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Flinders Petrie
Born
Petrie sorted pottery from Egyptian graves into groups and tracked which kinds turned up together. Changes in the shape of wavy-handled jars helped him put graves in relative order. A sequence date tells you what probably came earlier or later, even when you have no inscription naming a year.
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Alfred V. Kidder
Born
At Pecos, Kidder tracked pottery and other finds through successive layers. He then invited researchers to compare the evidence from their sites at the Pecos Conference. The regional chronology mattered because one excavator’s sequence could now be tested against what someone else had found miles away.
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Gertrude Caton Thompson
Born
At Great Zimbabwe, Caton Thompson dug in areas where deposits could help date the buildings. She found evidence that supported the site’s African origins, which some colonial writers had refused to accept. The case shows how carefully recorded finds could challenge an explanation that rested on assumptions about who was capable of building the place.
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Li Ji (archaeologist)
Born
Li Ji led excavations near Anyang for the Institute of History and Philology. The project let researchers study oracle bones as part of an excavated site, alongside other evidence of the Shang capital. Their location and surroundings became evidence in their own right.
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Ann Axtell Morris
Morris used drawings and watercolors to document archaeological work in the American Southwest and Mexico. Her illustrations preserved features that were easy to overlook in a field photograph, including how paint and architectural details fit together. Her work gives you a way to ask what a good excavation picture needs to record.
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Kathleen Kenyon
Born
At Jericho, Kenyon used and refined an approach developed by Mortimer and Tessa Wheeler. Excavating in squares while keeping strips of earth between them gave the team vertical sections to read as the dig went down. Those standing sections showed how floors, walls, and deposits related to each other.
More about Kathleen Kenyon7
Stuart Struever
Born
Struever described a way to use flotation to recover small material that ordinary screens could miss. Seeds and tiny bone fragments could now enter the record of what people ate or used. The technique changed the questions an excavation could answer by recovering remains that standard screens often missed.
More about Stuart Struever8
Edward C. Harris
Harris developed a diagram that records which deposits or surfaces came before or after others. It helps the excavator put cuts, fills, floors, and walls into a sequence even when they were exposed in different parts of the site. The connections stay available for someone else to inspect after the layers have been removed.
More about Edward C. Harris9
Lewis Binford
Born
Binford studied how Nunamiut hunters handled and discarded animal bones and used the observations to think about older deposits. The work asks a question every collection of bones can raise: which activities could have produced this pattern, and what other traces would each explanation leave?
More about Lewis Binford10
Mary Leakey
Born
Leakey led the team that found and studied tracks in volcanic ash at Laetoli, Tanzania. Paul Abell found the best-known trail of early human footprints. The trail records movement directly, leaving researchers a different kind of evidence about walking from what they get by examining a skeleton.
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Ian Hodder
Born
At Çatalhöyük, Hodder’s team made a point of discussing interpretations while the deposits were still being excavated. Specialists could bring what they saw in the finds into the field team’s conversations. An early interpretation could then be questioned while the evidence that prompted it was still in front of the excavators.
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Sonya Atalay
Atalay set out ways for archaeologists to work with Indigenous and local communities on research design, interpretation, and the use of findings. That can change what a team asks before anyone starts digging and who decides how the results are shared. Her work makes collaboration a field method with practical consequences.
More about Sonya Atalay
