Anthropology Assignment | Essay Help Services

Your assignment is to pick any one archaeological site and write a brief plan on how you would date it. Don’t worry about money; assume it’s not a concern.

First, briefly describe your site. 2-3 sentences should be fine. Examples: a pirate shipwreck off the Carolina coast in 20 feet of water; a stone henge on a hilltop in northern Scotland; a prehistoric village buried by a landslide in Panama. Be as specific as you can. You can make up any site you want.

Second, think about what dating methods you would use. You do NOT have to research or make up any data or dates, just plan what you would do in an ideal situation. Example for a Celtic mining village from the Roman contact period in Austria: seriation on the pottery, watch out for time markers on the jewelry, coins to a specialist, radiocarbon dating on any wood or charcoal, etc.

If you are not too sure about what the site would be like, start with doing basic stratigraphy and using superposition to get started. Example of my Celtic village continued: dig a test excavation or do some geophysical surveying to see how deep it was and whether there were discreet occupation layers or whether it was all mixed together. I might get lucky and half the site was buried by Roman or medieval fill. Or not. Using relative dating methods from the stratigraphy chapter I could figure out what layers or parts of the site were early and what was later.

Related to stratigraphy, try to specify where you would get material for dating. Usually, we like to get a date on something, a date from stratigraphically above it and a date from below it. Look back at the Laetoli footprints, for example. For my imaginary village, I might specify that I would dendro date any wood lining a well, because it would have been built no earlier than the settlement itself, but then I would also have the old wood problem to worry about. Maybe you would want to date the north and south or left and right of some horizontal feature, like a cemetery or city, to see if it grew one direction over time.

You should write about one page, standard font size, and spacing. Include at least 3 dating methods. 4 paragraphs should do it. Intro + one each for the three dating methods. Talk about why you choose them and what advantages and disadvantages they might have for your site. The goal is to demonstrate your ability to write clearly and correctly about dating in archaeology.