2014年4月托福考试模拟试卷及答案(第四套)_第19页

　　Archaeology has long been an accepted tool for studying prehistoric cultures.

　　Relatively recently the same techniques have been systematically applied to studies of

　　the more immediate past. This has been called "historical archaeology," a term that is

　　Line used in the United States to refer to any archaeological investigation into North

　　(5) American sites that postdate the arrival of Europeans.

　　Back in the 1930's and 1940's, when building restoration was popular, historical

　　archeology was primarily a tool of architectural reconstruction. The role of archaeologists

　　was to find the foundations of historic buildings and then take a back seat to architects.

　　The mania for reconstruction had largely subsided by the 1950's and 1960's. Most

　　(10) people entering historical archaeology during this period came out of university

　　anthropology departments, where they had studied prehistoric cultures. They were, by

　　training, social scientists, not historians, and their work tended to reflect this bias. The

　　questions they framed and the techniques they used were designed to help them

　　understand, as scientists, how people behaved. But because they were treading on

　　(15) historical ground for which there was often extensive written documentation and because

　　their own knowledge of these periods was usually limited, their contributions to American

　　history remained circumscribed. Their reports, highly technical and sometimes poorly

　　written, went unread.

　　More recently, professional archaeologists have taken over. These researchers have

　　(20) sought to demonstrate that their work can be a valuable tool not only of science but also

　　of history, providing fresh insights into the daily lives of ordinary people whose existences

　　might not otherwise be so well documented. This newer emphasis on archaeology as

　　social history has shown great promise, and indeed work done in this area has lead to a

　　reinterpretation of the United States past.

　　(25) In Kingston, New York, for example, evidence has been uncovered that indicates that

　　English goods were being smuggled into that city at a time when the Dutch supposedly

　　controlled trading in the area. And in Sacramento an excavation at the site of a fashionable

　　nineteenth-century hotel revealed that garbage had been stashed in the building's

　　basement despite sanitation laws to the contrary.

　　The phrase "their contributions" in line 16 refers to the contributions of

　　(A) social scientists

　　(B) prehistoric cultures

　　(C) historians

　　(D) documentation and knowledge