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Hi, welcome to week 2 office hours. So, in week 2 we'll be talking about what is anthropology,
and what is archaeology, and how we define those things. In other countries, like England
archaeology is not a subfield of anthropology, but rather is a subfield of history or in
some cases it may be a subfield of something like the study of ancient civilizations. But,
for our purposes, archaeology is a subfield of anthropology. We're also going to be talking
about some basic terms that you need to know that archaeologists really use. And the first
term is artifact. An artifact is just something that is humanly made or modified that you
can pick up and transport (or drink out of) from place to place. So that's an artifact.
The next term that you need to know is called a feature. a feature, unlike an artifact,
is not easily moved from place to place. examples might be post holes or hearths. For our purposes,
something like this desk might be considered a feature. I can easily pick it up and move
it from here to say Smith's. Archaeologists often use this term, kind of confusing, but
it's a term that encompasses artifacts and features as well as ecofacts, which we'll
also be reading about this week. This term is "material culture". Material culture just
means stuff. An archaelogist studies material culture to learn about events that happened
in the past. they can't study past behavior directly, of course, they have to use the
stuff to make inferences about what happened. And then finally, a site, everyone knows this
term, right? It's just a collection of artifacts, features, and ecofacts and perhaps human remains,
which we'll also be talking about this week. We'll also be discussing the beginnings of
archaeology. People have always been interested in old stuff. So, that's not new. What is
kind of new is looking at old stuff systematically and scientifically in order to make inferences
about the past. So, maybe around 1700s or the 1800s people still thought of these actual
artifacts as being made by elves and fairies and unicorns and other mythical creatures.
And it wasn't until the mid-1800s that people realized, "Hey, people are still using these
stone tools or things like them today. And so maybe these tools that we're seeing in
the ground and on the ground are actually made by people and not by elves. And that
really began the scientific discipline that we call archaeology today. It's not a perfect
discipline, in terms of what we know, but we do try to look things as systematically
as possible.