of archaeologists were able to learn the methods
and the techniques of those first university trained archaeologists who are now the professors
furthermore throughout the 1950s and the 1960s some theoretical changes helped push the
discipline beyond merely describing when things happened in the past but trying to understand why
and how the past happened the way that it did more recently though archaeologists have tried to do it
and be better in recognizing the damage that our discipline has done in the past so that we can be
better in the future the earliest archaeologists were often no more better than looters taking
important cultural items from native groups just to put into cabinets of curiosities or even
sometimes the earliest museums it is through this that we have unfortunately earned some of those
misconceptions of treasure hunting or that view of the roguish archaeologists like indiana jones
that we talked about last episode that we're now still trying to break furthermore we recognize
that we must be better at listening to and including as many voices as possible archaeology
shouldn't just look or sound one way it should look and sound just as beautifully diverse as
the cultural world around us that we are trying to understand in both the past and the present
so that is the end of this episode of frequently asked thank you for joining me please make sure to
comment on any of our social media sites and posts with the hashtag frequentlyasktoku or hashtag
frequentlyaskedhocu if you have any questions that you would like addressed in future episodes
as always stay safe stay healthy and i can't wait to see you at hopewell culture
national historical park in the near future got
♪♪ got questions, we got the answers, frequently asked♪♪