1898 in archaeology 1898 (MDCCCXCVIII) was a common year starting on Saturday (see link for calendar) of the Gregorian calendar (or a common year starting on Monday of the 12-day-slower Julian calendar). ... Importance and applicability Most of human history is not described by any written records. ...
December 31 is the 365th day of the year (366th in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar. ... John Eric Sidney Thompson (31 December 1898 - 9 September 1975) was an English archeologist and epigrapher, perhaps the most eminent student of pre-Columbian Maya civilization of the mid 20th century. ... // The Maya civilization is a historical Mesoamerican civilization, which extended throughout the northern Central American region which includes the present-day nations of Guatemala, Belize, western Honduras and El Salvador, as well as the southern Mexican states of Chiapas, Tabasco, and the Yucatán peninsula states of Quintana Roo, Campeche...
It may thus be conceived how vast a field archaeology embraces, and how intimately it is connected with the sciences of geology and anthropology, while it naturally includes within its borders the consideration of all the civilizations of ancient times.
The archaeology of zoological species constitutes the sphere of palaeontology, while that of botanical species is dealt with as palaeobotany; and every different science thus has its archaeological side.
The beginning of archaeology, as the study of pre-documentary history, may be broadly held to follow on the last of the geological periods, viz., the Quaternary, though it is claimed, and with some reason, that traces of man have been found in deposits of the preceding or Tertiary period.
Archaeology had by this time become nearly two dimensional, fixed in a temporal horizon of only 4,000 years in depth.
This brought the methodology of archaeology in line with cultural study and modern evolutionary thought as distinguished from pure stratigraphy in the geologic sense.
He said that archaeology as it was currently being conducted was not archaeology; rather, it was historical reconstruction.