Archaeologist in 550: Nabonidus digs for older kings

This page follows the job from Nabonidus and the royal tunnels of Pompeii through Champollion's decipherment, Petrie's pottery sequences, Carter's "wonderful things" and Kenyon's trenches at Jericho, to the radiocarbon, DNA and LiDAR revolutions that have remade it. It covers how people actually enter the field today, what a dig day demands, who reached the top of the profession, and how much of the work machines can realistically take.

No — that is paleontology, a branch of geology and biology. Archaeology studies humans and their ancestors through the material they left behind: tools, buildings, bones, seeds, rubbish. The two fields overlap only at human evolution sites like Olduvai Gorge, where archaeologists and paleoanthropologists work side by side. The oldest archaeological material, stone tools from East Africa, is roughly 3 million years old; dinosaurs vanished 66 million years ago.

Do archaeologists keep what they find? No. In almost every country, excavated finds belong to the state, the landowner or a designated museum, and national antiquities laws — Egypt's since 1983, Greece's since 1834 — make keeping or selling them a crime. Professional codes of ethics, such as the Society for American Archaeology's, also bar members from trading in antiquities. The archaeologist's product is the record and the publication, not the objects.