- [David] Hello, Wordsmiths, David here,
You've caught me at a dig site, excavating a rare find.
Hold on just a moment, here we are. (David grunting)
The word for this video is archeology.
It's a noun and it means
the study of ancient human cultures.
The word origin, the etymology is fun, it's Greek.
Arche means old in Greek, ancient, first, long ago,
and logy means science or the study of.
You might also see it in its combining form as ology,
so it's the study of things from long ago.
A person who practices this science, an archeologist,
goes on trips to the place they study,
and there they carefully dig up artifacts
and then they take those artifacts to a museum
or a university and they study them,
and they try to learn things about the culture
that produced those artifacts, right?
I could find ancient pottery from a dig in Turkey,
and then take it back to a museum in Istanbul,
or Antalya, or wherever,
and scrape off residue from the inside of a pot,
and say, "Okay, what were people drinking
5,000 years ago?"
Anyway, looking at arche, logy, or ology,
the word parts meaning old,
and a science or study of something.
What other words can you think of
that Use those word parts?
I'm gonna put on some music
and you've got 10 seconds to shout out some words.
Let's do it.
(upbeat playful music)
Here's what I came up with, an archive,
which is like a place for documents,
a place where you keep all the old papers and books.
Think of a newspaper archive, all the old editions.
Archaic, it's another way of saying
old-fashioned or ancient,
and biology, the study of life, right?
Bios in Greek, life,
let's use archeology in some sentences.
"I never label my leftover,
so investigating the mystery containers in my fridge
feels a little like archeology."
You don't know what's in there,
in my parents' house growing up,
it was always tubs of cottage cheese,
but they never had cottage cheese in them.
That's sentence Number 1, sentence Number 2,
"If I were an archeologist, I I'd study ancient pie.
Now, if you'll excuse me,
I think it's time to dig into my latest find.
Hm, I do believe that's eighth-century blueberry,
huh, still good.
For now, take heart,
you can learn anything, David out.