Experimental Archaeology

Experimental archaeology is the controlled replication of past materials, technologies, and behaviors in order to test hypotheses about how the archaeological record was produced. By making stone tools, firing pottery, building and burning structures, butchering with replica implements, or letting bone and refuse decay under monitored conditions, the experimenter generates traces — debitage, use-wear, residues, decay rates — that can be compared with those found archaeologically. The logic is uniformitarian: if a known process reliably produces a particular trace today, the same trace in the record is evidence of that process in the past. Systematized in the later twentieth century by scholars such as John Coles and integrated with behavioral archaeology and use-wear analysis, experimental archaeology is a cornerstone of middle-range research, building the bridging arguments that connect static finds to dynamic behavior.