The top archaeological discoveries of 2014 would make some good research paper topics for your archaeology class. You could write about the new digital maps made at Stonehenge or the origins of Buddhism.
There are many interesting topics you can cover on archaeology. (Credit: Mark Godfrey)
Another good term paper topic from today’s archaeology news is the difficulty in recreating an authentic “Paleo diet.” Here are some other interesting research paper topics.
Top 10 Discoveries of 2014
A good research paper topic could be to report on some of the top archaeology stories of the past year. In its “Top 10 Discoveries of 2014,” posted December 16, 2014, online at Archaeology.org, Archaeology magazine includes in its list: the largest tomb ever found in Greece, discovery of the ship HMS Erebus that sank in Arctic waters in Canada 170 years ago, and genetic material from a 12,000-year-old skeleton found in Mexico’s Yucatán that sheds light on the relationship between North America’s early inhabitants and modern Native Americans.
Top on the list is the use of remote sensing technology that created a digital map of the 5,000-year-old site at Stonehenge in England. Covering five square miles, the Salisbury Plain site includes seventeen newly discovered monuments, thousands of archaeological features, tens of huge stones buried in the dirt and the Cursus mounds located miles away that link with Stonehenge. “In the past we had this idea that Stonehenge was standing in splendid isolation, but it wasn’t,” says Vincent Gaffney of the University of Bradford. “It’s absolutely huge.”
Origins of Buddhism
Also in 2014, archaeologists uncovered the earliest link to the Buddha’s life. At the Maya Devi Temple at Lumbini, Nepal, a team unearthed a timber structure found under a series of brick temples. The structure is the first archaeological material evidence of Buddhist monuments, placing the Buddha’s birth in the 6th century B.C.E. and providing information on the social and economic context in which he lived. Previously, historians put the birth of Buddha anywhere from the 4th to 8th century B.C.E.
Buddhist tradition reports that Queen Maya Devi gave birth to the Buddha under a tree in the Lumbini garden. “The significance for us is that the shrine is built around a tree and the fact that the Buddhist birth story is connected with a tree. It is one of the really rare occasions when belief, tradition, archaeology and excavation actually come together,” said Professor Robin Coningham from Durham University in England in “North Expert’s Major Role in Buddhist ‘Find,’” by Tony Henderson published in The Journal (Newcastle, England), January 8, 2015. Coningham and Kosh Prasad Acharya of the Pashupati Area Development Trust guided the excavation.
The Paleo diet
The new year brings resolutions of dieting, and one craze is the so-called “Paleo diet,” in which people emulate the diet of meat, nuts, berries and plants that our cavemen ancestors ate. But archaeologists are learning that there is no one “Paleo” diet for a time period that ranges from 2.6 million to 10,000 years ago. Diet depended heavily on environment, climate, availability of plants, migration of both people and animals, digestion and even cognitive ability of early man.
Dr. Ken Sayers at the Language Research Center of Georgia State, coauthor of a study on the Paleo diet, said: “When you’re trying to reconstruct the diet of human ancestors, you want to look at a number of things, including the habitats they lived in, the potential foods that were available, how valuable those various food items would have been in relation to their energy content and how long it takes to handle a food item,” in the article, “What was the ‘Paleo diet’? There was far more than one, study suggests,” posted on Heritage Daily December 16, 2014.
Resources for Archaeology
American Archaeological Institute, and its magazine Archaeology.org, www.archaeology.org – offers news, features and photo essays on archaeological discoveries.
National Archeological Database, http://www.nps.gov/archeology/tools/nadb.htm – computerized communications network for the archaeological and historic preservation community.
Science Daily, http://www.sciencedaily.com/news/fossils_ruins/archaeology/ – online source for research news in archaeology.
For more information, check out Questia’s Archaeology database.
What were some of your favorite archaeology discoveries last year?