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Project >> Glossary Glossary of Archaeological Terms Navigating your way around a dictionary to understand archaeological language can be as challenging as navigating your way around an archaeological site if you are not familiar with the terminology used. The range of people who bring their specialist skills to a project is also considerable, and we have set up this page to give you a brief introduction to the kind of people you might expect to meet at Priniatikos Pyrgos, or many other excavations. In brief, at an archaeological site you will find fieldworkers conducting excavation in trenches . Part of their work includes preservation by record which includes filling out context sheets, drawing plans or sections and taking photographs as they record stratigraphy, architecture and other contexts. We also practice preservation in situ which requires conservation. Finds from the site are brought to our apotheke / post-excavation laboratory where specialists conduct their initial reading of material. We also take samples which include environmental material and representative components of some materials (e.g. plaster). The range of specialisms we employ are ceramic, osteology, plaster, zoo-archaeological, metal, geoarchaeological, GIS, lithics, glass and special finds. We also have a post-excavation team that manage our archive including records, drawings and photographs of finds as well as the archive generated from fieldwork. Archaeological Site Everywhere a human being has once walked is an archaeological site. Sometimes, it can even be a place where people never intentionally visited, such as a ship wreck! Your house is one, your old school is one, even your car is potentially one! The thing that draws an archaeologist to a particular archaeological site is typically a research question, something they want to know more about that particular place. Most of the time, this is because the events that took place there were considered to have potential to reveal new insights into the lives of people in times past. Other times, the questions may relate to saving all traces of past activities from destruction during infrastructural development. An archaeological site can range in size from a tiny rubbish pit to a city the size of New York. Back to top Fieldworkers Fieldworkers are the archaeologists who work at an archaeological site, digging and recording the archaeology. Excavation is a highly skilled profession and a good excavator must master a host of practical and recording skills which takes many years of on the job training. These are things which simply cannot be taught in the classroom, and a fieldschool is typically the best introduction to this exciting element of the archaeological process. Back to top Excavation Archaeological excavation is the methodical removal of soil and other materials that have built up through a series of events. By marking the difference between each of these events, we can trace the sequence of development at a specific location. This is usually quite the opposite of the process of building something so that excavating a house would first find collapsed roof material, then wall collapse beneath which they may find plaster from the walls, then material that lay on the floor, then the floor and further still down to the laying of the floor and foundations of the walls. The strategy for the recovery of excavation data at Priniatikos Pyrgos places strong emphasis on a detailed recording system derived from single-context systems used by professional archaeological units. Excavation is not viewed as a process which uncovers features and recovers materials for study by specialists, but rather we view it as a deconstruction of activities which created those features and caused the materials to be deposited. We therefore encourage a vibrant dialogue between our excavation and post-excavation specialists and seek to integrate all aspects of the archaeological process into a dynamic and reflexive system. Back to top Trenches It would be a dream come true for an archaeologist if they could simply strip back the modern world and see all traces of past activity that lay beneath. Several billion modern residents may object, so archaeologists have to focus their activity, and so an ordered system is usually set in place. This system involves areas being defined as trenches, usually with straight edges and right-angled corners defined by a string line. Excavation is focussed within these set limits. A trench can range from small test pits to large areas incorporating several buildings. At Priniatikos Pyrgos, they are usually between 25 and 125 square metres and are established and aligned in relation to standing architecture when possible. Back to top Preservation by record The concept behind excavation being a method of preservation is that an exact record of the site can be made which is tantamount to the site being preserved. Excavation itself brings about the destruction of a site and a major part of the excavation is recording what is present. In simplistic terms; the site is excavated using hand tools and recorded by scale drawings, photographs and written descriptions. Excavation itself is a highly complex and skilled business Back to top Context Sheets Preformatted sheets are used to record as accurately as possible all elements that are removed during the excavation process and all other features of archaeological importance. Typically, sheets are used to record cuts, fills / deposits / spreads, built features, burials. This is tabulated through specific boxes requiring data and other boxes that ask for the interpretation and description of the context. Drawings are also made to record the plan view of a context, its relationship to other features and a section through it or elevation of it. Back to top Plans A plan of an archaeological context or contexts is essentially a map view looking down on it from above. The dimensions and character of the feature can be thus graphically illustrated in a more precise and measured manner than is achived by photography alone. Every context should have a plan and these can be put together to create a phase plan of an area depicted all contemporary contexts or a multi-phase plan depicting all contexts of different periods in a given area. Use of digital technology in both the drawing and presentation of plans is becoming increasingly common using electronic distance measurement devices and CAD or GIS software to display and manipulate this spatial data. Back to top Sections By its nature, a section graphically represents various contexts that have built up over time, making it quite literally a slice through time. As contexts become superimposed horizontally, the visibility of the lower ones gradually becomes less or completely obscured. By cutting vertically through a series of contexts, the vertical face that remains shows the depth and character of all superimposed contexts. The best analogy to describe this is cutting a slice through a layer cake, the icing at the top is the lastest context and the base is the earliest. Most of the time!! Back to top Photographs Archaeological photographs are a medium to record and preserve an image of a context or contexts for the visual archive of the site and potentially for publication. All photographs should be taken to a standard that would permit them to be used for public presentation. These can be working shots which demonstrate the archaeological process in action, usually incorporating a range of archaeological contexts. Still photographs are used to record the relationship between contexts and the character of these. They should therefore illustrate clearly the subject of the photograph and as little superfluous material as possible. In particular, all tools and detritus should be taken out of the shot and the area should be thoroughly swept and cleaned. A scale should be placed in the image, and effort should be taken to ensure as little shadow is cast in the shot as possible, particularly from the photographer themself! If a picture is worth a thousand words, then remember that a good photograph can be priceless! Back to top Stratigraphy Stratigraphy refers to geological and archaeological layers that make up an archaeological deposit. Archaeologists use stratigraphy to better understand the processes that created the site. Charles Lyell's Law of Superposition argued that because of natural depositional processes (and in an undeformed natural sequence), soils found deeply buried will have been laid down earlier—and thence be older—than the soils found on top of them. Back to top Architecture In archaeology, architecture is not the design and creation of new buildings, it refers to the built environment, typically walls built from masonry (stone, mudbrick, bricks). Back to top Contexts An archaeological context is quite a broadly inclusive term. It basically refers to any event or process that can be isolated and was self-contained. If a foundation cut is made to build a wall, the action of cutting creates a context - the hole in the ground. The foundation stones are the next contex, then the material that is back-filled in betweent the wall foundation and edge of the hole creates another context. In an ideal case, the archaeologists who are seeking to excavate a site and thus preserve much of it by record (particularly the soils) will detect and record every event at the site as a context. In reality, sites were dynamic when they were in use with things building up and being altered with frequency, so the contexts we discover do not represent everything that happened in the past, they represent what survives on the site and is detectable by archaeologists. Back to top Preservation in Situ If a site can be understood sufficiently without intrusive work, it is possible to ensure virtually 100% preservation in situ. This is particularly the case in artefact, environmental or topographic surveys. Archaeological excavation, however, is by its nature a destructive process because we physically remove the materials that we use to understand the character and sequences of events on the site. The objective of a project should always be only to remove those contexts that prove informative in so-doing and to preserve as much as possible, particularly built features such as walls, in their original location. Many of the more informative cultural layers are made of non-consolidated soils, and usually these will be removed during excavation. The bias towards preservation in situ therefore tends towards the structures or particularly important deposits and the majority of the "archaeology" is removed by the excavators. Back to top Conservation Those elements of a site that are preserved in situ have been removed from the stable environment that led to their preservation for perhaps thousands of years. Walls, for example, long supported by layers of soil are once again expected to support themselves, though crumbling, tumbling and general disturbance over time may have significantly weakened them. Specialist conservators can stabilise most archaeological features at a site like Priniatikos Pyrgos on the site and ensure that they can remain exposed for future study or public display. Some elements of the site, particularly portable objects such as pots or glasses or knives must be brought to a laboratory where they can be mechanically and chemically treated to ensure they are stabilised. Conservation is therefore the process that ensures the stabilisation and preservation of materials once they have been exposed during excavation. Back to top Finds Archaeological finds is a broadly inclusive term that includes basically all portable objects, be they a tiny sherd of pottery, a bead or a statue. Through stratigraphic analysis of hundreds of archaeological sites in the last century and more, it is possible to date most archaeological finds within very close parameters. In turn, this allows finds to date the stratigraphic layers they are found in on new archaeological sites. In general, the latest possible find in an archaeological context is the one that dates it. Back to top Post-excavation When most people think of archaeology, it is the exciting work in the field digging holes and finding long lost treasures. In reality most of the things we find on site are so covered in dirt they need to be cleaned before they can reveal their story. Post-excavation as the name implies, is the element of an archaeological project that incorporates all aspects of the work outside of the field, including cleaning all finds but also analysing records and drawings from the site, studying finds and samples from the site, archiving records, drawing finds, creating databases graphically illustrating the site, writing reports and even ultimately, making websites such as this! You can see, that post-excavation takes a lot more time and range of skilled participants than the excavation in itself, and so a responsible project is one that puts as much care into organising this work as they do the more romantic side out in the field. Remember, for every one year spent digging, you should expect to spend 1 to 3 years doing post-ex (and sometimes even more!). Back to top Specialists A specialist is typically an archaeologist or scientist with one or more vocational specialisms within archaeology, some of those contributing to our team are listed below. The role of the specialist is often to give more specific meaning to materials recovered in the field and to enrich the narrative created so that, between the field and lab, we can tell the entire biography of objects, environmental remains or even soils from their creation, through their use, their interment, how they were affected in the ground and eventually their recovery and possibly first aid treatment to stabilise them. These stories can be anything from charting the growth and death of an animal, how they were butchered and even how and where they were cooked and eaten to more specialised studies in the microscopic elements of how a floor was formed! When all of this work is brought together it allows our team to create a synthetic history of the real-life context of ‘things’ and write exciting narratives about the past peoples of Priniatikos Pyrgos. Back to top Reading finds How can you read a find if it has no writing?!? Well, theoretical archaeology aside, in practical terms reading a find simply involves a specialist examining it and recording its precise character and date. For example, on a pottery sherd it is possible to tell from the fabric if it was used for storing things, cooking them or serving them on a table. The shape of the object can sometimes be determined if enough survives, and we can use this to refine its function more (was it a cup or a plate?) and from the precise element of its design, we can date the object in most cases. Back to top Samples What did people eat in the past? If we don't have texts that tell us these details, we can learn sometimes from finds such as querns that were used to prepare flour for bread. Samples can be used to reveal details of past diet, environmental conditions and even what specific places were used for. How? In the field, all of these things leave traces in the soil, ranging from actual seeds to chemical trace elements. A sample range of this soil is kept, usually just called a "sample", hence the name, and this is refined in post-excavation to recover elements contained within the soil that would be invisible to an archaeologist in the field. These near-invisible items can include tiny beads, debitage from stone tool manufacture, very small sherds of pottery or any such tiny object. Back to top Environmental material The seeds, charcoal, fishbones or basically any object that was a component of a living organism can be called environental material. This is recovered from samples typically through wet-sieving. In this process, the soil is put in a specially constructed machine which runs water through it. Heavy objects sink (like those listed above) while environmental samples tend to float to the top, and are then recovered in a sieve and examined under a microscope. These are instrumental in understanding about the foods people used, how they interacted with their environment or even how the environment imposed on them! Back to top Representative Sample Working on an archaeological site, it is not surprising that sometimes so many examples of a material are found that it may not be possible to keep all of them. For example, if excavating a city that was once built of mudbrick, it would not be practical to keep all of this mudbrick, as you would need a city sized storage area! A representative sample is generally randomly selected, though sometimes it is hand-picked by specialists. This material contains data that will be by and large replicated throughout the rest of the material of the same type, and so it can tell a representative story of that material - for example, the typical ingredients used in lime plaster. Back to top   Ceramic For the archaeologist, ceramics are most typically pottery. However, ceramic refers to any object that is made of clay that has been "ceramicised" by great heat (above 800 degrees celcius typically), causing a chemical transformation in the material so that it bonds together and cannot be broken back down into its original constituent parts. Examples of ceramics apart from pottery include moulds for casting metal objects, statuettes or models, architectural decoration, roof or floor tiles and so on. Back to top Osteology This is typically related to the study of human bones. The skeleton tells a lot about the life and death of a person. During their life, injuries such as broken bones are amongst the most obvious biographical details, but also things such as tooth enamel or thickness of bones or even their shape can tell things about the way they led their life, including the foods they ate. In death, the skeleton retains evidence of the age and character of their death in many cases. The fusing of bones that takes place over a person's life is indicative of their age at death for young people, and certain elements can roughly age people into phases of later life. The sex of the person can usually be told, and in many cases the actual cause of death, be it malnutrition, disease or violence. Back to top Plaster Plaster and mortars have been in use in various forms since prehistory. Plasters can be made of simple mud, though they are more typically the product of man-made substances, chief of which is lime. Lime is made by super-heating limestones, marbles or shells which converts them to a white powdery substance. This is mixed with other elements to produce plaster for walls, which was often then painted. When lime is mixed with coarser materials such as sand or gravel, it can be used to bind together stones in wall as a mortar. Back to top Zoo-archaeology As with human osteology, zoo-archaeology looks at the skeletons of animals and can tell us a similar range of data. Other things that can be determined are the age and type of slaughter, how the animal was butchered and to what end were its bones put - some may be burnt as offerings to the gods while others may end up as part of a barbeque and others still may be used as a resource for making bone tools or ornaments. Back to top Metal Metals have been long used to divide up the great ages of man, the Stone Age when it was rare, the Bronze Age when it became widespread and the Iron Age where it became an everyday resource. By studying metal objects, we can tell where the metal and / or the object itself came from. In the case of tools, we can tell the type of work undertaken at a site and in the case of jewellery, we can tell things about the status of people who lived, worked or died there. As with the modern world, in many stages of our past metals were used for a great many tasks, and so they have potential to reveal an equally rich vista of past lives. Back to top Geoarchaeology Geoarchaeology is a multi disciplinary approach rather than a discipline and uses the techniques and subject matter of geography, geology and other Earth sciences to examine topics which inform archaeological knowledge and thought Back to top GIS A geographic information system (GIS), or geographical information system, is any system that captures, stores, analyzes, manages, and presents data that are linked to location. In the simplest terms, GIS is the merging of cartography and database technology Back to top Lithics Stone tools were used for tens of thousands of years by mankind, though in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages, they became more refined and were used for a greater range of object forms. They fall into two many categories, ground stone and chipped stone tools. The former types are often rounded cobbles used for grinding objects, but the term covers many other forms and functions of these tools. Chipped stone tools generally used fine vitreous or siliceous rocks such as flint, obsidian or chert. These stones fracture like glass and through controlled 'knapping' they can be shaped to make very sharp knives, arrowheads, awls, razors, axes and many other objects. Back to top Glass Glass was first invented in the Bronze Age in a form known as faience. This was not transparent and was made of different coloured pastes. Transparent glass as we know it today became increasingly popular in Hellenistic times, though still an expensive commodity, and in Roman and Byzantine times it became more common still. As with pottery, the shape and composition of glass tells much about the age and function of an object. Back to top Special Finds A Special Find in archaeology does not need to be particularly special or exciting. It is used to differentiate what we might consider individualistic items such as loom weights or metal objects from bulk objects such as pottery. Typically a special find is given a catalogue number and they will be recorded and archived individually, whereas bulk finds all go in the same archive section (usually in bags). Back to top Archive The site archive is the entire collection of documents, objects and images from a project. It is becoming increasingly common practice to make a digital archive, which duplicates (and occasionally replaces) paper archives. When the fieldwork element of a project is completed and publication has been completed, the archive is typically the physical remains of a large percentage of what remains of the site. The rest was removed by the archaeologists! Most people will never want to see the archive, the end product of an excavation is the report that people will most certainly want to see. However, as times and practices change this report may need revision and the interpretations may need to change, and this can only be achieved if the archive is correctly structured and maintained. Back to top Records These are not black plastic disks that make music. Records on a dig relate to a textual representation of physical objects. These include the context sheets from the fieldwork, the notes of specialists looking at objects in post-excavation and all documents generated during a project. Back to top Drawings In the field, illustrations of the site are called plans. Drawings are the schematic representation of objects compiled during post-excavation. Drawings require a degree of interpretation by the illustrator, and in this process they gain much of their worth. A phototgraph can visually represent an object, but a drawing can draw attention to specific details and it can better attempt to represent 3-D elements of interest. A drawing should not be an artistic impression or facimile of an object, it is intended to be a schematic representation that brings out specific points of interest. Back to top Find photography As with drawing, photography is intended to provide a graphic record of finds and often samples (e.g. bone) from a site. As the original object will rarely be available for interested parties to examine, a photography should be as clear and illustrative as possible. With advances in 3-D scanning, it is becoming increasingly possible to take photography one step further and couple it with these scans to produce a digital representation of the object that can be manipulated and viewed on a computer screen. Back to top Fieldwork The final term in this glossary is fieldwork as sometimes this is taken to mean digging. Fieldwork really covers all aspects of archaeology that take place outside the normal working environment. For example, surveys count as fieldwork as do student projects seeking out known monuments or photographing landscapes from a plane. The word is as diverse as the discipline and it has as many practical applications. Back to top FEATURES Current News: Support funding provided for sixth consecutive year by the Institute of Aegean Prehistory. Fieldwork dates set as July 12th to August 22nd (pending official permit). High demand fills field school for third consecutive year. Bronze Age 1A levels to be targeted in 2010. 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