Archaeology aims to pull back the curtains of time and open a window on the past. We can be fairly certain that, even hundreds of thousands of years ago, life was full of the types of culture, language, beliefs, and rituals that we might expect of humans with all their complexities and irrational behaviours. But how much of this is still visible in the ground today? Sadly, very little. When I do outreach work with AncientCraft (a heritage service that I founded in 2009, which aims to make prehistory accessible to all), I often describe the challenge facing archaeologists as a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle in a box whose lid bears a colourful picture showing a scene from the Bronze Age. The image depicts a settlement bustling with people going about their daily tasks, chatting, wearing colourful clothing – a vivid illustration of what their world was like. After 3,000 years, however, pieces have gone astray, as has the box lid with its helpful picture – and when you, the archaeologist, look inside, only a handful of pieces remain, none of them corners. Instead, you find disparate images of pottery, tools, post-holes, pits, and bones. How on earth can you hope to reconstruct the complete image with such meagre clues?
Fortunately – as readers of Current Archaeology know – ours is a multi-faceted discipline, and we can draw on diverse methods of analysis; data from previous excavations and interpretations; surveying, and more to restore some of those missing pieces. One of those facets is experimental archaeology – a concept that has been popularised through television programmes like Time Team, Living in the Past, or I, Caveman (to name but a few), which make frequent use of reconstructions and replicas. Strictly speaking, though, true experimental archaeology uses fixed parameters, controls, and variables to test a question.
Cutting-edge research
Let’s say you wanted to find out whether the ground stone axes of Neolithic Britain were overengineered, or if the effort of smoothing and polishing their surfaces actually improved their ability to fell trees and work wood. To explore this, you would create a number of replica axes of the same size and material as original artefacts, using authentic methods. These could then be used in a ‘real-world’ setting to fell some trees, and in a controlled setting like a lab with a drop tower used to analyse impact and shock through a material. The hope would be that the results show whether the investment of time needed to turn a flaked stone axe into a refined, polished one really did enhance its function and longevity, or whether this effort was unnecessary to its perceived main use and might instead have been for another purpose – dare I say it, possibly ritual?
