Abstract

We have long felt those whom modern society has named "Engineers" have played a significant role in the evolution of cultures and civilizations. Working with manual tools and the materials that nature provided, archaeological evidence has shown that practical, innovative, and esthetically beautiful creations were produced by our engineering ancestors. As with most effective research, understanding the past can lead to optimizing the future, and we propose that it is beneficial to study engineering and design in this context. In this paper we will discuss what we have termed "Ancestral Engineering", and describe the rationale behind the initiative. Two main themes have emerged; engineers helping archaeologists to integrate engineering expertise into their investigations, and archaeologists helping engineers to extract engineering design practice and methodology from other cultures. We propose and will begin to develop a concept of some archaeological materials as "engineered products" as opposed to "artifacts", within this framework. Several initial project ideas are discussed and a suite of Research Questions is proposed. We believe this is an emerging field, with significant opportunity to develop collaborative relationships with interested engineers, archaeologists and anthropologists to pursue discussions and potential research in this field.