Artifacts gives look into life in the past (2024)

Question:What are ancient artifacts?

Answer:Archaeologists are scientists who look for and study the evidence left behind by people who lived in the past. This evidence tells us about past events and provides information on how the people before us lived their lives: what they ate, how they built their houses and how they organized their communities. The evidence studied by archaeologists allows us to explain how the course of human history unfolded as it did to lead to the present day. Archaeologists call the evidence of the past artifacts, a term that we define as anything that was the result of human activity. In today, as in the past, we make and use artifacts as part of our daily lives. The forks and knives we use to eat, the clothes we wear and the houses we live in are all artifacts. We also create artifacts when we step into a puddle of concrete, build a campfire or throw chicken bones into the trash. These other kinds of artifacts give us evidence of how we interacted with the environment and are an important source of archaeological information.

Ancient artifacts are simply objects that give evidence about people’s lives in the distant past. Ancient artifacts are often the same kinds of things we use today, but they may look strange to us because they are made out of different materials or make use of unfamiliar technologies. Ancient artifacts, for example, might be the remains of pottery used for cooking, stone knives used for cutting food or simple circular houses used for sheltering families. Ancient artifacts can also be the food remains of past feasts such as shellfish, or they might be footprints preserved in million-year old volcanic ash.

Ancient artifacts are known as far back as the times of our earliest ancestors, at least 2.8 million years ago, and perhaps earlier. These early artifacts are stone tools, systematically broken rocks that appeared to have been used for opening up nuts or tubers. Determining how old an artifact is a major task for archaeologists. Once we find an artifact, we must learn its age so that we can learn the point in time when something was made or used. Archaeologists use a variety of techniques to obtain ages for artifacts.

Over the course of human history, artifacts made by humans have exploded in their number and variety. Many of the earliest artifacts that archaeologists find are made from brittle stone that breaks into sharp flakes, a material that was used to fashion ancient knives and other kinds of tools. Over time, humans began to make ceramic artifacts by firing clay shaped into vessels used for cooking, storage and serving. In more recent history, human artifacts are made out of metal, and now, plastic. All of these artifacts give us information about specific times and places in our history and shed light on the way we live, the resources we depend upon and the technology we have developed. Some of the common artifacts we use today, in fact, will become the evidence that future archaeologists will use to learn about life in the early 21st century. Your smartphone, for example, might be one day become an ancient artifact that allows future archaeologists to learn how people of this time learned about the world and communicated with one another.

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