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Chapter 6: Finding Cultural Materials

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Mudbrick in a cut The most common way that archaeologists find cultural materials and archaeological sites is by doing an archaeological survey. Usually, this consists of a team of people who are evenly spaced apart, for example, about 5 meters (ca 15 feet) apart. The team walks in a set direction, for instance, due north, and examines the surface of the ground for artifacts and architecture. In some cases, we find sites on these surveys by looking at "cuts" in the ground, such as those made when roadways are excavated into hillsides or where rivers or streams have downcut to form river banks. Such cuts can show traces of sites through things like plastered house floors or sections of stone walls. Most often, however, these cuts simply expose stone artifacts and animal bones which then erode out of the cut and downslope onto the modern ground surface, where they can be easily seen.

Some archaeological materials, especially stone tools, have lain on the ground surface for thousands of years because they are in regions of the world where they have never become buried, such as a stony desert. A surface dig in Egypt These types of sites are highly visible because there is not any vegetation to cover them. Archaeologists also benefit from information about the location of sites from land owners whose property has archaeological sites. In the Paleolithic, such as at Pech IV, we do not find architecture and must locate our sites on the basis of artifacts that are either eroding from the sites or are visible on the surface of the ground, or from information from land owners.


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