Students will determine components of a soil sample and evaluate how archaeologists use soils to interpret sites.
Help students learn about archaeological methods and how archaeological interpretations are made. It is organized around questions that include: What is archeology? What do archaeologists do? How do archaeologists determine how old things are?
In their study of classification and attributes students will use "doohickey kits" to classify objects based on their attributes and learn that scientists and specifically archaeologists use classification to help answer research questions.
This site introduces students to archeology -- the study of material remains to learn about past human experiences. This lesson (Grades 3-8) discusses various challenges of an archaeologist: locating a site that will yield clues about the people who once lived there, conducting excavations, and more. Students identify artifacts from a contemporary setting, describe the function of each artifact, identify methods for dating soil layers, and interpret soil profiles.
Unfamiliar objects make us curious to know what they are. To make a proposed explanation --a hypothesis-- about something unfamiliar, archaeologists use the skills of observation and inference.
Because ancient pots are usually found broken into hundreds of pieces (sherds), archaeologists find it tedious and often impossible to glue them back together. One way they get an idea of how large a pot was is by calculating its original circumference. Rim sherds are used to do this because they often indicate how large the vessel opening was.
