Maureen Mallon, age 14, of Charlotte, North Carolina, for her question:     

What value to us is archeology?     

The study of any sensible subject feeds and exercises the brain. When curiosity prods, it is a signal to dig into a problem and grasp it as a terrier digs up and grabs a buried bone. Archeology happens to be a more sophisticated digging and its more sophisticated reward is a deeper grasp of mankind's past, present and future.     Archeology is the study of ancient objects concerned with the history and prehistory of mankind. Until the age of modern science, archeologists were mainly concerned with digging up valuable items and art objects which were produced by civilizations of old. They concentrated especially on the civilizations of Greece and Rome which contributed so much to our modern western culture. Modern archeology has a task of much wider scope. As it digs through the ancient layers of the post, it tries to evaluate the everyday lives of the every day folk. It digs deeper into the ground for scraps of evidence that seemed unimportant to earlier investigators. And deeper digging dredges up evidence from older and older civilizations.

This level of archeology reveals the trials and triumphs of the human family back through the long ages before they learned to write and report. We do not, of course, live in the past and our trials and triumphs must be met and solved in the all important present. Many of us tend to think that we have reached the topmost peak of civilization and the past should be forgotten, erased from the blackboard. Even if this big headed notion were true, surely we are polite enough at least to thank those struggling people of the past who helped us to climb to our present success. But there is more, much more to archeology than paying our respects to the past.     True, we 20th century people have reached a high point, especially in our ability to cope with nature through the sciences. But we still have our problems, bigger and perhaps more numerous problems than they had in the past. This is beeguge we are humans and no matter what changes, no matter how smart we get, human nature is slow, very slow to change. Digging down to deeper levels, archeology reveals this evidence of basic human nature, perhaps by accident. There are surface levels and deeper levels also in the human nature. The surface problems of mankind are solved step by step at advancing stages of culture. The persistent problems of coping with nature and getting along peaceably with each other spring from deeper levels of human nature.

As archeology strives to piece together the lives of our ancestors, it holds a mirror to human nature itself past, present and future. It forces us to face tha fact that though we have bettered our everyday conveniences of the surface levels, we still must face those deeper problems concerning ourselves and the world of nature.     Archeology reveals that our remote ancestors faced and did their bit to solve these persistent human problems. We have accepted and built upon their successes. We would be wise to assess and reject their failures. True, we can live only in our own times. But when we can gather reliable evidence from the past, it is folly to go on repeating the same old dreary mistakes. So far, every generation has tried and failed to reach the goals of peace and plenty. In studying archeology, we can profit from past mistakes and maybe struggle a bit nearer to the seemingly impossible goals.