ABSTRACT
Stuart Piggott, an eminent British prehistorian of the 1950s, once described archaeology as the science of garbage. He was, of course, perfectly correct—up to a point. We archaeologists do indeed spend much of our time dissecting the discards of ancient human behavior, sometimes almost to the point of trivial obsession. We’re masters of arcane scientific methods that can date a single wheat grain, trace the life histories of Bronze Age archers, and conjure up images of the long-vanished hinterland of Angkor Wat in Cambodia using technology from space. All this seemingly miraculous archaeological detective work may dazzle the casual onlooker and has indeed revolutionized our understanding of early humanity. But archaeology is far more than trash heaps and buried cities. It is the only historical discipline that is completely multidisciplinary and that encompasses the humanities, the sciences, and social sciences. Even more important, it is unique in that it studies changing human behavior over immensely long periods of time, through three million years—the human past in its entirety (Kelly, 2016). Archaeology is big history and always has been, concerned with long- and short-term biological and cultural evolution, with emerging human diversity, and with human history on both a global and local scale.
