So what exactly is archaeology? The word comes from the Greek (arkhaiologia, ‘discourse about ancient things’), but today it has come to mean the study of the human past through the material traces of it that have survived. The term human past needs stressing, because archaeologists do not – contrary to what many of the public believe, thanks to the Flintstones, and Raquel Welch in that memorable fur bikini – study dinosaurs, or rocks per se. Those are the realm of palaeontologists and geologists; dinosaurs had been extinct for tens of millions of years when the first humans evolved.

Archaeology starts, really, at the point when the first recognizable ‘artefacts’ (tools) appear – on current evidence, that was in East Africa about 2.5 million years ago – and stretches right up to the present day. What you threw in the garbage yesterday, no matter how useless, disgusting, or potentially embarrassing, has now become part of the recent archaeological record. Although the majority of archaeologists study the remote past (centuries or thousands of years back in time), increasing numbers are turning to historical periods and even quite modern phenomena – for example the Nevada nuclear test-site, the huts of Polar explorers, and even Nazi bunkers and the Berlin Wall have attracted the attention of archaeologists lately!

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One of the qualities most archaeologists need to have in abundance, regardless of their speciality, is optimism – i.e. the belief that they can say something meaningful about the past based simply on its material remains. The basic problem they face is that very little evidence survives of most of the things that ever happened in the past, and of this evidence only the tiniest fraction is ever recovered by archaeologists, and probably only a minute portion of what is recovered is correctly interpreted or identified. But don’t let this put you off – on the contrary, most people use this situation to their advantage: some by devoting time to drawing lines through gaps in the evidence to produce sequences of phases or types; others by simply ignoring how terrible and unrepresentative the data are, and using them regardless to produce stories about the past.