Archaeological context

Archaeological context refers to the specific surroundings of an archaeological discovery or artifact. Just like how you have a bedroom, kitchen, and living room in your house, artifacts also have a place where they were found. It’s important to understand the context of the artifact so that we can learn more about the people who used it and when they lived.

Let’s pretend that you found a toy car under your bed. The toy car is the artifact, and the space under the bed is the archaeological context. The context includes everything around the toy car, such as the dust and other toys nearby, which can tell us a lot about how long the toy car was there and how it was used.

Archaeologists study the context of artifacts by digging carefully in a specific location called a “site”. They may find a lot of things in one site, so they use the context to figure out which artifacts are related to each other and which ones are from different times or places. By carefully studying the context of an artifact, archaeologists can learn more about the people who used it, their language, their customs, their beliefs, and their daily lives.