Thanks to Hollywood heroes such as Indiana Jones, Archaeology is one of the most popular subfields of Anthropology. The goal of archaeologists is to reconstruct the daily life of humans throughout history. They also strive to map cultural change through time and make connections between cultures. Although both historians and archaeologists are concerned with reconstructing our past, archeologists are different in two major ways. First of all, historians deal mostly with history and not prehistory.
Prehistory is defined as the time before written records .
Due to the nature and definition of prehistory, the line between history and prehistory is different from culture to culture, and region to region. A second difference between historians and archaeologists is that historians deal with written documents, where as archaeologists deal other material remains. Archaeologists work with artifacts . An artifact is any material remain left behind by the culture the archaeologist is studying. An education in archaeology is usually obtained through the anthropology department of a university.