(HOW
LAYERS BUILD UP ON AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITE)
A lot of what archaeologists
find is old rubbish but it is important because it is evidence
of what people have done in the past.
Archaeologists look for things people have used and then thrown away or lost. They look for buildings people lived and worked in before they fell into ruins or were knocked down to build new ones.
They find this evidence
in layers which have built up over time. These pictures will help
you to see how this happens.
Take a look at this modern wheelie bin full of rubbish.
Look at this diagram of an archaeological excavation or ‘dig’. It is like a huge wheelie bin full of layers of rubbish. We have taken a slice down through the ground like slicing through a cake. Archaeologists would call this taking a section. Each layer here represents 100’s of years of rubbish.
PICTURE 3
On a real dig, working out how a place has changed over
the centuries can be complicated because of what people have done to the
ground. In this picture we have again sliced down through the layers of
soils. We call these layers the stratigraphy.
This excavation took place at the Whitefriars site,
Canterbury, Kent in 2002.
Take a look at this 21st century rubbish.
For more about what archaeologists do
For more about decay, evidence and dating (no, not the going out kind!)
• Discovering Archaeology in the National Curriculum, Key Stages 1, 2 and 3. •
• The Whitefriars Excavations • Key Kent Sites • Primary Schools • Secondary Schools •
• Beyond schools • A journey to Medieval Canterbury •
• Roman and Anglo-Saxon Canterbury Reconstructed • Roman Canterbury, a journey into the past •
• Home page •
This page was last updated on 28.04.05
