What Is Archaeology? Research Areas, Funding, and Career Paths

Archaeology is the study of past human societies through the material things they left behind — artifacts, structures, food remains, burials, and the traces of entire landscapes — used to reconstruct how people lived, what they made and used, how their societies changed, and how they interacted with their environment. It is the primary way researchers reconstruct human history for the vast majority of the human past that left no written record, and it remains essential even for literate periods, where material evidence often reveals what documents omit. This guide answers what archaeology actually studies, its major subfields, how archaeological research gets funded, the methods and tools archaeologists use, and typical career and training paths into the field.

What Is Archaeology?

Archaeology is the systematic study of past human activity through material remains — tools, pottery, architecture, human and animal bone, plant remains, and the broader landscapes people shaped and inhabited. Its central questions are, in essence: what did people make and do, how and why did their societies and technologies change over time, and what does the physical evidence show that written sources cannot — either because no writing existed yet, or because writing preserves only what its authors chose to record. Archaeology spans an enormous range, from the earliest stone tools made by human ancestors millions of years ago to the material culture of the recent past, including sites and objects from the 20th century.

In the North American academic tradition, archaeology is organized as one of the four core subfields of anthropology, alongside cultural, biological, and linguistic anthropology — reflecting the view that the human past, like human biology, culture, and language, is best understood as part of a single connected study of humankind. Outside North America, particularly in the UK and much of Europe, archaeology is more often organized as its own independent discipline or paired with history, with its own departments distinct from anthropology. Either way, archaeology sits at a genuine disciplinary crossroads: it draws on anthropological theory to interpret past societies, on history and epigraphy where written records exist alongside material remains, and heavily on the natural sciences — geology and earth science for understanding how sites form and preserve, chemistry and physics for dating and materials analysis, and biology for the study of ancient plant, animal, and human remains.

Archaeology is distinct from paleontology, with which it is sometimes confused: paleontology studies the fossil record of ancient life in general, including species that predate humans by hundreds of millions of years, using geological and biological methods, while archaeology studies human activity specifically, through artifacts and other traces of behavior rather than fossils alone. The two fields do overlap directly in paleoanthropology, the study of human and hominin fossil evolution, and share core techniques such as stratigraphic excavation and absolute dating — see What Is Paleontology? for how that neighboring field approaches the deeper fossil record.

Major Subdisciplines of Archaeology

Archaeology is organized both by time period/region and by specialized method. Common divisions include:

• Prehistoric archaeology — the study of societies before the existence of written records in a given region, spanning the earliest hominin tool use through the emergence of complex societies; the primary and often only source of evidence for the vast majority of human history.
• Historical archaeology — the study of societies alongside surviving written records, combining excavation with documentary research; in the Americas this often centers on the colonial and post-colonial period, while classical archaeology (Greek and Roman) and Egyptology are prominent historical-archaeology traditions in their own right.
• Bioarchaeology — the study of human skeletal remains from archaeological contexts to reconstruct health, diet, activity patterns, and population history; closely related to the biological/physical anthropology subfield covered in What Is Anthropology?.
• Zooarchaeology and archaeobotany — the analysis of animal bone and plant remains (seeds, pollen, charred plant material) recovered from sites, used to reconstruct diet, subsistence strategies, domestication, and environmental change.
• Geoarchaeology — the application of earth-science methods — soil science, sedimentology, geomorphology — to understand how archaeological sites formed, were buried, and were preserved or disturbed over time.
• Archaeometry — the application of physical and chemical science to archaeological materials, especially for dating, sourcing raw materials (such as tracing obsidian or metal artifacts back to their geological origin), and characterizing how objects were made.
• Underwater and maritime archaeology — the study of submerged sites, shipwrecks, and coastal/riverine settlements, requiring specialized diving, remote-sensing, and site-preservation methods.
• Cultural resource management (CRM) archaeology — applied, contract-based archaeology conducted ahead of construction and development projects to identify and, where required, mitigate impacts to archaeological sites; in the United States this work is driven largely by compliance with Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act, and it employs the majority of professional archaeologists in the country.
• Ethnoarchaeology — the study of living societies’ material practices and land use, used to build interpretive analogies for reading the archaeological record of the past.

How Archaeological Research Is Funded

Archaeological research draws on a mix of federal science funding, humanities funding, private foundations, and — distinctively for the field — a large volume of compliance-driven contract work that funds the majority of fieldwork actually conducted in the United States.

• National Science Foundation (NSF) — within NSF’s Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE), the Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences (BCS) supports anthropologically oriented archaeological and archaeometric research, including dissertation-improvement grants for graduate fieldwork; NSF’s Division of Earth Sciences and Office of Polar Programs also fund geoarchaeological and paleoclimate-adjacent work where a project’s core questions are earth-science rather than anthropological in framing.
• National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) — funds archaeological research with a strong interpretive, preservation, or public-facing dimension through programs in its Division of Preservation and Access (including support for archaeological collections and archives) and its fellowship programs, reflecting archaeology’s position as also a humanities discipline concerned with historical interpretation.
• Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research — a private foundation funding dissertation and postdoctoral fieldwork grants across all four anthropology subfields, including archaeology, and one of the few funders organized around the discipline itself.
• National Geographic Society — funds field-based archaeological research through its Explorer grant programs, particularly projects with a strong field, exploration, or public-storytelling component.
• Cultural resource management (CRM) contracts — in the US, developers and government agencies are required under the National Historic Preservation Act and related state laws to fund archaeological survey and, where sites are affected, excavation or mitigation ahead of construction; this compliance-driven contract funding, not competitive grants, supports the largest share of archaeological fieldwork actually performed in the country each year.
• International and government funders — outside the US, archaeology is typically funded through national research councils and antiquities or heritage authorities, such as the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), rather than a discipline-specific body; many countries also require excavation permits issued by a national antiquities authority regardless of funding source.

Because fieldwork frequently takes place in another country or on land governed by tribal, state, or federal authority, archaeology grant budgets and timelines typically need to account for excavation permits, human-subjects and human-remains review, and repatriation obligations in addition to standard research costs.

Common Research Methods and Tools in Archaeology

• Survey and remote sensing — systematic pedestrian survey to locate sites, increasingly supported by aerial and satellite imagery and LiDAR, which can reveal buried or vegetation-obscured features such as earthworks and settlement layouts across large areas.
• Geophysical prospection — ground-penetrating radar (GPR), magnetometry, and electrical resistivity survey, used to locate subsurface features such as walls, ditches, and burials without excavating.
• Stratigraphic excavation and recording — controlled removal of soil layers in the order they were deposited, with careful recording (often using a Harris matrix) of each layer’s position relative to others, since the sequence of deposits is central to interpreting a site’s chronology.
• Absolute and relative dating — radiocarbon (carbon-14) dating for organic material within roughly the last 50,000 years, dendrochronology (tree-ring dating), and luminescence dating (such as optically stimulated luminescence) for sediments and heated materials, alongside relative methods such as stratigraphy and artifact seriation for sequencing sites without an absolute date.
• Archaeometric and lab-based analysis — isotope analysis (for reconstructing diet, mobility, and climate), residue and use-wear analysis, and materials sourcing techniques such as X-ray fluorescence (XRF) to trace where stone, metal, or ceramic raw materials originated.
• Zooarchaeological and archaeobotanical lab analysis — identification and quantification of recovered animal bone and plant remains to reconstruct subsistence, domestication, and past environments.
• GIS and spatial analysis — geographic information systems used to map site distributions, model settlement patterns, and integrate remote-sensing, excavation, and environmental data.
• Digital recording and 3D documentation — photogrammetry and 3D scanning to record excavated features and artifacts with precision, increasingly used both for analysis and for public-facing digital preservation of sites at risk.

Ethical and legal review runs throughout this work: excavation generally requires permits from the relevant national or state antiquities authority, and in the United States, the treatment of Native American human remains and associated cultural items is governed by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), which sets legal requirements for consultation, repatriation, and consent that directly shape how archaeological research involving those remains and items can be designed and conducted.

Career and Training Pathways

An undergraduate degree in archaeology or anthropology provides a general foundation, but professional archaeological work — academic or applied — almost always requires graduate training. Typical pathways include:

• PhD (academic/research track) — the standard credential for university faculty and most independent research positions. Doctoral training centers on one or more seasons of original fieldwork, laboratory analysis, and often language or paleography training relevant to the region and period studied, culminating in a dissertation.
• Master’s degree — the common entry credential for professional cultural resource management (CRM) archaeology, museum and heritage work, and many public-sector archaeology roles, where a terminal MA is typically sufficient rather than a PhD.
• Register of Professional Archaeologists (RPA) credential — a voluntary professional certification, widely recognized in US CRM practice, that sets minimum standards of graduate education and supervised field experience and holds credentialed archaeologists to a defined code of conduct.
• Cultural resource management (CRM) careers — the largest single employer of professional archaeologists in the United States, conducting compliance survey and excavation ahead of development projects for private firms, government agencies, and tribal historic preservation offices.
• Other applied and public-facing careers — museum curation and collections management, historic preservation and heritage management with state and federal agencies, and public archaeology and outreach roles.

The main general-purpose professional societies in the United States are the Society for American Archaeology (SAA), which spans archaeology across the Americas, and the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA), a broader public-facing organization covering world archaeology; the Society for Historical Archaeology (SHA) is the leading professional body specifically for historical archaeology. These societies publish leading disciplinary journals, set ethical guidelines and standards of practice, and run the field’s major annual conferences.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is archaeology in simple terms?

Archaeology is the study of past human societies through the physical things they left behind — tools, buildings, food remains, and burials — used to reconstruct how people lived and how their societies changed over time, especially for periods and places that left no written record.

What is the difference between archaeology and anthropology?

In the North American tradition, archaeology is one of anthropology’s four core subfields — the one focused specifically on the human past through material remains, alongside cultural, biological, and linguistic anthropology. Outside North America, archaeology is more often organized as its own independent discipline. See What Is Anthropology? for the full four-subfield picture.

What is the difference between archaeology and paleontology?

Paleontology studies the fossil record of ancient life broadly, including species that predate humans entirely, using geological and biological methods. Archaeology studies human activity specifically, through artifacts and other traces of behavior. The two overlap directly in paleoanthropology, the study of human and hominin fossil evolution.

Who funds archaeological research?

In the US, the National Science Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities are the leading federal funders of archaeological research, alongside private funders such as the Wenner-Gren Foundation and National Geographic Society. In practice, however, the largest share of US fieldwork is funded not by grants but by compliance-driven cultural resource management (CRM) contracts tied to development projects.

How do archaeologists date artifacts and sites?

Through a combination of absolute dating methods — radiocarbon dating for organic material, dendrochronology for wood, and luminescence dating for sediments and heated materials — and relative methods such as stratigraphy (the order soil layers were deposited) and artifact seriation.

How do you become an archaeologist?

Most professional archaeology positions require at least a master’s degree, and university faculty and independent research roles typically require a PhD involving original fieldwork. Many US practitioners, especially in cultural resource management, also pursue the Register of Professional Archaeologists (RPA) credential.

Related Guides

This guide is part of a series covering major academic and scientific disciplines from a research-administration perspective — see the overview guide to the branches of science for how archaeology relates to neighboring fields, and these companion discipline guides: What Is Anthropology?, What Is Paleontology?, What Is Geophysics?, and What Is Evolutionary Biology?.