50 Times People And Archaeologists Stumbled Upon Interesting Finds From The Past And Had To Share

Bored Panda got in touch with archeologist Arie Amaya-Akkermans and he was kind enough to answer some of our questions. First and foremost, we were curious to hear what common misconceptions laypeople like myself often have about archeology. 

“First of all, archaeologists do not excavate dinosaur fossils! That's the work of Paleontologists. And secondly, the myth that archaeologists are Indiana Jones types. It is true that some kinds of archaeologists, like physical and zooarchaeologists, deal with bones, but the information they gather from them, although fascinating, doesn't lead to the kind of spectacular answers people in pop culture expect.”

“Bones give a lot of information about a person's (or an animal's) nutrition, the economic history of their societies, their pathologies, circumstances of death, and the environments they lived in, but the question of human origins is still far away from resolution, especially because it cannot be solved -- insofar as our complex origins are composed of many different beginnings, and given that we created ourselves, we have many origins. About Indiana Jones: It is a caricature of colonial archaeology,” he shared with Bored Panda. 

“The cliche of white men with fedora hats and servants. Not all archaeologists are excavating; some are in museums, others are working in archives, or work as cultural theorists, heritage experts, or processing data for survey technologies. But most importantly, since the appearance of "Ancient Aliens" on Netflix, there's the idea that archaeologists are busy with the question of extraterrestrial life, but that's far from the truth.”

“Archaeology in fact is heavily invested in de-bunking pseudo-archaeology because its theories are often, and not in completely transparent ways, connected with white supremacy around the belief that ancient non-Western societies couldn't be as technologically advanced. Lastly, archaeology isn't just about the ancient past. Archaeology could be sometimes also about the recent past, or even about the future, it could treat the 20th century as much as the Middle Ages.”

“The tools and methodologies of course would change, but today as much as archaeology studies the Babylonians and the Greeks, it is also interested in the modern ruins of Detroit or Beirut, the garbage of American cities, the bombardment of Gaza, or the social landscapes of mining. Christopher Witmore, a prominent American archaeologist, correctly points out that archaeology is the only discipline that has an adjective, "archaios" (ancient), rather than a noun, as its prefix.”

“From this, we learn how unconventional its position in the sphere of modern knowledge is. Archaeology is about human duration rather than antiquity (says another archaeologist, Dan Hicks). Archaeologists today are part of a cultural wave of materialists and posthumanists, including philosophers, environmentalists, contemporary artists, and social scientists, trying to understand our time -- contemporaneity, risk society, the imbalance.”

Naturally, we were curious to hear how he ended up in this fascinating field. “I didn't arrive at archaeology in the traditional pathway: I was always sensitive to archaeological material and discourses, and in general, thinking about the past, because of a background in Classics, but after many years working with contemporary art, particularly in the Middle East, I was excited by the ways in which contemporary artists engaged with the remote past,” he shared with Bored Panda.

“In a way, there was this intuition that it was a part of the present, materially, politically, and intellectually. This suspicion was confirmed by archaeological theory of the last thirty years. So I began becoming more informed about extended conversations between art, archaeology, and philosophy. In the end, it wasn't the excavations or the magnificent temples of the past that really blew me away, but a discipline that thrives in its own paradoxes, its uncertainty, and the awareness of the impossibility of many of its projects.”