Digging the Mayans:

Archeologists excavating a 2,500-year-old Maya city in Guatemala have unearthed buildings and massive carvings indicating the presence of a royal metropolis of more than 10,000 people at a time when, scientists had previously believed, the Maya were only simple farmers. New studies at the Cival site in the Peten jungle have unearthed the oldest known carved portrait of a Maya king and two massive stone masks of the Maya maize deity, discoveries indicating that the Maya developed a complex and sophisticated civilization hundreds of years earlier than previously believed. [LA Times]

Besides making news, archaeology plays a strong role in helping to define how we view ourselves, and plays a central role in addressing one of the really Big Questions: Is there such thing as progress? Put another way, does history have a direction? More prosaically, the more we know about past peoples, the more our lives can be informed by their successes and cautioned by their failures.

A couple of years ago I interviewed some experts on archaeology and culture for an NPR radio series I was involved with at the time, the first of whom was Dan Fuller, popular culture expert and English professor at Kent State University, Tuscarawas campus. I asked him what archaeology means:

Dan Fuller - It seems to me that archaeology is simply genealogy in a more scientific sense. People have always been fascinated about where they came from, and that's what so much of the stimulus for archaeology has been: find the mask of Tutankhamen and he shows up on the covers of over 100 publications and that fascination with this was then and this is what we came from.

EO - So deep down, archaeology may help serve some of the same needs as genealogy - our need for roots, for belonging to something greater than our fleeting existence. Each of us is a point on a vertical line of descendants through time, but we are also points on a horizontal line representing humanity here and now. Learning of our past also allows us to measure current humanity against those who have come before. How do we measure up? Dan Fuller is an optimist:

DF - It usually takes me about 30 seconds to convince someone that the good old days were not better: if you consider a life span over thirty to be a desirable thing. Of course there are things that we don't like about our civilization but in fact, most of us really subscribe to an optimistic belief that man can progress. We wouldn't have the United Nations if in fact we did not believe that civilization can improve.