In June 1873, Heinrich Schliemann was digging at Hissarlik in northwest Turkey, convinced — against the scepticism of most classical scholars — that this unremarkable mound concealed the remains of Homer's Troy. He had already been excavating for two years, cutting through layer after layer of accumulated ruins with a speed that later archaeologists would regard with horror. Then he found gold.
What Schliemann called "Priam's Treasure" — gold diadems, earrings, cups, bracelets, a silver vessel containing more than eight thousand tiny gold rings — was extracted hurriedly over two days. He smuggled it out of the Ottoman Empire wrapped in his wife Sophia's shawl. Sophia was photographed wearing the gold jewellery, the image widely reproduced as evidence of the discovery's significance. The treasure was real. The problem was what it was.
The layer Schliemann had so confidently identified as Homeric Troy predated the traditional period of the Trojan War by at least a thousand years. The gold he declared to be Priam's was from a civilisation that had flourished in the early Bronze Age — centuries before the culture Homer described. Worse, in his rush to reach what he believed was the right layer, Schliemann had dug straight through the actual remains of the period he was seeking, destroying them without record. The evidence he wanted was gone before he knew it was there.
The central question of this article is one that sits at the intersection of method and interpretation: How do the methods archaeologists use to excavate the ancient world shape what they find — and how does the preconceptions they bring to a site determine what they see when they find it?
This question matters because archaeological evidence does not speak for itself. A pottery shard does not announce its date, its cultural affiliation, or its historical significance. An architectural foundation does not label itself a temple or a granary. The meaning of what is found in the ground always depends on the interpretive framework the archaeologist brings — which is why understanding how that framework has evolved, been contested, and been revised is essential to evaluating archaeological evidence critically.
By the end of this article, you will be able to describe the major phases in the development of archaeological method, apply the key concepts of stratigraphic analysis and contextual interpretation to specific ancient sites, and evaluate archaeological evidence with the same critical awareness you bring to literary and epigraphic sources.
The four phases of archaeological practice
Archaeological method has not been static. The discipline has passed through recognisably distinct phases, each shaped by different questions, different technologies, and different ideas about what archaeology is for. Understanding these phases is the first step to evaluating any claim made on the basis of archaeological evidence — because how something was excavated determines how much we can trust what was found.
The core concepts every student must know
The three case studies below each illuminate a different aspect of the relationship between archaeological method and historical knowledge. Pompeii shows how a single site has been understood differently across successive methodological eras. Tutankhamun's tomb shows how even exemplary excavation practice exists within a colonial context that shapes what happens to what is found. The Herculaneum papyri show how technology can recover what seemed permanently beyond reach — and raise new questions about what "excavation" means when it involves no digging at all.
Case study one: Two and a half centuries at Pompeii
On 4 November 1922, Howard Carter's team uncovered steps in the Valley of the Kings that led to a sealed door. Behind it lay the most complete royal tomb ever found in Egypt: the burial of Tutankhamun, an 18th-Dynasty pharaoh who died around 1323 BCE, aged approximately nineteen. The tomb contained over five thousand objects — furniture, clothing, weapons, ritual items, and the famous golden death mask — preserved in almost perfect condition.
Carter's excavation, funded by the Earl of Carnarvon, was methodologically exceptional for its era. Carter spent nearly a decade systematically recording and conserving the tomb's contents before removing them. Each object was photographed in situ, drawn to scale, numbered, and described in meticulous catalogue cards before being carefully packed for transport to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Carter understood that the spatial relationship between objects — which items were in which room, which were placed in which positions relative to the body — was as historically significant as the objects themselves. His records remain an indispensable research resource a century later.
And yet Carter's excavation existed within a colonial framework that shaped what happened at every level. The excavation was conducted under an Egyptian government concession, but the assumption underlying much European Egyptology of the period was that Egyptian antiquities were better curated in European institutions. Carnarvon and Carter initially expected a share of the finds — the standard arrangement under the prevailing antiquities law — and were furious when the Egyptian government, newly assertive under a nationalist government, declared the entire tomb state property. The objects never left Egypt. This was, from the perspective of Egyptians, a victory; from the perspective of the excavators, an injustice. It was also the moment when the model of collaborative extraction began to give way to something closer to the current international norm — that antiquities belong to the country where they are found.
From object to meaning: reading an archaeological find
One of the most important intellectual skills in working with archaeological evidence is the distinction between describing what was found and interpreting what it means. These are genuinely different analytical moves, and conflating them produces weak historical argument. The following worked example shows how the same archaeological find can be described neutrally and then interpreted at different levels of confidence.
Excavation as destruction — the ethics of digging
Every excavation destroys what it uncovers. This is not a metaphor. When an archaeologist excavates a stratigraphic layer, that layer — which may have taken centuries to accumulate — is permanently disturbed. The spatial relationships between objects, the soil chemistry, the pollen record, the micro-stratigraphic details that might have answered questions we have not yet thought to ask: all of this is gone the moment the trowel enters the earth. The record made at the moment of excavation is the only thing that survives. If that record is inadequate, the information is lost.
This irreversibility is what makes archaeological method an ethical issue as well as a technical one. It is why the profession has developed strict standards for what constitutes responsible excavation: complete three-dimensional recording of find positions; full stratigraphic documentation; comprehensive soil sampling; prompt and full publication of results in accessible form. When these standards are not met — whether through inadequate funding, poor training, or the haste of rescue excavations ahead of construction — information is permanently forfeited.
The ethical implications extend to a deeper question: should a site be fully excavated at all? The current consensus in archaeological practice is that selective or partial excavation — leaving significant portions of a site unexcavated — is often preferable to complete clearance. Future archaeologists, with better technology and methods we cannot yet imagine, may be able to extract information from unexcavated deposits that today's methods would either miss or destroy. The principle of leaving evidence for future generations has become an explicit conservation ethic in responsible archaeological practice.
How to use archaeological evidence in examination writing
Archaeological evidence in examination responses carries different weight depending on how it is used. The following principles distinguish analytical from merely descriptive engagement with material evidence.
The object and the OPCL method
The OPCL framework from A3 applies to material and archaeological evidence as much as to literary sources, but with specific adaptations. The Origin of an artefact includes not just where it was made and when, but where it was found — its provenance and its deposition context. The Purpose of a material object is often less clearly legible than that of a text, and must be inferred from its form, its associations, and its parallels with better-understood objects. The Content of a visual or material source is what it depicts or records — its iconographic programme, its inscription (if any), its physical properties. And the Limitations of archaeological evidence are shaped by how it was excavated as much as by what it is: an object found by a treasure hunter in the 18th century carries far more uncertainty than the same type of object excavated with full modern contextual recording.
The Herculaneum papyri: archaeology without a spade
In 79 CE, the eruption of Vesuvius carbonised the papyrus scrolls stored in the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, transforming them into brittle cylinders of charred organic matter. Hundreds of these scrolls were recovered during the 18th-century Bourbon excavations — and immediately crumbled or were destroyed when early attempts were made to unroll them. Over the following centuries, careful techniques were developed to unroll them physically, producing partial and fragmentary texts. By the mid-20th century, roughly 1,800 scrolls and fragments had been identified, yielding Epicurean philosophical texts (the library appears to have belonged to an Epicurean household) — but the great majority remained sealed and unreadable.
In 2019, a team of computer scientists, papyrologists, and imaging specialists began applying X-ray phase contrast tomography and machine learning to the sealed scrolls — virtually "unrolling" them without physical manipulation. In 2023, a 21-year-old computer science student named Luke Farritor won the Vesuvius Challenge — an open competition — by being the first to identify readable Greek letters in a virtual scan. Within months, entire passages were being read for the first time since 79 CE. The first substantial recovered text discusses pleasure, fine food, and the role of music in enhancing enjoyment — a fragment of Epicurean philosophy that had been waiting inside a burned scroll for two thousand years.
This story matters for several reasons. It demonstrates that archaeological recovery is a continuing process — material that seemed definitionally beyond reach is now being read. It shows how technology from entirely outside the humanities (computer vision, machine learning, X-ray physics) can transform what is recoverable from ancient evidence. And it is a reminder that what counts as "archaeology" is expanding beyond excavation: non-invasive survey, virtual analysis, and digital reconstruction are producing new knowledge from material that was discovered centuries ago but could not previously be read.
The antiquities trade and the destruction of context
The global market for ancient objects is one of the most significant ongoing threats to archaeological knowledge. When objects are looted from sites and sold through the international art market, the context that makes them historically meaningful — their stratigraphic position, their associations with other objects, their spatial relationship to the structures around them — is permanently destroyed. What reaches the museum or auction house is beautiful but impoverished: an object without a history, or rather an object whose history has been stripped away and cannot be recovered.
The problem is systemic. High prices in the legitimate art market for ancient objects create demand; demand creates incentive for looting; looting destroys context faster than any amount of legitimate excavation can replace it. The illicit antiquities trade funds criminal networks, has in some cases funded terrorism (ISIS systematically looted Syrian and Iraqi archaeological sites before destroying some of them), and has made archaeologists' work dramatically harder in regions where looting has preceded any scientific excavation.
The 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property established 1970 as the baseline: objects that cannot be shown to have been in a known collection before 1970 are presumed to have been illicitly removed. Major museums have adopted this standard for acquisitions — though inconsistently. The repatriation of objects acquired through colonial-era excavation or illegal trade remains one of the most contested issues in contemporary cultural policy, with implications for how ancient historical knowledge is produced, controlled, and shared.
Community archaeology and Indigenous rights
The most significant shift in archaeological ethics over the past four decades has been the growing recognition that the communities whose ancestors are being excavated have rights in that process. In the United States, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA, 1990) established legal rights for Indigenous communities to claim the return of ancestral remains and sacred objects held by museums and universities. Similar legislation exists in Australia (under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act and state heritage laws) and New Zealand.
This legal and ethical framework has transformed archaeological practice in many parts of the world. Descendant communities are increasingly involved as partners in excavation projects — not as passive subjects but as active co-producers of knowledge about their own past. In Australia, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities have led campaigns for the return of ancestral remains taken by colonial-era scientists and held in museum collections around the world. This is one of the clearest examples of the connection between the ancient historian's methodological concerns (who controls the past? whose heritage is it?) and live contemporary political and legal questions.
Looking ahead: Article A7 — the final skill
Article A7 — Avoiding Anachronism completes Package A by addressing the interpretive challenge that sits at the heart of all ancient historical thinking: how do we read the past on its own terms, rather than projecting our own assumptions, values, and categories onto people who could not have shared them? After six articles building the toolkit for working with ancient evidence, A7 asks what we should do with that toolkit — and what the most fundamental intellectual discipline of ancient history actually requires of us.