Archeology Word Search Printable

Print 15 archaeology words in one grid, trowel to carbon dating, with the answer key on a second page.

Name Date

Archaeology Word Search

Find every word hidden in the grid. Words go across and down.

0 of 15 words found

HOURUINSLITOTFC

ARTIFACTFFRHTEF

FJQYCIKCOLOCYDE

FRECOHDRSNWAYMS

ETSSITEESQERENG

UTHBNZRXINLBRXS

KTVVSPRCLGLOBBK

BHICZRXAUHONCBI

CTCJRJAVWHDDDOX

IIMLSULAYERARBH

FANCIENTPOTTERY

XSIEVEDIGDBIRUX

MIKEQNIORDRNZSH

OEFDOBONESCGSHA

NEMEAUXSEUGXFNE

This grid is wider and taller than its box. Slide it to see every letter.To drag, hold the first letter for a moment, then slide.Keyboard: Tab to the grid, arrow keys to move, Enter on the first and last letter.

TrowelTROWEL
BrushBRUSH
SieveSIEVE
DigDIG
ExcavationEXCAVATION
SiteSITE
LayerLAYER
RuinsRUINS
ArtifactARTIFACT
PotteryPOTTERY
BonesBONES
FossilFOSSIL
CoinsCOINS
Carbon DatingCARBON DATING
AncientANCIENT

15 words from the Archaeology list.

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Word list

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Answer key: Archaeology Word Search

HOURUINSLITOTFC

ARTIFACTFFRHTEF

FJQYCIKCOLOCYDE

FRECOHDRSNWAYMS

ETSSITEESQERENG

UTHBNZRXINLBRXS

KTVVSPRCLGLOBBK

BHICZRXAUHONCBI

CTCJRJAVWHDDDOX

IIMLSULAYERARBH

FANCIENTPOTTERY

XSIEVEDIGDBIRUX

MIKEQNIORDRNZSH

OEFDOBONESCGSHA

NEMEAUXSEUGXFNE

TROWEL, BRUSH, SIEVE, DIG, EXCAVATION, SITE, LAYER, RUINS, ARTIFACT, POTTERY, BONES, FOSSIL, COINS, CARBON DATING, ANCIENT

Next step Make a puzzle from your own dig vocabulary Scramble these archaeology words

All 102 words

Dig Tools 18

Brush Soft bristles on a handle, for sweeping loose dirt off a find.
Bucket A pail for carrying loose soil out of a trench.
Camera It takes a picture of each find before anyone lifts it.
Compass A pocket instrument whose needle points north.
Drone A small flying machine that carries a camera over a site.
Labels Tags written for every bag, saying which square and layer its contents came from.
Lidar Scanning the ground with laser light, often from an aircraft, to map shapes hidden under trees.
Magnetometer An instrument that senses tiny changes in magnetism caused by things buried in the soil.
Mattock A heavy hand tool like a pickaxe with one broad blade, for breaking hard ground.
Notebook Where a digger writes down what was found, where and how deep.
Radar Pulses sent into the ground bounce back from buried walls and pits, so they can be mapped without digging.
Shovel A long-handled scoop for moving loose soil.
Sieve A tray of wire mesh. Soil is shaken through it so that small finds stay behind.
Stakes Pegs driven into the ground to mark the corners of a square.
String Thin cord stretched between pegs to mark out squares on the ground.
Tape Measure A long marked ribbon that gives the distance from a find to a fixed point.
Trowel A small hand tool with a flat pointed blade, used to scrape soil away a little at a time.
Wheelbarrow A cart with one wheel and two handles that takes soil to the heap.

Show all 102 words (84 more)

On the Dig 28

Archaeologist A scientist who studies how people lived by examining what they left behind.
Backfill To fill a trench in again once the work is done.
Burial A grave and what was placed in it.
Context Where a find lay and what lay with it. Once it is lost, most of the story is lost too.
Curator The person in charge of a collection of finds.
Dig The everyday word for an excavation.
Excavation Uncovering, handling and recording what lies buried at a site.
Feature Something people made that cannot be lifted out, such as a wall, a pit or a fireplace.
Fieldwork Work done outdoors at a site, not in a library or a lab.
Grid A pattern of equal squares laid over a site so that every find has an address.
Layer One band of soil in the ground. Unless something has disturbed them, a lower one is older than those above it.
Looting Digging things up illegally to keep or sell them, which wrecks a site for everyone else.
Midden An ancient rubbish heap, full of shells, bones and broken pots.
Mound A heap of earth raised by people, often over a grave.
Museum The building where finds are kept safe, studied and shown to visitors.
Posthole The dark round mark left in the soil where an upright timber once stood.
Record To write down, draw and photograph everything before it is moved.
Ruins What is left standing of old buildings.
Section The upright side of a trench, where the bands of soil show like the layers of a cake.
Shipwreck A sunken vessel. Divers study one as a single moment frozen in time.
Site A place where traces of past human activity are found.
Spoil The loose soil that comes out of a trench.
Stratigraphy Reading the order of the soil bands in a trench to work out what happened first.
Survey Studying a stretch of land for traces of the past without digging it up.
Tell A hill that grew as people rebuilt a town on the same spot for centuries.
Test Pit A small hole dug to learn whether the soil holds anything worth a larger dig.
Trench A long, narrow hole dug to see what lies below the surface.
Volunteer A helper who works on a dig without pay.

Finds 24

Amphora A clay jar with two handles, used mainly for shipping wine.
Arrowhead The sharp stone or metal tip once fixed to a shaft and shot from a bow.
Artifact Any object made by people.
Beads Tiny pierced ornaments threaded on a cord.
Bones The hard parts of a skeleton. Animal ones show what people hunted, herded and ate.
Charcoal Burned wood from an old fire, a good sample for carbon dating.
Coins Small stamped pieces of metal money.
Figurine A very small statue.
Flint A hard stone that breaks with sharp edges, chipped into blades and scrapers.
Fossil Remains of ancient life preserved in rock. Studying these is paleontology, a different science.
Hand Axe A stone tool worked on both faces and held in the palm: the longest-used tool in human history.
Hearth The burned patch where a household kept its fire.
Hoard A collection of valuables hidden in the ground by an owner who never came back for it.
Inscription Words cut into stone or metal.
Jewelry Rings, necklaces, bracelets and pins worn for show.
Kiln An oven built to bake clay pots hard.
Mosaic A picture made of many small colored tiles.
Petroglyph A picture carved into a rock face.
Potsherd A broken piece of a clay pot.
Pottery Pots, bowls and jars of baked clay.
Quern A stone for grinding grain by hand.
Relic A thing left over from a time long past.
Seeds Tiny plant remains, floated out of the soil with water, that show what people grew.
Skeleton The full frame of a body.

Dating and Ages 16

Ancient Belonging to times very long ago.
Bronze Age The middle of the three great spans of prehistory, when tools were cast from a mix of copper and tin.
Carbon Dating Measuring the radioactive atoms left in something that once lived to learn its age, back to about 50,000 years.
Century A span of one hundred years, a handy unit for placing old sites in time.
Chronology Events set in order of time.
Era A long stretch of history with a name of its own.
Half-Life The time in which half of a radioactive sample decays: about 5,730 years for carbon-14.
Iron Age The last of the three great spans of prehistory, named for a hard gray metal.
Isotope One form of an element. Carbon-14 is an unstable one.
Neolithic The New Stone Age, the time of the village of Skara Brae and of the first work at Stonehenge.
Paleolithic The Old Stone Age, the time of the cave painters of Lascaux.
Prehistory The long stretch of the human past before anyone wrote things down.
Sequence The order in which things follow one another.
Stone Age The earliest of the three great spans of prehistory, named for what tools were made of.
Timeline A line marked with dates to show what happened when.
Tree Rings Growth bands in wood. Matching their pattern can date a timber to the exact year.

Famous Sites 16

Angkor Wat Vast temple in Cambodia, begun in the early 12th century.
Cahokia Native American city of great earth mounds in Illinois, across the Mississippi from St. Louis.
Easter Island Rapa Nui, the Pacific home of a people who carved giant stone figures between 1250 and 1500.
Gobekli Tepe Hilltop in Turkey with rings of huge carved pillars, built about 9500 BC.
Great Zimbabwe Stone city in southern Africa, built from the 11th century by ancestors of the Shona.
Knossos Palace site on the island of Crete, built by the Minoans.
Lascaux Cave in France whose painted animals were found in September 1940.
Machu Picchu Inca citadel of the 15th century, high in the Andes of Peru.
Mesa Verde Colorado park that protects more than 600 cliff dwellings of the Ancestral Pueblo people.
Olduvai Gorge in northern Tanzania famous for evidence of early human life.
Petra City carved from sandstone cliffs in southern Jordan, nicknamed the Rose City.
Pompeii Roman city near Naples, buried under volcanic ash when Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD 79.
Skara Brae Stone-built village in Orkney, Scotland, uncovered by a storm in 1850.
Stonehenge Ring of standing stones on Salisbury Plain in England, begun about 3100 BC.
Sutton Hoo Burial ground in Suffolk, England, where a ship grave was uncovered in 1939.
Troy Ancient city in what is now Turkey, the setting of a famous Greek war story.

How this list was compiled: Own work: the 102 words and every clue were written for this page. Meanings were checked on October 9, 2026 against English Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeology, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_archaeology and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiocarbon_dating, and the technical terms again in the English Wiktionary (https://en.wiktionary.org/); the place and date in each Famous Sites clue against the article on that site. Licence: own work

How it works

This archeology word search printable hides 15 words, among them Artifact, Excavation, Trowel, Pottery, Ruins and Carbon Dating. Five more lists hold dig tools, site words, finds, dating terms and 16 famous sites, every word with a one-line meaning.

Read the full guide

Five lists for a dig unit

Start from a list splits the 102 words: Dig Tools (18), On the Dig (28), Finds (24), Dating and Ages (16) and Famous Sites (16). Famous Sites runs from Pompeii and Stonehenge to Cahokia, Mesa Verde and Great Zimbabwe, and each meaning says where the site is.

Meanings a class can dig with

"Where a find lay and what lay with it. Once it is lost, most of the story is lost too." is Context. "An ancient rubbish heap, full of shells, bones and broken pots." is Midden. Under More options, tick Show clues, not words, and the sheet becomes a vocabulary quiz.

Easy Archaeology keeps to 25 words of 3 to 5 letters, such as Dig, Site, Tell, Kiln and Troy.
The grid drops spaces and hyphens, so look for CARBONDATING, TESTPIT, HALFLIFE and MACHUPICCHU.

Questions and answers

Is it spelled archeology or archaeology?

Both spellings are correct and name the same science. This page's lists use archaeology. The title on the sheet is a text box, so a class that writes archeology can retype it before printing.

Do archaeologists dig up fossils and dinosaurs?

No. Archaeology studies people through the things they made and left behind. Fossils and dinosaurs belong to paleontology, a different science, and the meaning of Fossil in this puzzle says so. For that unit, print the fossil word search.

What tools do archaeologists use on a dig?

A trowel, a brush and a sieve for the close work, with a shovel, a bucket and a mattock for heavier soil. Dig Tools has 18 in all, including Lidar, Radar and Magnetometer, which find hidden features without digging.

How does carbon dating work?

Living things take in carbon-14, and after they die it decays, half of it about every 5,730 years. Measuring what is left gives the age of wood, bone or charcoal, back to about 50,000 years.

All 102 words

Dig Tools 18

On the Dig 28

Finds 24

Dating and Ages 16

Famous Sites 16

How it works

Five lists for a dig unit

Meanings a class can dig with

Questions and answers

More tools