Why Archaeology Matters

In an old interview to a Duch television channel, philosopher George Steiner mentioned a scene in Hemingway’s book The Sun Also Rises that exposed eloquently the importance of memory and cultural references for a good and meaningful life. In the scene, one of two close friends on the way from Pamplona mentions the sight of the roofs of Roncesvalles in the horizon. The significance of those words, which announced, for the educated readers, the betrayal the main character, Jake Barnes, was going to suffer from his friend Bill Gorton. Associating Roncesvalles with the song of Roland and his death, betrayed by one of his knights would have, according to Steiner, prepared the reader for the upcoming events and land thickness, interest, and drama to the book. Steiner's point was that as people forget the song of Roland and the story of Charlemagne, their lives become flatter and less interesting, less complicated and rich.

These references, memories, and stories are pieces of knowledge that philosopher Daniel Dennett calls thinking tools, as they are the tools that allow us to reason. One of his colleagues, Bo Dahlbom, wrote that as we cannot do much carpentry with bare hands, we cannot do much thinking with bare brains. We need memories, references, memes, to think better and faster, and archaeology, as literature and cinema, provide them in abundance, and make our lives richer, and far more interesting. 

Archaeology is a source of information about our past, the landscapes where our ancestors lived, their convictions, their thoughts, their problems, and knowing these landscapes we can imagine ourselves in them, and try to understand our humanity better, from a different viewpoint. In defense of our memories and our knowledge, George Steiner mentioned William Blake, something about the preciousness of the details when we try to inventory the totality of the human experience. Archaeology matters because it lends thickness to our lives.

This section is a repository of data pertaining to maritime archaeology and its importance, and to treasure hunting, something that archaeologists consider highly destructive, and based on a shallow and unsophisticated attitude towards our past, culture, identity, and humanity, but that anthropologists must take into consideration as an important part of the human adventure: misery, basic needs, or just greed move people to look for easy wealth, lost treasure waiting to be found and make the finders perhaps happy, or as it often happens, make them fight over every coin and worry about the treasure they have missed. 

It is impossible to talk about archaeology, the source of wonder about our humanity and the our human condition, without talking about treasure hunters and their celebrated fever for easy wealth, which deafens them to the great philosophical questions that inspire the rest of us: who are we? where do we come from? what can we know? where are we going to? what should we do? and turns them to more pedestrian answers, like the famous one 'today is the day!'