Archeology, the branch of anthropology that is devoted to the study of the human past, often focuses on the period before people began to keep written record.
Archeologists study the origin, spread, and evolution of culture by examining the remains of past societies. They share the task of other kinds of anthropologists in that they are trying to understand human behavior.
The difference is that their materials are generally the unwritten records of past societies. They can’t sit down with living members of those societies and talk about each they have found. They can’t even observe living people, but must interpret the material evidence left by people long dead.
Many archeologists distinguish between prehistoric archeology, which is the study of extinct cultures that left no written record, and history archeology, which is the investigation of those groups for whom there are written materials to accompany the archeological evidence.
Archeology is limited by the nature of the evidence it deals with. For one thing we cannot examine the activities of prehistoric people. We have almost no way of knowing what they believed, what they valued or even how they organized their society.
We can guess a few things such as, that early human beings believed in form of magic created by imitating the image of a natural object. One interpretation of the famous prehistoric cave paintings in southern France and Spain is that they were meant to ensure success in a hunting expedition by showing a successful hunting scene.
Definitions of Archeology
