X Marks the Spot

And we're gonna be talking about not just the technology using archaeology. We're going to talk a little bit about an overview of what it is and how it evolved over time, because that's kind of hand in hand with what is going on now in the field of archaeology. Right. The technology being used today is some really vance stuff, but for a long time that was not the case, because archaeology is actually a fairly young field. So I

guess first we should explain what it is. I suppose sure, Yes, it's it's the study of human activity, um, in the past. In the past, yeah, not now right, So essentially it's it's related to history, it's related to anthropology. Uh, it's got some similarities with other disciplines, but this is mainly all about studying what human life was like in the past, based mostly on the stuff that our ancestors left behind. Well, you know, kind of necessarily because what they didn't leave

behind we have very little record of. Yeah, exactly, we can't study what wasn't left behind. That's actually very true, not profound, but true. Um. But yeah, So so it's a crossover with a lot of other disciplines, and lots of other scientists will kind of work hand in hand with archaeologists to to promote research for for both of

their fields. Oh sure, Yeah, it's interdisciplinary, so you can have people from multiple disciplines and expertise is coming in on a on a single project for multiple reasons, including people who might not technically be considered scientists by everyone, like a historians or um or artists. Right, yeah, you've got you've got a lot of art historians and other types of historians as well. In fact, archaeology as a discipline kind of straddles the line between science and uh

a humanity. Uh. And it's sort of because the techniques have been evolving over time as well. We're getting to a point now where there are some archaeologists are using some very high tech, sophisticated techniques, whereas in the past it was a lot more well Indiana Jones ish in the sense that you were getting down and dirty with it, although you were rarely chased by a giant rolling ball or uh, you know, things of that nature that that we've heard of personally. I mean, I'm sure that someone

out there, actually I'm not sure at all. Maybe if they were lost in a giant game of mouse trap, right, that's that's about as close as we can get. Um. But okay, So, so the thing is is that Indiana Jones was a terrible archaeologist, but it's not his fault. He did not have access to all of the tools that we have today, as dashing as he was and as good as he was with a whip, which sounds weird when I say it out loud, that he you know,

it's it's not his fault. Although a lot of the things that you know that we kind of see him doing in those films are things that archaeologists, archaeologists have done and still do today, especially the predecessors of today's archaeologists. Well, I mean, you know, there's still a certain amount of digging and brushing a little gently of things a little less. Uh. There are fewer examples of um unauthorized tomb rating in in established archaeology, which is really, when you get down

to it, what Indiana Jones was doing. Like if you watch that first movie where he's trying to get the idol and they being chased off by the indigenous people of that jungle that he's in, it's pretty clear he did not have full permission to go in there. Well, and the entire kind of terrible notion of like it this belongs in a museum as opposed to with the people who created it is a little bit weird. But um, but but that's actually stealing stuff from ancient cultures is

how archaeology began. Wow, well, I mean shouldn't be a surprise. You could argue that chemistry kind of started off with people trying to figure out how to make worthless stuff into very valuable stuff. Okay, So, so archaeology really originated in Europe our circle than fourteen hundreds is when wealthy Renaissance collectors started acquiring antiquities from from Greece and Rome as art rather than artifacts. They weren't really interested in

the history of these items. They were like, this is pretty I wanted in my house. Yeah, this is very typical of the Renaissance, I mean Renaissance. Of course, the whole Rebirth it was mostly about how Europe kind of rediscovered this amazing civilization that existed a thousand years earlier. But for between the time of the Fall of Rome and uh and the Renaissance, there was a whole lot of We're gonna just concentrate on not getting killed by

all those other people out there. And this is to the point where they're finally saying, hey, look, we're smart, but there were smart people a long time ago to their stuff, and let's stop burning books, read them instead. Crazy um and and so some of these wealthy collectors even even wrote really expansive travelogs and guides to ruins to you know, tell their fellow rich people how to go rob right. So again it still was not a way of documenting something for a historical record. It was

more of guys, I found the best antique small. Uh, you just have to break in there and take whatever you want, and it's all old and awesome. Yeah, and eventually even bigger patrons of the arts as as much as they were got into us, have been this and drove really large excavations, um like the initial digs at Pompeii Um, which was both victimized and preserved by Vesuvius's explosion and what like circle like seventy nine CE. I've

been there, by the way. Yeah, fascinating place, absolutely, and you can see where things have been perfectly preserved after there were excavations where things have been buried with ash and things of that nature. And it is amazing. All those early excavations were due to basically the Queen of Naples saying I want some statues, go get some from that place. And I hear that the famous not actually short Napoleon Bonaparte was interested in this kind of thing too.

He was of average height for his time, in fact, not just for his time. I think it was like five ft seven or five ft eight, so it was actually six or five seven. Yeah, so a little bit short for now, but totally average for the time. It's a whole inconsistency in uh in English, Yeah, exact leads.

It's uh. That's another podcast and stuff you missed in history class I'm sure has covered it, but at any rate, right, No, So when he invaded Egypt in seventeen, he brought a group of a hundred and seventy five scholars that we're calling themselves the Institute of Egypt UM. And they came with like a traveling library, scientific tools, measuring instruments, and they published this huge illustrated tome called Description of Egypt. I'm assuming the title was originally in French UM, but uh.

And and that helped launch kind of the first wave of egypt Mania in the in the West. And we're starting to see here actual scholarly work being applied to this, as opposed to just I like this, I like the stuff that these people made, get it for me. So now we're starting to see this develop, at least informally, into more of a scholarly discipline as opposed to to tomb robbing. Right. Meanwhile, lots of other scholarly disciplines were advancing.

Geology and biology were both coming into their own. UM. Charles L. Really helps spread UM this this modern geologic

system of uniformitarian stratigraphy UM. And this gave archaeologists a kind of time scale on which date items based on sediment, and that along with Charles Darwin's Origin of Species um popularized evolution and and allowed prehistoric archaeology to actually become a thing where people could actually look for uh, for examples of prehistoric civilizations by the stuff they left behind. And because of this other these other disciplines, they could start to at least give a range of dates for

when those civilizations may have been active. Now, in these early days, that range was not very precise, right, you could coute not like when you're talking about geologic ages. Obviously, mankind has only been around for a very tiny fraction of a geologic age, so your your precision is pretty touch and go. But it could still at least give some indication as to how old any particular finding would be.

And that was sort of the footholds of modern archaeology. Yeah, and and we'll get a little bit into some of those some of those geologic methods in just a minute.

But um uh Meanwhile, I think the real founding of archaeology as a science was when Flinders Petrie published Methods and Aims in Archaeology in nineteen o four, and that described a systematic method for excavation that was that was the basis I mean, it's kind of sort of a little bit still the basis of how people go about go about a dig and making sure that everything is well documented and laid out in a way that you can take enough notes and gather enough data. Because okay,

archaeology is a destructive science. Necessarily, as you're taking apart a site, you are you are taking it apart. It's not going to be the way that it was ever again. It's it's the same thing for for crime scene forensics. You know, it's and in the investigation of where everything was and how it is laid out, you have to move it around right, So you have to you have to take a lot of really exhaustive initial measurements without without disturbing as much as you possibly can, and then

you progressively get more and more involved. That's why those notes are so important, because three or four steps down the line is not going to resemble what it did when you first got there. And uh in the United States again early in the nineteen hundreds realized this and passed the Antiquities Act, which prohibits the excavation or destruction of archaeological materials on any kind of government land. And I think that that's the point at which we have

like legal documentation that archaeology was a science. Yeah, so this is that they're saying, there are people who will be uh certified and ratified and allowed to do this sort of stuff. Everyone else, keep your grubby myths off it, right,

That's essentially the message. And then just a little bit further on, in the nineteen hundreds, archaeology became really popularized through some huge discoveries like King Tut's tomb um, the Sumerian royal tombs that are you know, these are huge newspaper headline inducing kind of digs and and that's kind of where we get the sort of pulp novels that

led to Indiana Jones right exactly. This this kind of led to this sort of exotic you know, the heroic explorer who is uncovering uh, you know, history itself and discovering stuff that was long thought to have been gone forever. And that that's a very romanticized version of what an archaeologist really does. I think any archaeologist who has done a lot of field work would be like, look, I

obviously love what I do and I am passionate about it. However, most of the time, I'm not running around fighting bad guys for access to precious historical artifacts. There's very few saving hot babes involved. I mean, I would imagine probably not as much whipping at least. I'm gonna leave the rest of that alone. So at any rate, um, at any rate, do we have time for something about Nazis?

We have to talk about this, okay, okay, So speaking of Indiana Jones, the Nazis totally had a thing for archaeology. I mean, this is a super legit story. I mean, Indiana Jones is not a super legit story, but except behind it, Yeah, the idea that Indiana Jones was competing against Nazis to get access to certain things has a basis and historical fact. Yes, um, Chuck wrote a really good chuck of course of stuff you should know. Yeah, it's a little show. You might, Yeah you might. You

might have listened to it once or twice. Has a great article on how stuff works called what did the Nazis have to do with Archaeology? And uh and and plumbed directly from that. So part of Hitler's entire plan um, you know, as of his swearing in in ninety three, was aligning the curriculum of German universities with the interests of the Nazi Party, which we kind of touched on in our Heisenberg episode where off about physics. Yeah yeah, um.

And this was including the idea that their Germanic people were descendants of this original Aryan master race. So he sent teams of archaeologists excavate sites around the world that he believed would help back up this theory. So in other words, he's searching for evidence to prove the philosophy that he was he was writing at the time. Yes, uh it failed, yeah a lot, basically, um, I mean.

And and they put they put a huge budget into this, uh Himmler himself led a group called the Ancestral Heritage Research and Teaching Society that went everywhere looking for this history. Um that They also you know, dug up part of Poland, hoping to prove that the Germans had lived there first and had legit claim to the land after, you know, after they invaded again, trying to search for evidence to

justify their actions. So not a not a bright chapter in human history, obviously, but another example of how archaeology was becoming a really important field of study. So let's talk about some of the tools that are important for archaeologists, things that that they rely on, and we should go ahead and say maybe I should have said this earlier.

This is gonna be a two part episode. This first part we're looking at some of the basic tools and just the basic philosophies that guide archaeology and in um. In our next episode, we're going to dive into more detail about some of the more high tech tools that have become more available recently. We'll get a little bit into some of the high tech sort of science that has that that from mid century has started to to really develop how we can evaluate archaeological digs. Right, So

starting with the hand tools, the basic hand tools. Now, keep in mind, archaeology is something where often we're looking for evidence that has been at least partially, if not entirely, covered up by soil and rocks and often sand, Like when we're talking about the the Egyptian digs, they are usually it's things that after hundreds of years, have been covered up by by sand. So a lot of the tools are basic hand tools meant to remove that kind

of stuff. Like, you don't want to get too many big, heavy right, because you could just inadvertently damage very stuff that you're looking for. So, but you do get some stuff that is pretty heavy duty for hand tools. I mean, it's not all like a very light brush where you can gently brush the dirt away. Right. Well, that's by the time you get down to something that you that you suspect might be an artifact, you're going to use a very gentle brush. But until then, it's time to

put your back into it. So you've got some pick axes, some shovels, hose, yeah, maddox. Maddox are tools that are used to break up hard ground. So any of my fellow farmer folks out there, I say fellow farmer folk because as a kid, I used to have to do this kind of stuff. I had no idea what that thing is. Yeah, it's no, it's a hand tool. Use

it to break up hard ground. It's you know, if if the shovel is not going to do it because the ground is too hard, you bring in a mannequin, you break it up, and then you use the shovel. It just means making more work for yourself down the line. Of course, you know, you have to have something to move that stuff all the all the spoil away, right, buckets and wheelbarrows, getting I mean, we're talking about lots

of physical labor here. Eventually you might get down to a point where you're using something along the lines of a trowel instead of a shovel, because you want to be a little more precise. Perhaps you're starting to see what could be the outline of perhaps like a wall of a settlement, Sure, or even maybe encounter fragments of pottery or something like that that you want to kind of scoop up in preserve. Sure, and uh, of course we'll talk about it more in the second half of

this episode. You want to be really careful about what kind of contact you make with this stuff, right, because some of the processes that you can use to identify or to date these objects can be thrown off by by human touch. Yeah, you could actually corrupt your own data just by picking something up, So it's really important to try and maintain that distance. On top of that, of course, you do have the brushes to brush away

extra dirt. Other things that you might use to get some dirt and and and sentiment off of an artifact include dental tools, So you can use these little like like dental picks to get to get dirt out of grooves and things like that. Uh So, so you know, a lot of the reason why these early tools were very general purpose or were repurposed from other disciplines was because again archaeology was a young science and so not a lot of work had been had gone into developing

tools specifically for archaeology. Early on, they were essentially using whatever else would do the job they needed done and repurposing it. And and and I mean that still happens. I've heard about people using you know, like pen knives and chopsticks in the field, whatever happens to be lying around it tends to be one of those things where you know, there are tools out there that do the ub really well. So there's not a whole demand to

start developing things specifically for archaeology. Doesn't mean that there aren't companies that do it. There are, But you know, if you're like, well, this is a relatively inexpensive tool I can get that will do what I needed to do,

let's go with that. On top of that, you have things, you know, like basic tools like line levels and plumbobs, which you use to try and make sure that if you're using other types of equipment that require level ground that you're you've got that straight and we'll talk about in the second episode. I'm so excited. Also for for surveying purposes, are important tape measures obviously if you need to start determining things like the size of a particular

artifact area or maybe it's even a house or a wall. Again, these are things where you know you're gonna take these measurements, that you can write all this stuff down as early as you possibly can, so you can you can start to form that image of what this site looked like originally, you know, hundreds or perhaps even thousands of years ago. So, uh, interesting little tidbit I did not know until we started

to research this podcast. It turns out there are two different styles of measuring depending upon the nature of the site you're looking at. If you're looking at a prehistoric site, you measure using the metric system, because that's what science does. Yeah, metric system is easy, right, I mean, it makes sense, everything's in tens or hundreds, easy to deal with. Here in America, that's not necessarily good enough. You know, we don't like our you don't like our measurements to be easy. No,

that's ridiculous, would be silly. So here's the thing. Anything that's of a historical time period, so prehistory versus history, historical time period stuff tends to be measured using English standard measure units like inches and feet because that's what the people of the time we're using when they were building their stuff. Yeah, yeah, I mean especially here here in the West, I I would imagine, and for most

ranges of history. Yeah, certain ranges of history, right, and in other parts of the world where the English measuring system would not have been introduced, then it's a little different. But yeah, if you're if you're researching let's say you're researching a an ancient Roman establishment in in in Britain because the Romans had had Britain and you wanted to measure that, then uh, you know, that might be one

set of standards. And then let's say that you're looking at maybe it's something from the Middle Ages in Britain, that would be a different set. So you know, it all depends. But it's it's interesting to me that in general, the prehistoric is in metric and the historic sites are in English standard. So yeah, I didn't know that either. That's some complicated and fascinating. Yeah, I wonder if there are.

I'm sure there are. I mean, there have to be archaeologists who specialize in in certain types, but it makes me wonder what their dinner parties are like. Um. There are other tools that are often used, things like calipers, obviously to be able to pick things up without actually touching them yourself. But also there's a tool called a

soil core, which is fairly unique to archaeology. I mean, you can use it in geology too, but a soil core is essentially a imagine a metal tube And what you do with the smell tube is you shove it into the ground and then you yank it back out again and it pulls out a soil sample. Yeah, exactly. And then you look at the stuff what you pulled out, and you look to see if there's any evidence for artifacts, organic matter, that kind of thing that could indicate the

presence of human settlement or whatever. And if you find it, then that gives you an idea of all right, well, this is definitely an area we need to look at

when we're doing our excavation. If you're you know, you might be doing a few you would do lots of soil samples obviously, but it might help you determine all right, I think we're beyond the border now because none of these core samples are coming back with anything, or maybe that you're in a different area and you're thinking, oh, settlement is actually larger than we first anticipated, because we're

actually finding quite a bit of stuff over here. It's just that everything has overgrown to the point where we never would have suspected it otherwise. So it's really cool stuff. So those are your basic hand tools, right, the stuff that that archaeologists have been using in one form or another for decades. You know, some some of these, some of these are as old as as people going into

tombs to rob them. But so that kind of covers the basic hand tools, you know, the stuff that in some form or another has been around for like decades or hundreds of years. And yeah, if you've been tomb robbing this whole time, you probably used to shovel at some point. And and technically shovels and brushes are technology,

Yeah they are. I mean we talk about how you know, a lot of tech stuff is all about the higher text things, but electron that we we do tend to like every now and then revisit stuff that's older technology. And while you know, on the face of it we might dismiss it as it's just a tool, at one time that was a world altering technology. So yeah, I can imagine that for early farmers, shovels were pretty pretty big.

Yeah yeah, Okay, so we've got those basic tools out of the way, and before we move on, let's just take a really quick break to thank our sponsor. All right, and we're back. So now we've talked about the basic tools, all right, Lauren, let me let me give you a little scenario. All right, Let's say that I have joined

an archaeological dig. Perhaps I've got one of those sort of eco tourism type things going on, or maybe I've taken a class or something, or I don't know, maybe my brain has been swapped with someone way smarter than I am, and I've gone out and I've done this archaeological dig and I found something and it looks really neat.

How do I tell how old it is? Well, okay, Historically we relied on things like self dating, you know, like like some items like coins will be stamped with a date, which is that's handy more or less reliable as soon as assuming you know what the indigenous people's dating system was, yes, and assuming that you can read it clearly, and that they weren't lying right right, you know, that could have been backdating their coins. I know, I

hate it when that happens. Um. And and also relative dating, which is extrapolating the date of unknown items from the

known dates of self dated items. Right. So in other words, you might be like you might think along the lines of, well, this this settlement existed as far as we can tell two hundreds something years before this other one did, and we know the dates of this other one, so from that we're going to extrapolate a lot of information, all right, But that's also not always reliable because I mean, because

sediment patterns can change over the years. Um, you know, looting and other explorations of the site could have moved stuff around or left more more recent things with older things. And it really only works for for items about five thousand years back for for you know, recorded history, right, So if you're wanting to look at stuff all the

way from the Stone Age, then that's not gonna cut it. No. However, around the eighteen hundreds or so, um, if if you were finding old stuff, you could start using things like like clave arf, counting clave ARFs being an annual layer of sedimentary rock that's created during wet and dry seasons each year. Wow. So this is almost like a geological version of tree rings, but it's just depending upon those wet dry seasons, right, interesting exactly. I mean you can

also use tree rings. Um. There you go. That's another thing you could do. That's dender chronology. Um. And that's you can use it to date pieces of wood pretty specifically. I did, dude, I did date a few pieces of wood in my college. Yes, yeah, me too. It was a yeah, you know, eventually you find the personalities out there, so stick with it people. We good luck, yeah, good luck. Yeah yeah. This This entire section, by the way, is

titled how dating works, um, which cracked me up. And but I'm sparing you the majority of the jokes that I made. Oh wait for it. So all of these kind of kind of geological sort of things helped us determine um lots of prehistorical artifacts timeline. Sure, but it wasn't until we we didn't get any kind of specificity about stuff like this until the nineteen forties. Um, that's when one Willard Libby developed the carbon dating process. All right,

and I know a little bit about carbon dating. I understand that it actually requires that you compare two different types of carbon against each other, and the differences between those two give you an indication of how old something is. Is that right? That is exactly how it works, yes, um, specifically Okay. So, so there's a radioactive isotope of carbon called carbon fourteen. It has a half life of about

five thousand, seven hundred years, and it's really plentiful around earth. Um, living things absorb it, Plants take it in as as part of carbon dioxide. Other living exeat plants, circle of life, so on and so forth. Exactly. But so you've got this radioactive isotope, and then you've got, um, the stable normal carbon, which is carbon twelve, two different types of carbon.

You have carbon fourteen in carbon twelve, right, And the ratio of these two in the air and in living things is pretty much constant, even though the fourteen keeps decaying into carbon twelve. Okay, So if that ratio is constant, then that suggests to me that in fact, these living things are getting new sources of carbon fourteen because otherwise

the ratio would get out of whack after a while. Right, right, Well, we we get carbon fourteen because of cosmic rays hitting particles in the atmosphere and and creating it and stuff and things, um so, But so we breathe it in constantly. It's in our bodies, and it decays slowly over time into carbon twelve. Okay, So as long as we're alive, we keep getting carbon fourteen, correct, and we maintain that ratio. But after we die, we stopped taking in carbon fourteen.

So therefore, if you compare the amount of carbon fourteen to carbon twelve in an artifact, in an organic artifact, anyway, you can get a pretty good idea of how old it is. I see. So because you know that carbon fourteen decays over time into carbon twelve in a study in constant right, and you know what the ratio is in general between carbon twelve and carbon fourteen for a living object. By checking that new ratio, you can kind of extrapolate how old, or at least how long this

thing has been dead more or less. Yeah, it's it's not a really I mean, it's more precise than previous methods were, but it's still giving you a range, it's still giving you a range, and there's some downfalls um. For example, like we kind of mentioned earlier, UM, if you touch organic material um to the object in question, you know, like like your hand being organic material um,

then you can contaminate that sample. So in other words, you could get a false reading from it because you've actually some of your carbon may have actually corrupted it. Now what I think one of the things I think is interesting here is how, once again, anyone anyone listening to this podcast who has watched any kind of movies that are about uh, not just archaeology, but anytime you're having characters who are digging up an old side or something.

Carbon dating was like the the the blanket statement to find out how old anything was, whether it was organic or not. I'm thinking specifically of there was some horrible science fiction film. It was one of the ones that m ST three k riffed on, where their solution to figuring out how old this clearly non organic thing was was through carbon dating, and I thought, I don't think that works the way you think it works. It Maybe spaceships are made from carbon, and I don't, yeah, from alive.

So that's something true. UM and and also I mean okay, so so you can't really do it with with very small samples, although improved techniques are helping to change that, UM and the data can be a little bit off for for newer samples. UM And they can also be off for anything over fifty years old because the too much of the carbon has degraded to really accurate. Idea, so basically more than years old, right, so anything that's younger than fifty years old, but not so young as

to have happened like within the recent past. So that's what it's good for. So let me ask you this, Uh, large samples obviously something that you need to do. I imagine that this also requires that you have to move stuff, because I don't I can't imagine there being like a carbon dating kit that you drag out with you to the archaeological site that you just pick up an artifact and you scan it and everything's cool. Another thing you

have to watch out for. UM there have been periodic fluctuations in the ratio of carbon twelve carbon fourteen over the millennia um and and we're gathering more data about that all the time. UM. But you know it's it's something that has to be taken into consideration. Right, So that could mean that something that you had previously or at least you thought you had previously previously established to a particular time might in fact be from a different

time because of one of those fluctuations be nudged earlier later. Um, Robert and Julie over a stuff to blow your mind did a whole episode on this back in April April to be precise, called how old is that artifact in the window? Um? And it talks a little bit more about the process if you're if you're curious to learn more, and also about some of the controversies that have come up with specific artifacts due to all of these kind

of weird behavior exceptions to the rule type of thing. Absolutely. Now, I understand there are some other techniques that are similar to carbon dating, but they're not using carbon, which would allow archaeologists to actually date non organic stuff like rocks and minerals, right or spaceships, um. Right, because it clearly

Indian Jones four taught us, Oh no, it's here, um. Yeah. No. Other radioactive isotopes can be used for basically the same job, Like a potassium forty is pretty good uh, you can. You can compare the the argon in minerals and rocks to to the amount of potassium forty and that will give you a similar effect. And that chronology can can

date things back to like two million years. So so that's how we've gotten done a lot of um paleo archaeology, right, yeah, because paleontology and archaeology are similar disciplines but not exactly the same thing. So okay, so that makes sense, all right. So Unfortunately that the the thing about all of this, All of this always got toring me down, I know, right, science bringing us down. Unfortunately, all of these methods have been basically screwed over forever by the fact that we

have nuclear weapons and reactors. Oh right, I guess those could kind of influence the amounts of radiation that you would find in any given sample. And you know, so I'm sure that future you know, aliens or human populations or whatever could find a way around it. They're probably going to be pretty clever, right, Yeah, they'll have a holidayck and they'll the person will just appear and say, oh, yeah, I was around at this time, but until then, man,

science shucks, always bringing us down. Now, I gotta ask you about this because I see it in the notes. I don't know what this is. It's um thermoluminescence. So if I have to guess, I would say it's got something to do with heat and light. That is entirely correct, all right. So basically, some pottery includes crystaline materials like quartz um that when heated, release electrons that were trapped

in defects in the crystal structure. And that means that during the initial firing of a piece of pottery um, it kind of sets this quartz clock to zero. UM be cause the the electrons got into those defects and in the crystals through um, through cosmic rays, through the absorption of electromagnetic radiation, or or through the the the effects that probably the piezo electric effects of electromatic magnetic

radiation on the crystals. We'll have a lot more to say about piezo electric effects in part two of this show. We will um and also in another episode that we're according to. That's right, it's we're all about the piezo electric effect up here. They're everywhere. So so over the years, defects absorb electrons at a pretty constant rate, and so if you find a bit of pottery that has that has previously been fired in the ground, dig it up and reheat it, and then measure the amount of electrons

that you get off of it. You can date kind of sort of where like like how long it has existed since it's been originally fired. That's pretty incredible. I mean, it's you know, it's an interesting, very novel approach to

trying to go around finding how old something is. Uh. And this is just an example of the ingenuity that people have applied to this discipline to be able to learn more about where we come from and the ancestors that came before us who didn't leave any written records, and you know, how do we know more about them? This is exactly how we have to go about it,

which is why I find it so fascinating. Anytime you you're talking about unraveling a mystery, obviously that that arouses curiosity, right, So not a big surprise that we had a bunch of pulp action heroes kind of come out of this, including the beloved Indiana Jones. Let's not let's not even you know acknowledge the fourth movie. Yeah no, No, Chyltte Booth was never a part never a part of Indiana Jones.

Uh bad dates. All right? So um, anyway, that wraps up our first episode about archaeology, but we're going to do another episode where we're talking about some of the newer technology that's being used in the field and how it's really making this a truly exciting discipline for the twenty one century. Not that it wasn't exciting before, but now we're actually gonna have chances to, at least in a virtual way, see what these places look like. It's exciting in a much nerdier way, which is why I

get all excited at the end of the episode. So guys, if you have any suggestions for future topics that we can cover here on tech Stuff, I recommend you let us know. How do you do that? You ask, Well, here's a way. Send us an email our addresses tech Stuff at Discovery dot com. Or if you are a social media guru, then you can jump onto Facebook or Twitter and hey, what's that blogging thing that all the

kids are doing now? Humbler tumbler and find us at tech Stuff hs W M Lauren and I will talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics because it has staff works dot com