okay hey guys what's up welcome to
Dig it with Raven. I'm Raven, and today
we're going to talk about archaeology
101. A lot of people think
archaeology is actually palaeontology.
No, we are not Ross from friends. Though we
identify with him very very much.
He's just so cute! My first
Archaeology 101 class, the professor asked a very
simple question: "Who here thinks that
we're talking about dinosaurs?" Most of
them yes, literally half the class was
shocked they weren't going to talk about
the t-rex or watched Jurassic Park. "Well
if you don't dig up dinos, are you like
Indiana Jones? Wrong. I wish! So Indiana
Jones is the main reason that most of
us born after 1970 decided to become and archaeologist,
it's not really that realistic about
what we do.  No, we don't all get to wear
those amazing hats, though we want to. If you
find some who does, take the for a beer
because you know that they've actually
done some real cool stuff. To get
educational on you, the Oxford Dictionary
describes archaeology as the study of
human history and prehistory through the
excavation of sites and the analysis of
artifacts and other physical remains. That
was a mouthful. Take a definition, take it, take it and
throw it away! But not actually. It was
pretty much true, but it just sounds so boring! You
can't describe archaeology in such a scientific way!
(even though it is a science). Archeology is literally the most human thing that you can do in the world.
Archaeologists dig up
essentially what people leave behind.
So, you could go for a walk in the forest
one day and start a fire, cook, leave it
you know, spend maximum an hour there
and that becomes an archaeological site.
Hundreds and thousands of years from now
people are going to be digging through
the dirt, looking at what you ate for
lunch that day and thinking that it is
one of the most important things that
they can be doing right now. All of that
evidence all of that fire the food
evidence, you sitting there that all
leaves a mark on the earth. And it stays there for crazy
amounts of time people, I'm talking
hundreds of thousands of years. If you drop this pen on the ground
and it happened to get
covered by a rock or it fell in to a body of
water... like ten thousand years now
someone's going to pick up my pen, it's
going to become an artifact and it's
going to be worth tens of thousands of
dollars. This one dollar pen is therefore
going to turn into priceless cultural
artifact from the Year 2016. *My Precious!*
Just like that evil Frenchman in the
Lost Ark said. He had a great hat to!
Archeology requirement number
one: have to look good in hats! Archeology
is literally looking through people's
garbage. Or "material culture" as the
professional say.
That's the job, digging through trash
trying to figure out what these people
were doing with their lives back then. Sometimes we literally dig in garbage pits.
We're glorified garbage pickers everybody
don't try to argue with me. But Raven, what about
huge sites? The tombs the palaces the pyramids?!
yeah yeah I know
It's not a garbage heap but think about it,
these are all places that people have
left behind. Like from tombs and
gravestones and necropoli, these are
things which were which were built to
commemorate a person's life. All the
other areas are places people left
behind
whether they chose to or not. You
literally dig up the things
people could not take with them. Yes you get a 
valuable item every so often but those
have usually turned up the tombs or have
been deemed so important so precious that
they've been passed down from generation to
generation until they've made their way
into a museum today where we can all Ooh an Ahh. But here's what they don't tell
you about archaeology: 80% of what you're
going to find is pottery. BORING!
Is what I first said when I had to start
studying it. But guys, it's so addicting
you have no idea. Why pottery you ask? I'm going to save most of this for another post,
but it's because it lasts. Cooking pots, lamps, bowls, plates, cups, mugs, so many things
are made out of clay and when it broke
it was worthless
Don't need this anymore! The style and
depth of complexity and what it was made
out of can tell us so much about a site
about the people about how advanced
they were and when they lived. Also when you
find pottery it's the most surefire way
to determine that you found civilization.
Archaeology allows us to find out where
went and how people lived, what was
important to them everything like that
when we find places like this it's
called a site. A site is a place where
there are physical remains of a past
culture. From there, we should get a
sometimes clear picture of what people
were doing. It's like a Facebook page for a
slice of history. Let me get my fake toga on here for a moment
For example: Roman
Forum likes the Senate. Julius Caesar has
just checked into Pompey's Theater with
Gaius Cassius and Marcus Junius Brutus.
Marcus Junius Brutus has just added 12
photos to the album: Assassination of
Julius Caesar, hashtag winning. Gosh. Now let's talk a
little bit about the different types of Archaeology. 
Each one of these is going to get their
video a video of their own but I just
want to I just want to touch on them
here to give you a brief introduction. Don't
worry
I just want to familiarize you guys with
them so you can choose your sides early.
So Archaeology can be broken down into two
major sections: there's prehistoric
archaeology and historic archaeology.
Prehistoric archaeology deals with all
the sites of human life before the written
word. Once we started marking things down
and literally I mean marks on a tablet, we
hit historical archaeology. Humans as we
know that have been on earth for thousands
and thousands of years so just think about
how much there is to find. In fact
there's more to find with pre historical
archaeology than there is with
historical archaeology because we've
only been writing for very short
amount of time like 99% of our history
is prehistory so we don't even know half
of what we were doing before then. Now
within historical archaeology there's
tons and tons of subsections. Classical
archaeology, Near Eastern archaeology,
biblical archaeology, urban archaeology
North and South American Archaeology or "New World" archaeology as people
call it. Far Eastern archaeology.
Archaeology is even is getting as
science-y as bioarchaeology where people
are studying the plants and all the
organic remains found on the site. Then
there's underwater archaeology. I just showed
bias there. Seriously, I love
all archaeology the same. Underwater
archaeology is you guessed it
archaeology under water. Because humans
hate staying in one place and one day
looked over onto this big blue piece
body of water that they couldn't see to the
other end of and thought "yeah I bet I
could cross that!" I swear there must've been
some drunken dare, however many
thousands of years BC it was. "Hey, you think there's something on
the other side of that big blue thing?"
Only one way to find out! alright that's
it for today folks thanks
thank you for my first vlog, more to come.
If you want a  writeup on what archaeology
is in 500 words or less and some
resources were extra reading, click on the
link below don't forget to subscribe to
my channel to stay up to date with the
latest old news and thanks for watching
stay dirty my friends
