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Material artifacts are the means humans use to solve the problems of survival. We make tools geared to dealing with the climate, food sources, and other aspects of the environments in which we live. Material artifacts are also related to our cultural environments. The specific form of an artifact may be more connected to the cultural system than to the natural world. Artifacts have, in other words, meanings and, thus, styles. And many artifacts, such as the tombstones discussed in the beginning of the chapter, serve the purpose of expressing a society's cultural ideas, ideals, and attitudes. These connections are used by archaeologists to interpret the remains of past societies and cultural systems and to reconstruct those societies and systems. These endeavors, of course, aid anthropology as a whole in answering the broad questions we ask about our species and its behavior. Although our image of archaeology usually centers on the recovery of ancient artifacts, the heart of the data-collection phase of this field is record keeping. Without a context for the raw data it would be impossible to see the relationships between artifacts and thus impossible to achieve the real goals of the field. So archaeologists use a precise set of techniques to locate, recover, record, date, and preserve the material remains of ancient lifeways. The archaeological record of human prehistory is rich and complex. But by looking, even briefly, at some of the high points, we can see that the record tells a story of our species' increasing ability to imagine ways to aid survival and to implement those ideas by mastering technical skills to produce a rich and vast array of material artifacts. |