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The Backward-Looking Curiosity: A Glance at Archaeology in the Year of Our Lord 1989

Early on the morning of 21 July A.D. 365, a terrible earthquake struck Cyprus. Huge tidal waves devastated neighboring coasts. The port of Kourion on the southwestern shore collapsed under several feet of rock and dust. Sixteen centuries later archaeologists chronicled the last terrible moments of Kourion, the death throes of a man frantically trying to protect his wife in bed, a young girl quieting a restless mule in a nearby courtyard. In pre-Columbian times, Peruvian farmers divided their highland fields into patterns of alternating canals and ridges. The canals insured a steady supply of water, and the nitrogen-rich sediment that gathers in them provided fertilizers for the crops. This simple, low-tech agricultural system was discontinued in Colonial times. Now archaeologists have helped reintroduce this highly effective farming system to land-poor peasants-with remarkable success. Modern archaeology is a truly extraordinary enterprise, an enterprise that covers the entire spectrum of human experience. We dissect inconspicuous scatters of stone tools and animal bones left by our earliest ancestors in East Africa more than 2.5 million years ago. We search for the first inhabitants of the Americas more than 15,000 years ago, a task that has been likened to a quest for a "needle in a haystack, and a frozen one at that." Early farming villages in the Near East and China, Stonehenge, Anasazi Pueblos, Sumerian irrigation systems, Maya glyphs, and Inca road systems-all are grist to the prehistoric archaeologist's mill. We study Classical settlement patterns, investigate Mediaeval English towns, excavate 19th-century missions in the Southwest, dissect ancient shipwrecks for the clues they give us about ancient life on land. There are archaeologists studying modern city garbage and doing fieldwork among living hunting and farming societies-to understand and interpret the past better. It is rumored that California archaeologists are about to excavate the collapsed Egyptian temple from Cecil B. de Mille's movie The Ten Commandments, made in 1921! Tonight we celebrate archaeology in all its great excitement and variety, in all its intellectually challenging forms. There is a great deal to celebrate, for the treasure hunt of yesteryear has become a fully fledged academic discipline of great complexity and openended potential. The emergence of scientific archaeology, and the discovery of the prehistoric past, is one of the greatest intellectual triumphs of the past century. The intellectual impact of archaeology has been equivalent to that of Darwin's Origin of Species. Staggering difficulties confront us-public incomprehension, wholesale destruction of archaeological sites, and rapid erosion of the priceless archives of the past. But we can still look around us with profound satisfaction. Archaeology has come of age. Thanks to a battery of new, hi-tech methods and fresh bodies of archaeological theory, we can reconstruct and interpret ancient human behavior in staggering detail. Archaeologists are no longer perceived as pith-helmeted eccentrics digging in the shadows of mysterious pyramids. We are thought of as serious scholars, scientists, and humanists. It has become a truism to say that archaeology is a primary way of understanding human behavior in the past, present, and perhaps even in the future.