What even is archaeology?

No. Dinosaurs are the work of paleontologists, who study fossils of ancient life. Archaeology deals only with the human past, so archaeologists dig up things people made or used, tools, pottery, and buildings, rather than the remains of creatures that lived long before any humans existed.

Yes, though a particular kind. Archaeologists work systematically, surveying, excavating, and recording finds, and borrow lab techniques like radiocarbon dating from chemistry and physics. But it also leans on the humanities, since interpreting what the evidence means about past people draws on history and culture.

Not quite. Archaeology is one branch of anthropology, the wider study of humankind. Where cultural anthropologists study living communities, archaeologists reconstruct past ones from the physical traces left behind, which is why the field centers on objects, sites, and material remains rather than people alive today.

Because most of the human story was never written down. For the vast majority of the past, there are no texts, so the objects and structures people left behind are often the only evidence of how earlier societies lived, ate, traded, and changed over thousands of years.