How is barely 86 years ago be considered archeology?
Am I Methuselah that have to be studied, poked, and prodded?
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When I was a child I used to love watching Time Team, a British Channel 4 series where each episode the team would carry out a different archaeological dig.
Of course, normally they would be excavating a mediaeval or Roman site, but I remember seeing an episode where they were digging up a crashed WW2 B-17. That expanded my idea of what archaeology could be.
Also, loved that show although I never really knew why.
In series four, there was an episode in the US¹ that I found quite jarring with the discussion of prehistory finds only a few hundred years old. Obviously, the term has a different meaning given the context, but it still sticks in my mind to this day.
Tangentially related, in Amsterdam a few years back they were digging into a spot in the central city for a new metro station. They made a display of all the archaeological artefacts that they found, which you can see along the escalators.
It goes from 124,000BC (ok, seashells) to the 1300s (old pottery, cooking utensils), to 2005 (flippo disks, ID cards, probably some still functioning Nokia phones.) You can browse it here: https://belowthesurface.amsterdam/en
Yes :P
:D I did write in jest, but would love to learn if there is a barrier of age where something is considered worthy (?) of archeology, or worthy to be labeled as archeology.
One perspective is that it if archaeology is the study of humanity "through the recovery and analysis of material culture" (wikipedia), then everything where that is done qualifies, and could be quite young. E.g. WW2 is clearly in scope: while we do have documentation and eye-witness reports for a lot of it, they are far from universal and on-site studies of battlefields, former prisoner camps, sites of war crimes, ... are done and contributing to what we know. And historians in general are dealing with even younger events, e.g. historians are studying the cold war (although I'm not aware of any archeological studies of it - maybe there are some of the actual wars during it?)
On the other hand, just because an investigation of a somewhat recent event is digging through material doesn't make it archaeology, but I guess that's partially distinguished based on motivations? (e.g. accident/crime investigations etc)
EDIT: younger example: https://www.archaeology.org/news/8291-191213-south-carolina-... "Archaeologists are investigating a possible Vietnam War–era military training site at Fort Jackson, an initial entry training center for the U.S. Army in South Carolina, according to an ABC News report." - I guess discarded beer cans could be useful dating something like this
> although I'm not aware of any archeological studies of it
https://www.worldcat.org/title/archaeology-of-the-cold-war/o...
It varies by jurisdiction, what the research goals are (if any), and the details of what's found. 50 years plus for human remains is a pretty common number in my experience, but objects can really go all the way up to the present.