Archaeology, or archeology,[1] is the study of human activity through the recovery

and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists

of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, and cultural landscapes. Archaeology can be
considered both a social science and a branch of the humanities.[2][3] In North America, archaeology
is considered a sub-field of anthropology,[4] while in Europearchaeology is often viewed as either a
discipline in its own right or a sub-field of other disciplines.
Archaeologists study human prehistory and history, from the development of the first stone
tools at Lomekwi in East Africa 3.3 million years ago up until recent decades. Archaeology as a field
is distinct from the discipline of palaeontology, the study of fossil remains. Archaeology is particularly
important for learning about prehistoric societies, for whom there may be no written records to study.
Prehistory includes over 99% of the human past, from the Paleolithic until the advent of literacy in
societies across the world.[2]Archaeology has various goals, which range from understanding culture
history to reconstructing past lifeways to documenting and explaining changes in human societies
through time.[5]
The discipline involves surveying, excavation and eventually analysis of data collected to learn more
about the past. In broad scope, archaeology relies on cross-disciplinary research. It draws
upon anthropology, history, art history, classics, ethnology, geography, geology, literary
history, linguistics, semiology, textual criticism, physics, information
sciences, chemistry, statistics, paleoecology, paleography, paleontology, paleozoology,
and paleobotany.
Archaeology developed out of antiquarianism in Europe during the 19th century, and has since
become a discipline practiced across the world. Archaeology has been used by nation-states to
create particular visions of the past.[6] Since its early development, various specific sub-disciplines of
archaeology have developed, including maritime archaeology, feminist
archaeology and archaeoastronomy, and numerous different scientific techniques have been
developed to aid archaeological investigation. Nonetheless, today, archaeologists face many
problems, such as dealing with pseudoarchaeology, the looting of artifacts,[7]a lack of public interest,
and opposition to the excavation of human remains.

Ethnology (from the Greek ἔθνος, ethnos meaning "nation"[1]) is the branch of anthropology that
compares and analyses the characteristics of different peoples and the relationship between them
(cf. cultural, social, or sociocultural anthropology).[2]

Compared to ethnography, the study of single groups through direct contact with the culture,
ethnology takes the research that ethnographers have compiled and then compares and contrasts
different cultures.
Adam František Kollár, 1779

The term ethnologia (ethnology) is credited to Adam Franz Kollár (1718-1783) who used and defined
it in his Historiae ivrisqve pvblici Regni Vngariae amoenitates published in Vienna in 1783.[3] as: “the
science of nations and peoples, or, that study of learned men in which they inquire into the origins,
languages, customs, and institutions of various nations, and finally into the fatherland and ancient
seats, in order to be able better to judge the nations and peoples in their own times.” [4]
Kollár's interest in linguistic and cultural diversity was aroused by the situation in his native multi-
ethnic and multilingual Kingdom of Hungary and his roots among its Slovaks, and by the shifts that
began to emerge after the gradual retreat of the Ottoman Empire in the more distant Balkans.[5]
Among the goals of ethnology have been the reconstruction of human history, and the formulation
of cultural invariants, such as the incest taboo and culture change, and the formulation of
generalizations about "human nature", a concept which has been criticized since the 19th century by
various philosophers (Hegel, Marx, structuralism, etc.). In some parts of the world ethnology has
developed along independent paths of investigation and pedagogical doctrine, with cultural
anthropology becoming dominant especially in the United States, and social anthropology in Great
Britain. The distinction between the three terms is increasingly blurry. Ethnology has been
considered an academic field since the late 18th century especially in Europe and is sometimes
conceived of as any comparative study of human groups.

Claude Lévi-Strauss

The 15th-century exploration of America by European explorers had an important role in formulating
new notions of the Occidental, such as, the notion of the "Other". This term was used in conjunction
with "savages", which was either seen as a brutal barbarian, or alternatively, as "noble savage".
Thus, civilization was opposed in a dualist manner to barbary, a classic opposition constitutive of the
even more commonly shared ethnocentrism. The progress of ethnology, for example with Claude
Lévi-Strauss's structural anthropology, led to the criticism of conceptions of a linear progress, or the
pseudo-opposition between "societies with histories" and "societies without histories", judged too
dependent on a limited view of history as constituted by accumulative growth.
Lévi-Strauss often referred to Montaigne's essay on cannibalism as an early example of ethnology.
Lévi-Strauss aimed, through a structural method, at discovering universal invariants in human
society, chief among which he believed to be the incest taboo. However, the claims of such
cultural universalism have been criticized by various 19th and 20th century social thinkers,
including Marx, Nietzsche, Foucault, Derrida, Althusser and Deleuze.
The French school of ethnology was particularly significant for the development of the discipline
since the early 1950s with Paul Rivet, Marcel Griaule, Germaine Dieterlen, Claude Lévi-
Strauss and Jean Rouch.
Linguistics is the scientific[1] study of language,[2] and involves an analysis of language form,
language meaning, and language in context.[3] The earliest activities in
the documentation and description of language have been attributed to the 4th century
BC Indiangrammarian Pāṇini,[4][5] who wrote a formal description of the Sanskrit language in
his Aṣṭādhyāyī.[6]
Linguists traditionally analyse human language by observing an interplay
between sound and meaning.[7] Phonetics is the study of speech and non-speech sounds, and
delves into their acoustic and articulatory properties. The study of language meaning, on the other
hand, deals with how languages encode relations between entities, properties, and other aspects of
the world to convey, process, and assign meaning, as well as manage and
resolve ambiguity.[8] While the study of semantics typically concerns itself with truth
conditions, pragmatics deals with how situational context influences the production of meaning.[9]
Grammar is a system of rules which governs the production and use of utterances in a given
language. These rules apply to sound[10]as well as meaning, and include componential subsets of
rules, such as those pertaining to phonology (the organisation of phonetic sound
systems), morphology (the formation and composition of words), and syntax (the formation and
composition of phrases and sentences).[11] Modern theories that deal with the principles of grammar
are largely based within Noam Chomsky's framework of generative linguistics.[12]
In the early 20th century, Ferdinand de Saussure distinguished between the notions
of langue and parole in his formulation of structural linguistics. According to him, parole is the
specific utterance of speech, whereas langue refers to an abstract phenomenon that theoretically
defines the principles and system of rules that govern a language.[13] This distinction resembles the
one made by Noam Chomsky between competence and performance in his theory
of transformative or generative grammar. According to Chomsky, competence is an individual's
innate capacity and potential for language (like in Saussure's langue), while performance is the
specific way in which it is used by individuals, groups, and communities (i.e., parole, in Saussurean
terms).[14]
The study of parole (which manifests through cultural discourses and dialects) is the domain
of sociolinguistics, the sub-discipline that comprises the study of a complex system of linguistic
facets within a certain speech community (governed by its own set of grammatical rules and
laws). Discourse analysis further examines the structure of texts and conversations emerging out of
a speech community's usage of language.[15] This is done through the collection of linguistic data, or
through the formal discipline of corpus linguistics, which takes naturally occurring texts and studies
the variation of grammatical and other features based on such corpora (or corpus data).
Stylistics also involves the study of written, signed, or spoken discourse through varying speech
communities, genres, and editorial or narrative formats in the mass media.[16] In the 1960s, Jacques
Derrida, for instance, further distinguished between speech and writing, by proposing that written
language be studied as a linguistic medium of communication in itself.[17] Palaeography is therefore
the discipline that studies the evolution of written scripts (as signs and symbols) in language.[18] The
formal study of language also led to the growth of fields like psycholinguistics, which explores the
representation and function of language in the mind; neurolinguistics, which studies language
processing in the brain; biolinguistics, which studies the biology and evolution of language;
and language acquisition, which investigates how children and adults acquire the knowledge of one
or more languages.
Linguistics also deals with the social, cultural, historical and political factors that influence language,
through which linguistic and language-based context is often determined.[19]Research on language
through the sub-branches of historical and evolutionary linguistics also focus on how languages
change and grow, particularly over an extended period of time.
Language documentation combines anthropological inquiry (into the history and culture of language)
with linguistic inquiry, in order to describe languages and their grammars. Lexicography involves the
documentation of words that form a vocabulary. Such a documentation of a linguistic vocabulary
from a particular language is usually compiled in a dictionary. Computational linguistics is concerned
with the statistical or rule-based modeling of natural language from a computational perspective.
Specific knowledge of language is applied by speakers during the act
of translation and interpretation, as well as in language education – the teaching of a second
or foreign language. Policy makers work with governments to implement new plans in education and
teaching which are based on linguistic research.
Related areas of study also includes the disciplines of semiotics (the study of direct and indirect
language through signs and symbols), literary criticism (the historical and ideological analysis of
literature, cinema, art, or published material), translation (the conversion and documentation of
meaning in written/spoken text from one language or dialect onto another), and speech-language
pathology (a corrective method to cure phonetic disabilities and dis-functions at the cognitive level).