About the Author
Being an archaeologist was something Nancy Marie White wanted to do from the time she learned how to spell the word as a kid. She was interested in Native American cultures, outdoor adventure, and the romance of finding ancient things and lost knowledge. After earning a BA in history, she went to live in Mexico, where she saw that studying archaeology and the rest of anthropology would lead to a fascinating life. She earned a PhD from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland (home of rock and roll), and is now
professor of anthropology at the University of South Florida, Tampa, and a long-time member of the Register of Professional Archaeologists.
White’s research includes finding and sometimes excavating sites of all time periods. She’s currently studying how late prehistoric agricultural societies in the U.S. Southeast became complex and why they had no beer. She also investigates campsites, villages, and mounds of earlier Native American hunter-gatherers, fishers, and gardeners, and lost towns and forts inhabited by historic Indians, European-Americans, and African-Americans. Her one kid, Tony, spent an entire childhood camping in the woods and digging, and now studies engineering. White tries to travel often in order to go somewhere different to visit archaeology. She really believes in public archaeology and the potential of the distant past to show us a lot that might be useful in the modern world.
About This Book
I’ve tried to pack a lot into this book to give you at least a little taste of many things in the smorgasbord of archaeological topics, including ways that archaeology affects your own life that you may not have thought of before.
Here’s what you’ll see in these pages:
* What archaeology really is (and misunderstandings about what it isn’t).
* The many different kinds of archaeology out there, each of which
investigates different things.
* How archaeologists think and how they use scientific method to
reconstruct the past from the material record.
* How to do archaeological fieldwork — survey and excavation.
* The huge amount of work you need to do after fieldwork for processing
* The story of the whole human career — from the first humans through
modern times — known only or mostly from archaeology.
* Guides to help you understand, visit, and do archaeology.
I aim in this book to demystify archaeology, to tell you what it is, how it’s done, where you can do it, and what you can learn from it about humanity.
You should be able to open to any chapter and see the topic of choice, and you can also find everything on the topic by looking in the index.