Experimental Archaeology

The reconstruction and reproduction of past behavior and processes to obtain or evaluate archaeological data and test hypotheses about the way man dealt with subsistence and technology. The experiments involve such activities as creating and using stone tools, duplicating prehistoric methods of farming, building, and travel, etc. The term is normally used only for those experiments which deal with material culture, such as industry, the building of structures, mining, and crop processing. The more theoretical aspects, such as ideas about the development and organization of society, are generally thought of a part of processual archaeology rather than experimental. Reconstructions can be based on excavated ground plans, and some of these have been deliberately burned or left to decay so that an idea can be gained of what the archaeologist might expect to find later. Boats have been built and sailed, food has been cooked in earth ovens and eaten, stone monuments have been laboriously erected, and trumpets and stringed instruments have been made and played. Although past events are not exactly repeatable, experimental simulation can prove very instructive and is being increasingly used. One of the earliest examples was General Pitt-Rivers' observations of the rate and duration of ditch silting on his excavations at Cranbourne Chase in the 19th century.

Term used to describe experiments carried out to test hypotheses about practical aspects of past societies, such as how tools were made and used, how buildings and other structures were constructed and how long the construction would have taken, how ancient crops were planted, harvested and stored, or how boats were made and used. The journey of the Kon Tiki in 1947 is one of the best-known of all archaeological experiments. One of the most important projects still in progress is the experimental farm at Butser Hill in Hampshire, southern England, where hypotheses about Iron Age farming practices are tested. Another type of experiment is aimed at discovering information about how structures, artefacts and materials decay over time; two experimental earthworks in southern England (Overton Down in Wiltshire and Wareham in Dorset) are being excavated at intervals to monitor processes of collapse and silting of the structures, and the movement and decay of various buried materials.