ARCHAEOLOGY
★★★★★ (3 out of 5)
Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of everything in the world. Today I am reviewing archaeology.
When you dig up something from a long time ago, that’s called archaeology. The things you dig up have to be things besides just rocks – typically dead things or things made by humans.
The only time when it’s not called archaeology is when it’s called grave robbing. If you dig up someone who has been buried within the last maybe 100 years or so, that’s illegal. If you wait about a thousand years until all of the people who cared about the dead person are long gone, then you’re an archaeologist.
Indiana Jones is the most famous archaeologist. The least famous is a woman named Patricia Woznicki.
It takes a lot of work to be a successful archaeologist. It’s probably about 95% digging and maybe 5% finding stuff. And even when you find stuff it probably isn’t that big of a deal. You might only find a bone or a piece of pottery. When you find a whole dinosaur or new kind of primitive man, that’s when things get exciting.
Unearthing an ancient treasure of gold coins is another great thing to find but I’ll bet a lot of those discoveries go unannounced, because the archaeologist would rather just pocket the money and retire than become famous.
If you are an archaeologist who never finds anything, does that mean you’re really just a person who digs a lot of holes for no reason? Not finding anything must be a real bummer. One time a guy wanted the rewards of finding something without having to do all the work, so he just made up a discovery. He took the bones of two different monkeys and claimed it was a new thing called the Piltdown Man. Now if someone ever discovers an actual Piltdown Man, no one will believe it.
Some people believe that the earth is only a few thousand years old. If I was one of those people and I met an archaeologist, I would think he or she was either a liar, or just sadly misled. I might start a counseling center, trying to cure archaeologists so they don’t end up wasting their lives away on something that doesn’t exist.
Please join me next week when I’ll be reviewing Bruce Springsteen.
