Archaeology
Reconstruct past human activity from material evidence by preserving where things were found, how deposits formed, what changed them, and which interpretations the surviving relationships can actually support.
Keep the sherd. Change its context.
Archaeological interpretation depends on relationships among objects, deposits, features, and recorded positions. The ceramic sherd below never changes; only the circumstances of its recovery do.
On a sealed occupation floor
A discrete floor surface sealed by a later deposit.
Hearth ash, animal bone, and several vessels lie on the same surface.
No obvious cut or later intrusion crosses the floor in this teaching example.
The sherd can be discussed as part of an assemblage deposited on this occupation surface.
The sherd alone cannot identify who used the room, what language they spoke, or the exact activity that occurred there.
How much carbon-14 remains?
After a once-living organism stops exchanging carbon with its environment, radioactive carbon-14 decays. This toy model isolates that decay law; real archaeological dating also depends on sample selection, measurement uncertainty, contamination checks, and calibration.
Stratigraphy is about relationships.
In an undisturbed depositional sequence, lower deposits are generally earlier than deposits placed above them. Archaeological sites complicate that simple pattern with cuts, fills, reuse, erosion, burrowing, cultivation, construction, and redeposition, so archaeologists record interfaces and formation processes rather than assigning ages from depth alone.
Excavation destroys a context while documenting it.
Because excavation removes deposits, notes, coordinates, drawings, photographs, samples, and collection records become part of the evidence that future researchers inherit.