I've never really seen archaeology as being any different from history. What I love are the stories of human beings that were around 1,000 years ago and how they lived - archaeology is another aspect to that.
The history of the Jews has been written overwhelmingly by scholars of texts - understandably given the formative nature of the Bible and the Talmud. Seeing Jewish history through artifacts, architecture and images is still a young but spectacularly flourishing discipline that's changing the whole story.
Archaeology is not only the hand maid of history, it is also the conservator of art.
I have made sense of my life by developing an ability to analyze Mainstream American Cultural Artifacts.
Archaeology is the peeping Tom of the sciences. It is the sandbox of men who care not where they are going; they merely want to know where everyone else has been.
As a field archeologist, one usually has to specialize in a particular part of the world or specific culture, whereas if one is a materials specialist, one can jump around to different areas. So I've had experience on excavations all over the place.
I studied archaeology.
When you think about archaeology, archaeology is the only field that allows us to tell the story of 99 percent of our history prior to 3,000 B.C. and writing.