Archaeologists are scientists who study sites, artifacts and natural byproducts of past human activities to learn about their life ways. Using scientific methods and techniques, archaeologists study many aspects of past human groups - the houses they built, the foods they ate, the tools they used and even the art they created.
Paleontology is the study of past plant and animal life from fossil remains.
It includes the study of dinosaurs. Archaeologists who work on early human sites and human evolution may be both an archaeologist and a paleontologist. The oldest radiocarbon date associated with artifacts is the 13,200 year old date from Fort Rock Cave, a rockshelter in a butte near the State Park of the same name. For may years, anthropologists who studied the Mayan peoples of Mesoamerica were prehistoric archaeologists. Now that the Mayan glyphs have been translated, they are historic archaeologists.