bph@buengc.BU.EDU (Blair P. Houghton) (12/18/88)
In article <881@quintus.UUCP> ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes: >In article <1182@arctic.nprdc.arpa> bickel@nprdc.arpa (Steven Bickel) writes: >>In article <862@quintus.UUCP> ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes: >>>I think you will find very few professional archaeologists claiming that >> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ >> Did you mean anthropologists? >> >No, I meant archaeologists. >Anthropologists study living societies. They have informants. >Archaeologists study dead societies. They have shovels. Archaeologists study artifacts and the gathering thereof. Anthropologists study human artifacts, abstract, inanimate, living, or dead, for the information relating to human activity. While the really glamorous archaeology involves the riches of societies that lived thousands of years ago and are now unsurprisingly dead, or even the bones of hundred-million-year-old vermin, there are archaeologists who study artifacts from periods as late as Watergate. Conversely, there are anthropologists who study Ancient Egypt and the Incas. The Leakeys are anthropologists. --Blair "I almost dug arrowheads for a living."