Archaeologist Answers Archaeology Questions From Twitter

I'm archeologist Andrew Kinkella,

and I'm here to answer some of your questions on Twitter.

This is Archeology Support.

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@landyhoz, What is the difference between archeology

and paleontology?

Paleontology is about very old things, like dinosaurs,

and on the order of millions of years old.

Archeology is about much more recent human past,

largely the last 10,000 years.

There is a wing of archeology that deals

with ancient human ancestors

where we're studying on the order of early human evolution

from several million years ago.

@Anyextee asks, What do you think is the most

significant archeological discovery

in recent years and why?

The find of Richard II, which was amazing, in a parking lot.

That just shows you that things change.

People move around.

People forget things that were one really, really important.

Another one on my top 10,

the find of the shipwreck, the Endurance,

off the coast of Antarctica.

The Endurance got lodged in the ice.

Ultimately, it sank because the ice would melt

and the ship would sink.

They had to use ROVs, remote operated vehicles,

in order to find this thing, because of its depth.

@athienofanacco1 asks, Do y'all only use

those little brushes at dig sites?

Like, that would drive me mad using that all day.

We use all different kinds of tools in archeology

depending on the situation at hand.

The trowel is the tool of the archeologist.

You can dig fast with the long edge of it

or you can be really precise with the pointy tip.

[trowel clinking]

Archeology is much more about touch sometimes

than you would think and sound.

You could hear a little clink, time to slow down.

So I take the trowel, put it down, bust out the brush.

As I brush, we can see the artifact.

At that point, we can switch to the popsicle stick.

I can push and you don't have that metallic clink.

What we would do at this point, pedestal the artifact.

We would dig around it.

We can say the artifact is 10 centimeters deep,

20 centimeters from the west wall,

17 centimeters from the north wall,

and then we have the artifact's exact location.

This artifact is called a Clovis point,

a very specific tool to some of the first people

to ever enter the New World.

@CheungMattias asks, Honestly, I still don't know

how the Rosetta Stone works.

The Rosetta Stone is one of the most important

archeological discoveries,

because it led to the cracking of Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Rosetta Stone was found in 1799

by Napoleon's science team

that he brought with him in the town of Rosetta in Egypt.

What makes it so important is because it says

the same thing three times.

At the top, it's in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics,

in the middle, it's in demotic,

and at the bottom, it's in Greek.

So you have this one piece that you can read,

and then you sort of have a key

where you can start to build off of and figure out

what the different symbols mean.

@iamnjogu asks, Curious about these stone tools

discovered from ancient man?

How do the archeologists know

it's not just a chipped rock?

If this just rolled down a hill, it would look different.

If I'm an ancient toolmaker

and I'm using a hammer stone on this,

I'm gonna hit it really hard to get a flake to pop off.

It's gonna create what's called a bulb of percussion.

It's gonna create this divot.

Also, in terms of ancient stone tools,

they're gonna use things like obsidian, it's volcanic glass.

Those types of stones can make a really, really sharp edge.

On the flip side, this is a hammer stone.

It was very specifically sought after by ancient people

for its qualities of not being too soft or too hard,

and you can use it to make good stone tools.

@Zefwagner asks, I don't know what the hell

a Dial of Destiny is,

but I sure as hell know that a dial is inherently

less exciting than an ark, a temple, or a grail.

The Dial of Destiny is the new artifact

that they're gonna use in the new Indiana Jones movie.

What they're relating this to is something

called the Antikythera mechanism

and its ability to track the rotation of planets over time.

I think what it really shows is an excellent use of math

to make the gears so precise

that it could at least work for a while.

@_AtangBiyela asks, Why do archeologists

excavate graves again?

Sometimes we come across them and we don't expect it.

I will say that is the most common way

that we find human remains.

It's a little bit of a deep moment.

You do start to think about your own mortality.

Human remains that you find in a grave

tell you so much about the past.

The human skeleton itself can tell you how that person died.

Did they have any diseases?

What was their social status?

It can tell you about the religion of the culture.

When we excavate something like a human burial,

we go very slow.

We work with local communities.

Where are you gonna store these human remains?

Are you going to rebury these human remains?

@goff_logan asks, How does this carbon dating thing work?

Carbon-14 is an isotope.

It breaks down over time.

And what we can do is measure the rate

at which it breaks down.

Let's say after I'm filming this,

I walk off and I die in the parking lot.

My carbon-14 starts to go down.

5,730 years from today,

I will have half as much carbon-14

as I did in the beginning.

Now if you add another 5,730 years,

I have a quarter of what I had.

Now you gotta watch it,

because it only works on things that were once alive.

You cannot carbon-14 date a rock.

But for living things, burials, remains,

we can get a date for it.

@rstephens asks, LIDAR is being advanced

partly by its use in self-driving car research.

How long has it been used for archeology?

It's been used in archeology

in the last 10 years or maybe more.

But LIDAR is a bunch of lasers shot down from a plane

or a helicopter that flies over a site.

What it gets is really, really specific

geographic and mapping data.

So as the plane flies over and shoots a bunch of lasers,

the trees actually blow a little,

so a couple of the laser beams will get down

to the ground surface.

It used to be just prohibitively expensive.

These days, the more and more we get of that,

the more projects actually have it

due to the decreasing cost.

@brycepwrites asks, How often do archeologists

have to think,

'Are these bones a crime scene or a discovery?'

I did once work on a salvage archeology project

where a construction crew had accidentally hit a family plot

that was about 80 years old.

The skeletal material was still kind of supple.

You can really tell the difference

if you're working with something

that's thousands of years old,

because it's totally dry

and it started to kind of wither away.

So they're not bleach white like you would think.

They're sort of a dull brown.

I still will call the coroner just to make double sure.

@katyazeisig asks, Anyone else wonder how accurate

a forensic facial reconstruction artist

would be if they just had your skull to work off of?

We have to realize that it's not perfect.

In terms of facial reconstruction from a skull,

some things you can get are stuff like the cheeks.

Are the cheeks higher or lower?

The eye sockets, the brow ridge, the chin, the teeth.

Sometimes the chin will be more of a jutting chin.

But stuff like what was the overall shape of the nose?

You know the ears.

You're gonna go with the trends of the time.

So if you're working on a skull that's 4,000 years old

and it's a male skull,

you're gonna put some sort of beard on it,

because they didn't have BIC razors 4,000 years ago.

Archeology is literally three pieces

of the thousand-piece puzzle.

@MalakaiWaters asks, Do archeologists

just go to random places and be like,

'I feel like there's something important here,'

and then just start digging?

We only excavate after we've surveyed

and mapped the location.

We are looking for the best possible places

that archeological sites might exist.

The ancient Maya would build on good soil.

If there's a forestry company or something

who has made a map of the soil quality

throughout the region,

I love getting that map,

because that makes my work that much easier.

I was working on a project in downtown LA

where they were replacing the sidewalk.

And they took up some of the concrete

and there was a human skeleton right there.

This was a human skeleton

that had been there for hundreds of years.

In the modern world, we wanna have archeologists

along with construction projects and building projects,

because they do find things like this from time to time.

@John_engineer asks, What's the most valuable artifact

you have ever found?

I'm gonna go with an entire Mayan pyramid.

I found the pyramid through Google Earth at home.

I rolled the cursor over this area of the jungle

and the altimeter would go

bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop.

And I thought, You know, next time I'm in that area

of the jungle, I gotta go back there

and check out that area.

And yes, it actually was an ancient Maya pyramid.

@jo6totorobear asks, What archeological find

do you wish you had made and why?

The tomb of Tutankhamun.

Howard Carter, in the early 1920s,

it took him several field seasons,

and he had to look for months through the entire

Valley of the Kings.

At his last little survey square, that's where it was.

Those artifacts are amazing.

Stuff like wood that's 3,000 years old,

it looks like it was made last week.

They tell you so much about this little moment in time

when this young king died unexpectedly.

@Janelovesbees asks, Do archeologists

even do sex estimations of skeletons?

Yes, and it's usually fairly easy.

The two best places to look are the skull and the pelvis.

For a male skull, it tends to be more robust.

It'll just sort of be bigger overall, a bit more angular,

although there's a lot of overlap on this.

So you have to look at different,

very specific parts of the skull in order to be sure.

I got this wrong once.

Now, it was a skeleton that had no head.

The pelvis looked very, very narrow,

and I was like, It's a guy.

Once they got it to the lab

and they could look more closely,

it was a female who had a very narrow pelvis.

In the field, there's still parts of it covered with mud,

it's in a bad position.

But once it's in the lab, it's under controlled conditions,

you can get really exact measurements,

you can just get a much better idea of what's going on.

@reactive_yuri asks,

I finished watching 'Ancient Apocalypse' last night.

Why do the experts

dismiss Hancock's hypothesis as baseless?

Ancient Apocalypse is a Netflix series

whose central premise is there was a cataclysm

about 10,000 years ago

that destroyed a super-advanced, super civilization

and we only have bits and pieces of that left.

It didn't happen, there is no evidence.

One of the best examples of this is the Piri Reis map.

It was done in the early 1500s,

made by this guy named Piri Reis.

Pseudo-archeologists, like Graham Hancock, say,

This is evidence that ancient people explored Antarctica.

It's just not.

It's proof that ancient mapmakers ran out of paper,

curved it around.

This is just a part of South America.

We can't use this today

as serious scientific evidence, it's not.

@Motmotorg asks, Did you know that the Maya believed

that natural sinkholes, called cenotes,

were sacred portals to the underworld?

I am a Mayanist and I did my dissertation

on the cenotes of Belize.

Sometimes they were just used for water,

but other times they did sacrifice people

into the cenotes from time to time.

I don't want you guys to think that human sacrifice

happened like every weekend or something, it didn't.

If the crops were going poorly and if there was no rain,

you may sacrifice somebody

who was usually a captured warrior

from one of the other cities.

Take this person to the edge of the cenote,

you would slash them through their chest.

We have found human remains in some of the cenotes.

We have accounts from the Spanish

of seeing this kind of thing happen.

In terms of my research,

we did find a little building

right on the edge of the cenote,

and we would call that a water shrine,

and that would be the place

where these kind of rituals would take place.

@ethvnsroom asks, Why do archeologists dress like that?

It depends on the environment you're working in.

For me in the jungle, I'm gonna wear a light shirt,

I'm gonna have boots on,

I'm gonna bring a machete with me

in order to cut through the jungle.

I'm gonna wear a hat, protects you from the sun.

You will also bring with you a bunch of different tools

in a backpack or a satchel, a GPS unit.

If I had to bring one thing with me, it would be a compass.

The compass will get you home.

GPS units are great, they work on batteries.

And once you're outta batteries, you're dead.

Always trust your compass.

@Rocketeer46 asks, Why are there so many

archeological discoveries of late?

Are there more archeologists,

or is it technology, or what's the reason?

It is true that we tend to be finding more and more stuff.

We do have more modern technology, like LIDAR.

There's also satellite technology

that help us find new sites

and we can see things like ancient trade routes.

But a major part of this is world overpopulation.

There is more and more excavation,

so we find new archeological sites

in every country of the world.

@Oikade20 asks, What do archeologists not know or debate

that you would most like an answer to?

When did human beings first enter North and South America?

The overwhelming evidence points to Asia,

across to Alaska, and then down.

We have very good evidence

up to about 16 or 17,000 years ago.

It's really hard to say after that.

You have sites way down in South America

that can be quite old too,

21,000 years or 40,000 years,

but the evidence isn't quite good enough.

A decade from now, maybe we know more than we do now.

Those are all the questions for today.

Thanks for watching Archeology Support.

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