mineral or vegetable?

Hello again everyone...

Over the past week or so, I've been reading and processing the first few chapters of Bruce Trigger's A History of Archaeological Thought (2nd Edition, 2006). It came recommended to me from some colleagues I met while traveling through South Asia, and I figured I'd try to knock it out before classes start in the Fall.

Anyway, I finished up the chapters on the inchoate periods of archaeology, when Classical Studies was king, and the idea of studying artifacts was novel and tenuous.

North American archaeology has it's roots in the antiquarianism of the pre-Enlightenment post-Renaissance period of Europe. During this period, artifacts that weren't of classical origin were often placed in the same category as crystals and trilobites. Though it varied depending on what specific part of the world you're talking about, arrowheads were generally so different from contemporary material culture that people believed they were of natural origin and had sprouted forth from the ground. Some even believed that elves had left them behind.

Long story short, thanks to the onset of colonialism, European scholars came in contact with people from all over the world. Some of these people used the same sorts of tools that had been recovered from sites in Europe. After a couple of centuries of analyzing stone tools from at home and abroad, pre-prehistory antiquarians finally concluded that objects like stone tools were definitely not of natural origin, and had been made by people in the past.

This is all very interesting from a contemporary perspective... it took so long for archaeology's forebears to decide that some artifacts were even artifacts. What sorts of patterns are we musing over that will appear elementary by future scholar's standards? Time will tell.

You can find Trigger's book at: http://www.amazon.com/History-Archaeological-Thought-Bruce-Trigger/dp/0521840767/ref=sr_1_1/102-6355922-1256906?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1186509479&sr=8-1