Did you ever wonder
how we get to know about things that happened in the past?

Archaeology is the study of people in the past from physical remains found in the present. Each piece of evidence, no matter how small, can be an important chapter of a story about how people organized their day to day lives, how they developed complex ways of conducting business and politics, about their religious or supernatural beliefs, about how they taught their children, what they ate, or where they slept.

Archaeologists are like detectives, searching for clues to reconstruct and understand the lives of ancient peoples. Each clue they find can bring us all closer to a better understanding of how present cultures developed.


Pick an artifact to find out
more about it 		Clues can be artifacts like stone or bone tools, pottery, or elaborate ornaments.  They can be features, like house mounds, hearths, storage pits and depressions, or burials.

Even the smallest stone flake, or fragment of animal bone can help tell the archaeologist more about how people lived in the past.

Subsistence studies in Archaeology		 Food remains, like animal bones, seeds and other plant remains, and shells can be used to find out about what people were eating. But they can also be used to reconstruct past environments.
Surface features sometimes help to identify the location of old villages. Large mounds found at this site indicate raised central hearths where houses were built. Other mounds are refuse 'middens'. Surface features can also include post holes, pits and depressions, abandoned fire hearths, or scattered cultural debris like stone and bone fragments, metals, ceramics, and glass.

Look in the magnifying glass to see what is below the surface of these mounds
     
      take me back to the museum!

© 1997 Simon Fraser University. Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology