Heard a museum curator say we're digging up the 'wrong' stuff now

I was at a talk last week in Santa Fe and the curator said most digs focus on big sites like temples and palaces while ignoring regular villages. It made me wonder if we're missing the whole story of how normal people lived. Has anyone else noticed this shift toward studying everyday settlements instead of just the rich stuff?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_seth21d agoMost Upvoted

Oh man, that hits hard. I swear archaeologists have a weird obsession with finding the fanciest toilet seat from 2000 BC instead of figuring out how regular folks actually survived. Like, cool, you uncovered King Bob's golden chalice, but what about the guy who had to dig the well for that kingdom? We're out here studying one percent of the ancient world and pretending that's the whole picture. It's like future people digging up the White House and thinking everyone lived on 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Pretty sure the baker and blacksmith were the ones keeping society running, not just the guy in the fancy hat.

eric_ramirez6721d ago

Yeah I read this thing from an archaeologist at UNM who said the same thing. He was saying that for decades they basically ignored the trash pits and little houses because those didn't get the funding. All the money went to the big flashy sites because that's what donors and museums wanted to see. But now there's a shift where some teams are specifically looking at the outskirts of these old cities where the farmers and craftsmen lived. The guy said they found way more pottery and tools in one little village than they did in a whole temple complex. Makes you wonder how much we got wrong about daily life because we only looked at the rich people's leftovers.