Archaeology Subfields

Traditionally, biblical archaeology is the name given to the study of the archaeological aspects of the history of the Jewish and Christian churches as provided in the Judeo-Christian bible.

Classical archaeology is the study of the ancient Mediterranean, including ancient Greece and Rome and their immediate forebears Minoans and Mycenaeans. The study is often found in ancient history or art departments in graduate schools, and in general is a broad, culture-based study.

Archaeologists who practice cognitive archaeology are interested in the material expression of human ways of thinking about things, such as gender, class, status, kinship.

Commercial archaeology is not, as you might think, the buying and selling of artifacts, but rather archaeology which focuses on the material culture aspects of commerce and transportation.

Cultural Resource Management, also called Heritage Management in some countries, is the way cultural resources including archaeology are managed at the governmental level. When it works best, CRM is a process, in which all the interested parties are allowed to have some input into the decision about what to do about endangered resources on public property.

Economic archaeologists are concerned with how people control their economic resources, most particularly but not entirely, their food supply. Many economic archaeologists are Marxists, in that they are interested in who controls food supply, and how.

Environmental archaeology is the subdiscipline of archaeology that focuses on the impacts of a given culture on the environment, as well as the impact of the environment on that culture.

Experimental archaeology is a branch of archaeological study that replicates or attempts to replicate past processes to understand how the deposits came about. Experimental archaeoloy includes everything from the recreation of a stone tool through flintknapping to reconstruction of an entire village into a living history farm.

Indigenous archaeology is archaeological research which is conducted by the descendants of the people who built the towns, camps, burial sites and middens that are under study. The most explicitly indigenous archaeological research is conducted in the United States and Canada by Native Americans and First Peoples.

The study of ships and sea-faring is often called maritime or marine archaeology, but the study also includes investigations of coastline villages and towns, and other topics related to life on and around the seas and oceans.