The course will not make you a geoarchaeologist, but will introduce you to Geoarchaeology as a framework for asking archaeological questions and solving archaeological problems. You will have to start on it immediately to be successful -waiting to begin until week five is fatal. Reconstruction of past human behavior. We can argue about whether past human behavior is best investigated as cultures, social systems, gender relations, adaptive strategies, or myths created by contemporary power elites to serve their own purposes. Comprised of artifacts within or on the surface of sediments.
Sediments are the matrix of the archaeological record.
Since that is true, said JOD, no one can call oneself an archaeologist who cannot describe sediments and explain their genesis. And, he said, you can t explain the origin of sediments without being aware of the landscape which supplied them. By landscape he included underlying hardrock geology, landforms, processes of weathering, erosion, deposition, soil formation, the effects of climate, the vegetation and the animals over a large area. Moreover, as a materialist he believed that people must adapt to their environment, so the more closely the paleoenvironment could be specified, the better we could understand why people did the things they did. In his screed, then, JOD came close to the present conception of Geoarchaeology.