Geoarchaeology: a debt in the disciplinary training of Latin American archaeologists
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.2448-1750.revmae.2025.233395Keywords:
Archaeology, Site formation processes, Archaeological stratigraphy, Latin American academic tradition, Curricular debtAbstract
When archaeologists have to deal with the stratigraphy of sites, we excavate “layers” that we generally cannot define genetically and characterize them by color and texture, hoping that a geoscientist will help us interpret them. But shouldn’t an archaeologist be a good interpreter of archaeological stratigraphy whose origins are both natural and cultural? Shouldn’t we have methodological and conceptual tools to assess how a site was formed, how it was buried, and how it reached the present day? These are the basic questions we ask when we think of geoarchaeology as archaeology, a perspective that is due to us in our disciplinary training. Geoarchaeology is not geoscience, it is archaeology. It deals with questions that interest us as archaeologists, about our problems and object of study, about our scales and inferences. This does not prevent us from resorting to different professional geologists, geographers or soil scientists in search of specific analyses or studies, but as archaeologists we must deal with basic aspects of the geoenvironmental context of the site in the same way as we deal with those related to the lithic, bone or ceramic materials present in the archaeological record. Geoarchaeology provides the context for interpretation, dealing with such important issues as the primary or secondary character of a site, the meaning of the association between the materials it contains, the resolution and contemporaneity of archaeological deposits, their preservation, the possible gaps between layers, as well as the natural or cultural origin of some excavated elements and structures. Addressing such basic interpretative aspects of the discipline means that geoarchaeological studies cannot be ignored in any archaeological investigation and should be an inevitable part of the undergraduate curriculum of every professional archaeologist.
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