Well, I thought we were here because of a number of previous scholars
had studied some of the past we either, as the Chinese have divided it
into, "chance encounters" or "planned encounters" with the past,
primarily the "happenstance" type of finding, i.e., construction,
destruction, erosion, etc., an unintended "revealing" archaeology
predominating, the actual "planned" discovery archaeology occurring
much less.
Because prior studies by, for example, French sociologist Emile
Durkheim's student Fustel de Coulange who studied and published "The
Ancient City" read in social anthropology, we could perhaps connect
the scholarly with the encountered either by design, i.e., a planned
excavation, or "applied archaeology" to the remains of the past in the
way of "progress".
Charles Redman, Ph.D., had an interesting thesis however which I think
is interesting. Take the area of "southwest Asia" where the "cradle of
civilization" or "fertile crescent" (the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers
in Iraq) is. If we plan to dig up a city, what would we learn? We
would have a nice collection of artifacts from the "tell" or mound
(often under a modern settlement) and in the case of Nuzi, near Kirkuk
and the Mosul oil fields, a collection of skeletons from a cemetery,
excavated by Starr of Harvard University in the 1930's yielding one
the more important collections of clay tablets deciphered from the
region, toy chariots included, but have knowledge of the actual
chronology of settlement that connected it to other places.
He recommended more regional studies, collecting surface ceramic
sherds from many many sites to first establish a chronology of
abandonment of sites I think, then perhaps a design for excavation to
add to the region's history. I'm not sure if that is being done,
there's a war on, which is old news for that area, and would require a
number of countries cooperating, which is difficult today.
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