Houghton Mifflin Social Studies
Chapter 3, Lesson 2: Examining Sources (pp. 64-70)
I. Unlocking the Archaeological Record
B. By studying the archaeological record, archaeologists can learn many things about people of the past.
C. Archaeologists slowly remove earth at a site and carefully record the exact location of everything they find.
II. Dating the Information
B. Cultural dating compares the objects found at a site with objects whose dates and information are already known.
C. Scientific dating techniques bring small samples of the objects found at a site into a laboratory for detailed analysis.
III. Interpreting the Evidence
B. Different archaeologists come to different conclusions about the materials they examine.
Lesson at a Glance Outline
A. Archaeology is the recovery and study of artifacts, ruins, bones, and fossils from the past.
A. Archaeologists use two methods to determine the age of an artifact, cultural dating and scientific dating.
A. Archaeologists must interpret the evidence they collect just as historians do.
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