Q: Do archaeologists really have adventures like Indiana Jones’s?

A: I wish! The early days of archaeology were indeed an adventure, at a time when even Egypt was a remote country and difficult of access. In those days, you could literally go out and find an ancient civilization in a week. English archaeologist Austen Henry Layard discovered two ancient Assyrian palaces in northern Iraq in a month, while his French colleague Paul Émile Botta had unearthed the Assyrian civilization from complete historical obscurity a few years earlier. American traveler John Lloyd Stephens and Scottish artist Frederick Catherwood revealed the glories of ancient Maya civilization to an astonished world in 1841, after adventures that were quite unlike any of modern archaeologists. Today’s excavation is patient and slow moving. We move as much dirt in a month as a 19th-century digger would remove in a day.

As for Indiana Jones, he is a figment of Hollywood’s imagination and a fictional amalgam of three or four well-known archaeologists from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Which ones? Your guess is as good as mine!

Q: How do scientists determine weather conditions of the past?

A: Advances in paleoclimatology have given scientists a wide range of tools for understanding ancient climates. A combination of tree rings; annual rings in ice sheets, such as those in Antarctica and Greenland; and coral growth rings from the Caribbean and South Pacific Ocean provide detailed climatic evidence for the past 10,000 to 12,000 years. The evidence extends back to the end of the last Ice Age. The study of fossil pollens from organic deposits often provides information about changes in ancient vegetation. Fossil pollens, for example, have helped scientists pinpoint the moments when humans deliberately cleared forests to make way for grasslands and cultivated plants.

Date: 2015-02-16; view: 888