Why do you dig for fossils and figure out what ages things are and how? Ella (10)

Hello Ella,

Archaeologists don’t actually dig for fossils: fossils are the preserved remains of animals and plants and they are usually very old and not man-made. Archaeologists are interested in the study of the past and concentrate on material culture (many periods studied by archaeology pre-date written records) to understand early societies. Sometimes we do find fossils buried in archaeological contexts though: even people in the past might have liked their unusual shape and maybe they picked them up as keepsakes!

We have several ways to figure out how old things are: first of all, we excavate sites in layers so we know the top layers are the most recent, and the bottom layers are older. But mostly, the way we can date different sites and contexts is by studying the artefacts we find. Pottery is widely used to date archaeological sites: we can trace the evolution of pottery, from the Neolithic to modern days and it is a very useful tool for dating! Other artefacts can also be used, and for many of them, a typology (when a sequence of their evolution is studied) has been established.

Also, when we work with organic materials (wood, bone, etc), we can use Carbon-14 dating: this is a technique that is used to determine the age of organic materials by measuring the decay of C14 in once-living organisms.

Odile, January 2026