Archaeology more than just a "handmaiden to history"

To Steven Sidebotham, archaeology is more than the "handmaiden to history" label that sometimes is used to describe the discipline. Rather, he says, it is one of the humanities that also includes some features common to research in the natural sciences.

"The discipline is more like a science in some ways," he says. "In a lot of historical research, you go to an archive with a particular objective in mind, you find a finite number of documents, and you use them.

"At an archaeological dig [like the Egyptian port city of Berenike, where he has been working for almost two decades], the research is extremely long term, time-consuming and expensive. It is also very collaborative — definitely not a one-person endeavor."

The Berenike project is jointly run by the University of Delaware and the University of Warsaw, with assistance from European undergraduate and graduate students and local Bedouin workers. Sidebotham and the international team also work with a number of specialists to examine everything from ancient botanical remains to bones, textiles, coins, glass, pottery and other artifacts unearthed at the site.

Sidebotham has been hooked on archaeology since he was a teenage "Army brat" living in Turkey. While in high school there, his ancient-history teacher inspired him to visit nearby archaeological sites. He first went to Egypt in 1965, studied at the American University in Cairo from 1969 to 1971, began his own excavation career in 1972 and first excavated in Egypt in 1980.

Archaeology is clearly one of the humanities, he says, "not a math-science type of exercise" with results that can be tested with precision. And, while it is not history, its goal is to obtain as complete a historical record of any dig site as possible.

But the biggest difference from a laboratory experiment, he says, is that work at an archaeological dig cannot be repeated: "You get only one shot at it, and if you get it wrong — if you don't dig and record it properly and carefully — there is no way of going back and doing it again. You've lost the information forever."