When archaeologists examine religious buildings they can learn about a society's beliefs. The last type of artifact that I'm going to talk about is written records. Written records like letters, medical texts, religious writings and inscriptions on buildings can tell us what the people were thinking and what they were feeling. Written records are very helpful to archaeologists because they can find out lots of things from them especially dates in time. In tree ring dating, or dendrochronology, every growth ring equals one year.
Archaeologists count how many rings there are and match ring patterns.
This tells how old an object is. Archaeologists can only use this on wood. Magnetic dating compares the magnetic force within an artifact and the earth's magnetic field from the past. This technique can be used for baked clay and mud from lakes. Carbon 14 dating is useful when archaeologists measure the C14 in something.