The oldest known dig was ordered by a Babylonian king 2,600 years ago
Excavation is controlled destruction: once a layer is dug away, all that survives are the notes, drawings and photographs made of it. Modern archaeologists peel sites apart one thin stratum at a time, logging every find's position so the whole place could, in principle, be rebuilt in three dimensions.
Digging into the past is old. In the sixth century BC Nabonidus, king of Babylon, uncovered a temple floor that was already thousands of years old. Caesar's soldiers plundered bronzes, medieval Europeans pulled up pots exposed by erosion and weapons turned over in fields, and later antiquarians tore into burial mounds in North America and north-west Europe, often wrecking the very context that gave objects meaning. Careful, systematic excavation replaced that barrow-digging only in the early to middle 1800s.
The biggest change since then is record-keeping. Early diggers hunted for objects and rarely noted where they lay. Today a team gathers four kinds of evidence: artefacts that can be carried away, fixed features such as hearths, post holes and graves, ecofacts like pollen, charcoal and animal bone, and the context linking them all. Ground-penetrating radar and augering can hint at what lies below before a trowel goes in. Stratigraphic digging then removes the site in reverse order of deposition, while soil is sieved or floated in water to catch small remains.
Sites build up as a series of events. Someone lays a path, a wall goes up and its trench is backfilled, a pigsty is added, the wall eventually falls. Each leaves its own deposit, and reading that layered sequence is what lets excavators interpret a place. Most modern digs fall into two kinds: research excavations run by academics or societies at their own pace, and development-led work paid for by builders, done quickly but by skilled professionals.
The processual archaeologist Lewis Binford warned that a site can mislead. Among Nunamiut hunters in north-central Alaska he found that waiting for game took up 24 percent of recorded working hours yet left no trace. What survived instead were the by-products of boredom, such as a carved mask mould, a horn spoon and mended caribou-skin socks.
Source: Archaeological excavation
