To an archaeologist, a carved bone is an artefact but a butchered one is not
Archaeologists sort finds with surprising care. A pebble carried far from the river that rounded it is a manuport, a charred hearth stone is an ecofact, a hearth itself is a feature, and only something people made or shaped counts as an artefact. Where it lay matters as much as what it is.
An artefact, spelled artifact in American English, is anything humans made or shaped, such as a tool or a work of art, and in archaeology specifically an object recovered by excavation. Museums tend to say object and art historians artwork, so one item can wear several labels. Typical examples are stone tools, pots, weapons, buttons, jewellery, clothing and bones bearing marks of human working.
The boundaries need policing. Features are remains that cannot be carried away, like hearths, roads and trenches. Ecofacts, or biofacts, are things of archaeological interest produced by other organisms, such as seeds or animal bone, along with natural items like fire-cracked rocks. A bone pulled from a carcass is a biofact, yet the same bone carved into a tool becomes an artefact. Some early stones are argued over endlessly because nature can chip rocks into shapes that mimic human work; such lookalikes are called geofacts.
Context is everything. An object results first from behaviour, as people gather materials, make something and throw it away, then from transformation, as nature and later humans disturb it after burial. The surrounding material is the matrix, and the exact spot within it is the provenience. In primary context neither has been disturbed; in secondary context they have. Carol Kramer's dictum that pots are not people warns against equating a style of material culture with an ethnic group.
Different specialists read different materials. Lithic analysts trace technology through stone tools; ceramic analysts use spectroscopy to learn what clays went into pottery; faunal analysts use animal remains to reveal trade, diet and social status. Dating ties it together through relative sequences, written records and typology. Looting wrecks all this by removing objects before their context is recorded, and museums face ethical questions too, from the British Museum's display of the Parthenon Marbles to objects taken during Europe's conquest of Africa.
Source: Artifact (archaeology)
