Our purpose here is to explore the nature of Archaeology and how archaeologists contribute to our understanding of our past. We want to dispel the images of "Indiana Jones" archaeology and archaeologists with a more accurate depiction of what archaeology is really all about and what archaeologists hope to learn not only about the past but also about the present. We often picture an archaeologist and flying dirt excavating a site somewhere in the world. We tend to think that what is found in the excavation ends up in a museum. An archaeologist does excavate, but this is a method to retrieve insights about how a culture operated in the past or around us today. Actually it is a blend of methods and excavation is only a part of archaeological investigation. There are traditional things that an archaeologist does and there are often non-traditional and hi-tech approaches integated into an archaeological study. Most importantly, there is a way archaeologists pursue their investigations through a series of questions always striving for new insights that makes this inquiry scientific. 
Colin Renfrew, an archaeologist from Cambridge, views archaeology as the examination of the history of humanity as seen through the process by which humans use material things to engage their world. It is about understanding human cultures over time. It is about exploring how these cultures adapted to their surroundings and how these cultures changed over time.
The Society for American Archaeology defines the goals of archaeology this way:
• To obtain a chronology of the past, a sequence of events and dates that, in a sense, is a backward extension of history. For example, an archaeologist may wish to determine when agriculture developed in a particular society or when a certain kind of pottery was made. Such basic information not only contributes to charting the individual sequences of culture change but also allows comparisons among culture histories in different parts of the world.
• To begin at least to reconstruct the many ways of life that no longer exist. For example, excavations at the huge Cahokia site in western Illinois give us an intriguing glimpse of the area as it was around A.D. 1200 by providing numerous clues to the nature of everyday life, the richness of ceremonial activity, and the workings of economic systems in the Mississippi Valley at that time.
• To give us some understanding of why human culture has changed through time. Given the delicate and complicated interplay between environment and people—either different segments of past societies or peoples of different cultures—archaeologists can often isolate the occurrence of small changes in the past, such as shifts in gathering methods, changes in art motifs, or new sets of social relationships. These, in turn, may allow investigators to track changes through time and to understand the reasons for them. (http://www.saa.org/publications/ArchAndYou/)
The importance of this is to realize that archaeology strives to explain human behavior by looking at things in the past but for the purpose of understanding humanity at large so that we can understand the present at the same time. As such, archaeology is a part of the study of humankind – what we would term Anthropology.
The pages that follow begin at the smallest units of study for archaeologists and build to meaningful units where we can talk about people's behavior. These smallest units are what is called artifacts and features.
LINKS
Archaeology and You: http://www.saa.org/publications/ArchAndYou/
The Science of Archaeology: rtsp://140.198.75.120:554/qtmedia/Media/rathje.mov
