Scientists Say: Artifact

Artifact (noun, “AR-ti-fact”)

An artifact is something that has been made or modified by humans.

In archaeology, artifacts are objects that tell us how people of the past lived. Ancient tools, such as arrowheads or pottery shards, are artifacts. Human remains — such as old bones — typically do not count as artifacts unless humans modified them. An Egyptian mummy, for example, is preserved by humans. Therefore, mummies are considered artifacts.

Scientists use various methods to determine the age of artifacts. Radiocarbon dating is one example. This technique works for dating only organic matter. That’s matter that contains carbon — charcoal or bone, for instance. The process works for objects up to about 50,000 years old. An artifact’s age helps answer big questions. For example, the age of a farming tool may indicate when a society began growing crops.

Tools and jewelry found in Bulgaria’s Bacho Kiro Cave are famous examples of artifacts. Archeologists discovered stone tools and pendants made from cave bear teeth. They also discovered pieces of human bone. Bone is an organic material. So, scientists used radiocarbon dating to figure out its age. They learned that the bones were at least 40,000 years old. This told them the artifacts in the cave must be 40,000 years old as well.

In other fields, the word artifact has a different meaning. An artifact also can be an unexpected finding that occurs as a result of how people collected data. Such artifacts could distort data or could point to a misleading conclusion.

In biology, material contaminating a microscope slide is an artifact. In statistics, an artifact is not even an object. Instead, it refers to problems with how the data were collected and analyzed.

In a sentence

Archeologists investigate artifacts of the Chaco Canyon to answer questions about Native American societies.

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