THE archeology it is a discipline that deals with the investigation of evidence, or vestiges, of past civilizations and cultures. The term is composed of the Greek radicals Arkhe, which means both "beginning/beginning" and "order/organization", and Loggia, which in turn means “study/science”. The main objective of archaeological investigations is to provide material subsidies, with precise temporal dating, for the reconstruction of the human past. That's why this science is so important to other disciplines, such as history and anthropology.
The first properly archaeological interests date back to the Middle Ages. The search for the sacred ruins of the Holy Land (such as the Temple of Solomon), carried out by the Knights Templar, already indicated the need to find fragments of ancient civilizations. These fragments allowed a better understanding of what happened in remote times. Like Rebirth (15th and 16th century), there was a revaluation of the classical Greco-Roman culture. The ruins of ancient palaces, temples and sculptures awakened in Renaissance men the interest in to reproduce them, to know how their architectural construction process worked and what kind of techniques they were employed.
But it was only in the 19th century that archeology would be consolidated. The French's decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs Jean-François Champollion, between 1822 and 1824, based on inscriptions in the rosetta stone, was a kick-start for archeology to gain legitimacy. The Rosetta Stone had been found among ruins, on Egyptian soil, by Napoleon's soldiers, in 1798. The ruins and great monuments of the ancient Egyptian civilization kept secrets for the understanding of more than 3 millennia of history. In this way, many researchers went to Egypt between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. Archeology, as a science, was born with these researchers.
Two of the greatest names in the early days of archaeological science were Egyptologists, that is, specialists in Egyptian civilization, who worked excavating at archaeological sites in Egypt. The first is the british sir Petrie Flinders (1853-1942). Petrie started working on archaeological sites in Britain, such as the famous Stonehenge, but it was in Egypt that he stood out, by developing an investigation and classification system for the archaeological finds of the Great Pyramids of the Giza Valley, close to the city Cairo. the second is Howard Carter (1874-1939), assistant to Petrie, also an Egyptologist, besides Egypt he also studied the archaeological sites of the civilization of Nubia, and was responsible for finding the tomb of the pharaoh. Tutankhamun. Even in the nineteenth century, we have the figure of the German Heinrich Schliemann (1822-1890), responsible for discovering the archaeological sites of Mycenaean civilization, which predated the city-states of Ancient Greece.
Do not stop now... There's more after the advertising ;)
In the twentieth century, in addition to archaeological research on great ancient civilizations continue and became more refined, there was also the expansion of archeology to even more remote areas, such as The Prehistory. New dating systems, such as the carbon-14 and of the thermoluminescence, helped archaeologists to specify the time of human bones, as well as that of ceramics, fabrics, stone instruments, etc. In this aspect, archeology also goes hand in hand with biology (theory of evolution and paleontology), in addition to continuing to link up with history and anthropology.
In the Brazilian case, one of the examples with the greatest repercussion in the area of archeology was the discovery of the archaeological site of Serra da Capybara, in São Raimundo Nonato, Piauí. The discovery was made by the São Paulo archaeologist Niéde Guidon in the 1960s. This site comprises one of the places with the largest record of cave paintings in the world. In just one point in the Serra, there is a panel with more than 3,000 different images of paintings, in addition to having fossil records and other types of remains dating back thousands of years before Christ.
*Image credits: shutterstock and thomas koch
By Me. Cláudio Fernandes
