Destructive human processes, such as agriculture and land development, may damage or destroy potential archaeological sites.
[4] Scholars have frequently used in textual analogies such as 'record', 'source' and 'archive' to refer to material evidence of the past since at least the 19th century.
[5] In the first critical review of the concept, philosopher Linda Patrik found that by the 1980s archaeologists conceptualised the term in at least five different ways:[1] Patrik argued that the first three definitions reflected a "physical model" of archaeological evidence, where it is seen as the direct result of physical processes that operated in the past (like the fossil record); in contrast, definitions four and five follow a "textual model", where the archaeological record is seen as encoding cultural information about the past (like historical texts).
In this sense, it is equivalent to material culture, and includes not just 'ancient' remains but the physical things associated with contemporary societies.
[5][15] The archaeological record can also consist of the written documentation that is presented in scientific journals.
This spans the entire world; archaeology is the human story that belongs to everyone's past and represents everyone's heritage.
[4] There are different databases which are used to archive and preserve the documentation in addition to the artifacts which serve as archaeological records.
[18] Features are also part of the archaeological record, and are material culture that usually archaeologists are unable to take and study inside a lab.
Features can include burn marks in the ground from fire pits or mounds and other structures constructed long ago.