Description: UNIT 1. About Archaeologists and Archaeology 1. Metaphors We Dig By, Warren R. DeBoer, Anthropology News, October 1999 The following "study" emerged from a casual classroom survey of introductory archaeology students at Queens College during the 199899 academic year. It hits home with any professional archaeologist who has to agree that we usually don't know our posteriors from a hole in the ground, to paraphrase a line from this article. 2. The Awful Truth About Archaeology, Dr. Lynne Sebastian, The SAA Archaeological Record, March 2003 "You're an Archaeologist! That sounds soooo exciting!" Of course it sounds exciting because of the hyperbole and mystic surrounding archaeologists perpetuated by T.V. shows, movies, and novels-professional archaeologists know better! Yes, the thrill of looking at the past is truly exciting. But the process of discovery is slow, tedious, frustrating, and even on occasion time wasting-nothing is found. Digging square holes in the ground and carefully measuring artifacts, cataloging, taking notes, and hopefully and ultimately publishing something meaningful about the past. It is a work of love that has its inherent reward in knowledge. 3. The Quest for the Past, Brian M. Fagan, from Quest for the Past: Great Discoveries in Archaeology, Waveland Press, 1994 This excerpt from Brian Fagan's book provides an overview of the history of archaeology that traces archaeology's roots to antiquarians, grave robbers, and looters. 4. Distinguished Lecture in Archeology: Communication and the Future of American Archaeology, Jeremy A. Sabloff, American Anthropologist, December 1998 Jeremy Sabloff discusses the role that archaeology should play in public education and the need for archaeologists to communicate more effectively with relevant writing for the public. He further suggests the need to recognize nonacademic archaeologists and to focus on action archaeology or what is more usually termed public archaeology. 5. First Lady of Amazonia, Colleen P. Popson, Archaeology, May/June 2003 Betty Meggers is a strong-willed octogenarian with immmovable beliefs about ancient jungle culture. It is very important to Betty Meggers that her theories are the only right ones-even if the archaeological data happen to prove her wrong. However, she is credited with bringing the question of environment into archaeology. And, she uses her strong personality to find collaborators to carry on her immovable beliefs-archaeologist subordinate science in favor of personality! In this editor's opinion, this destroys archaeology as a science. 6. Archaeology's Perilous Pleasures, David Lowenthal, Archaeology, March/April 2000 Archaeology is presented here as our obsession with heritage. David Lowenthal writes that human interest in things ancient often lends itself to the idea that primacy confers entitlement. Tangible remains lend to archaeology a sense of its immediacy and importance to the public. From this basis, however, conflicts arise between contemporary human groups over ownership of the past; thus archaeologists need to be aware of the sensitivity of their endeavors. 7. The Travails and Tedium of Conflict-Zone Fieldwork, Lori A. Allen, Anthropology Newsletter, October 2002 While archaeologists are fascinated with the question of heritage, sometimes that heritage can be ha

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