What Is Archaeology?

The concept of archaeology varies depending of who is asked. When asking a middle school student or even a High School student, the answer would most likely relate to the movie “Indiana Jones”. Whentalking to an everyday citizen the answer would probably fall in the lines of excavation and artifacts, but in general, most of the population forgets to add the “cultural study” component in thedefinition. According to Price (2010, 1) archaeology “is the study of our human past combining the theme of time and change”. While the previous definition is quite vague the Encyclopedia Britannicadefines it as “the scientific study of material remains of past human life and activities or remains of the culture of a people”. Whereas in the first definition refers to objects that change over time,the second definition refers to the cultural aspect, which is barely identified as a feature by the common population.
The study of archeology is a magical gateway to the past. It is the disciplinethat complements History best with its hard evidences and organizational advantages. The archaeological research article by Curtoni and Politis “Race and Racism in South American Archaeology” attemptsto show that race and racism are still vivid in many social and cultural fields. In this, the authors disparages their own doctrine in order to investigate if the material remains or research papers ofprevious archeologist have affected the socio-cultural past, present and future of race and racism in South America.
Curtoni and Politis present the importance of their own doctrine, by introducingthese huge cultural changes that the archaeology study has made in South America. To examine how race and racisms in South America can be accredited to archeology, the authors reviewed thecontemporary South American examples, as said by Curtoni and Politis (2006, 93-108) “try to gasp subsumed or explicit ideas to race and racism that have been used to sustain archaeological interpretations.”...