Archeological record

The archaeological record is the body of physical (not written) evidence about the past. It is one of the core concepts in archaeology, the academic discipline concerned with documenting and interpreting the archaeological record.Archaeological theory is used to interpret the archaeological record for a better understanding of human cultures. The archaeological record can consist of the earliest ancient findings as well as contemporary artifacts. Human activity has had a large impact on the archaeological record. Destructive human processes, such as agriculture and land development, may damage or destroy potential archaeological sites. Other threats to the archaeological record include natural phenomena and scavenging. Archaeology can be a destructive science for the finite resources of the archaeological record are lost to excavation. Therefore archaeologists limit the amount of excavation that they do at each site and keep meticulous records of what is found. The archaeological record is the record of human history, of why civilizations prosper or fail and why cultures change and grow. It is the story of the world that humans have created.

Scholars have frequently used textual analogies such as 'record', 'source' and 'archive' to refer to material evidence of the past since at least the 19th century. The term 'archaeological record' probably originated this way, possibly via parallel concepts in geology (geologic record) or palaeontology (fossil record). The term was used regularly by V. Gordon Childe in the 1950s, and seems to have entered common parlance thereafter.

In the first critical review of the concept, philosopher Linda Patrik found that by the 1980s archaeologists conceptualised the term in at least five different ways:

Patrik argued that the first three definitions reflected a "physical model" of archaeological evidence, where it is seen as the direct result of physical processes that operated in the past (like the fossil record); in contrast, definitions four and five follow a "textual model", where the archaeological record is seen as encoding cultural information about the past (like historical texts). She highlighted the extent to which archaeologists' understanding of what constituted 'the archaeological record' was dependent on broader currents in archaeological theory, namely, that processual archaeologists were likely to subscribe to a physical model and postprocessual archaeologists a textual model.

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