artifacts as tools and pottery help archaeologists learn about?

Answer 1

how people lived in the past.

Answer 2

What many people do not know is the past can show us much about people today. Tools and pottery show how humans lived and worked in the past which shows human traits and learning just as it would today.

Think of it this way. We live in what we consider an advanced world, but can you all by yourself without anyones help develop any of the things you use ?

If you were put on an island with water and all the raw materials like coal, iron ore, salt, seeds, sand... would you be able to make glass ? Steel? Food? Something that would keep food fresh? Could you grow food and live and not starve? Would you have any free time after spending so much time just trying to eat and not die from the weather?

You see while you have all these amazing devices today, very few or any of them are because of something you designed or developed or even made?

You would be back to using a stick to dig in the dirt to plant your seeds.

No one wants to go back to that life and it would be hard to study how humans learn so we look back in the past.

You are just one bad government from living back in the dark ages.

Here is a question. If you spent 12hours a day looking for food to keep from starving would you care what you hair looks like.

Answer 3

As you might expect, the most common excavating tools are the shovel and the mason's trowel. A skilled worker can make effective use of these tools to trim and scrape (not dig!) the soil from the site with virtually no damage to the artifacts and features within it. When a more delicate touch is required, wooden picks (bamboo splinters are popular), spoons, dentist's picks, and brushes are useful. Tape measures are constantly in use for mapping the locations of items and keeping track of depths. An archaeologist who can't keep a floor level and at the right depth and who can't keep a wall vertical is in for severe kidding from his coworkers.

Record keeping is the other half of excavation. Excavation record forms and graph paper are used to keep track of what was found in each level and to map its contents, including artifacts, stains or other marks in the soil, the location of features, and so forth. Photographs (with scales, north indicators, and labels) are taken often during the course of the excavation. Many archaeologists shoot considerable video footage these days, too.

Excavated soil is sifted through screens, usually measuring 1/4" or 1/8". This captures small items which may have been missed by the excavator. Items found in the screen are kept with the rest of the material found in each level of each unit. A smaller screen size can be used effectively if a water hose is used to rinse the soil through the mesh. The technical term for this is, of course, waterscreening. Very often, samples of soil are also floated in water as part of the waterscreening process, which recovers very tiny bits of charcoal, seeds, bone, and such.

Other, more exotic, tools are also used by archaeologists. In recent years nondestructive investigative techniques have been employed successfully at many sites. These remote sensing techniques include magnetometers, resistivity measurements, and ground penetrating radar. All of these can, under good conditions, provide a sense of what features lie under the ground surface. They have proven to be very helpful at locating the lines of buried walls, foundations, earthlodge floors, and many other features.