A History of archeology

About this episode

Episode SummaryForget the whip and the fedora — the real story of archaeology is a 500-year glow-up from rich-guy hobbyism to laser-equipped aircraft revealing lost cities. In this episode, we trace how archaeology (from the Greek for "study of the past") evolved from Renaissance collectors chasing ancient coins for prestige, into a rigorous science built on stratigraphy, typology, and hard chemistry. We start with 14th-century Italy, where Petrarch and Boccaccio kick off the antiquarian craze, and traveling collector Ciriaco de' Pizzicolli sketches the Acropolis like a Renaissance travel blogger. Popes get in on it too — Sixtus IV and Julius II found some of the first antiquities museums, scoring a win with the discovery of the Laocoön. Then method starts to show up: John Aubrey gives us the chrono-typological method(dating objects by their style), and Olof Rudbeck gives us the stratigraphic method — the single most important idea in the field, based on reading the layers (strata) of the earth like a timeline. The excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum turn archaeology into a public obsession, leading to the founding of the British Museum and the Louvre, and the first university