Presidio Archaeology Lab

Students who participate in our field trip program, Excavate History, have lots of questions about archaeology. After each class visit, Eric and Liz, two archaeologists who work here at the Presidio, select one question posed by a student and post an answer here on our blog.

 If you have a question that you would like to ask Eric or Liz, you can send an email to Presidio.Archaeology@yahoo.com They might just post an answer to your question on our blog!

Do all of you study the same things?

Fourth Grader in Ms. Rothaus’ Class at Clarendon Elementary

April 18, 2008

Although we are all students of the past, archaeologists study many different things. We work in many different places all over the world looking at different cultures. Sometimes these sites are far from our homes, and sometimes they are literally right in our backyards! We also study different times in the past. Archaeologists at the Presidio study the fairly recent past - only about 100 to 300 years ago. Other archaeologists study sites that might be around 1,000, almost 10,000, even several hundred thousand years old!

But even archaeologists working on the same site might have very different interests. Sometimes we’ve just interested in different questions about the past. For example, at the Presidio one person might be interested in the experience of women at the Presidio during the Civil War, whereas someone else might be interested in the interactions of Native Californians and Spanish colonists. Other times, we have different specialties - that is, different things we study or different tasks we’re responsible for. This can be different types of artifacts - ceramics, animal bones (a field called zooarchaeology), and ancient plants (a field called archeaobotany), to name a few. But it might be mapping, photography, excavation, lab work, writing, or interpretation.

Do archaeologists keep the things they find?

Fourth Grader in Ms. Devine’s Class at St. Thomas the Apostle

April 11, 2008

Excavated artifacts are almost always kept - but not necessarily by the archaeologists themselves! Artifacts belong to the owner of the land they came from - in our case at the Presidio, the owner is the federal government of the United States of America. Government-owned artifacts have to be kept safe in special buildings called curation facilities or repositories.These places have staff members trained to protect artifacts so that they are accessible to everyone, both now and in the future. That means not only archaeologists and other researchers, but members of the public, too - anyone from descendants of the people who lived at a site to school kids learning about the history of a place! Because artifacts are curated (that is, kept in these repositories), it means people get to see them in person or in displays even long after an excavation has ended. Also, scientists in the future could look at the same artifacts we analyze today and ask different questions of them, make different observations, use new technologies to make discoveries, and develop new theories and stories about the people who lived at places like El Presidio de San Francisco!