Relationship (archaeology)

Archaeology is like a big puzzle where we dig up pieces of old stuff to figure out how people used to live a long time ago. A relationship in archaeology means how different things we find are connected or related to each other.

Let's say we find an old toothbrush and a broken plate in the same spot. We might think that someone lived there and used both those things. That's a relationship between the toothbrush and the plate. We have to figure out how they were used and why they were left there together.

Sometimes, we find pieces of something that are broken into little bits. For example, we may find pottery shards. We put the pieces back together, like a puzzle, to see what the whole thing looked like. When we find more pieces of the same pottery, we can put them together with the broken bits to see how they're related to each other. We can learn a lot about people's past from the relationships between the things they left behind.