Archaeologist in 1748: Pompeii excavations begin

The profession is built around an uncomfortable fact its own maxim states plainly: excavation is destruction. A layer of soil, once dug, can never be re-dug, so every observation must be recorded the first and only time it can be made. That discipline — measured drawings, photographs, context sheets, databases — is what separates an archaeologist from a looter with patience, and it shapes the training, the ethics and the daily routine of everyone in the trade.

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.