The year 1982 in archaeology involved some significant events.

Events

• Archaeological Museum of Olympia opens in Greece.
• Eindhoven Museum founded as an archaeological open-air museum in the Netherlands.

Excavations

• October 11 - Hull of Tudor navy ship Mary Rose raised from the Solent.^[1]
• The Chaco Project ends at Chaco Canyon (begun 1971).

Finds

• March - Wreck of HMS Swift (1763) located in Puerto Deseado on the Atlantic coast of Patagonia.^[2]
• May 12 - Coppergate Helmet found in York, England.^[3]
• NASA's Thermal Infrared Multispectral Scanner (TIMS) detects over 200 miles of a precolumbian (900 CE or 1000 CE) road system in Chaco Canyon, as well as walls, buildings and agricultural fields.^[4]
• Uluburun shipwreck discovered.

Publications

• A. F. Harding (ed.) - Climatic Change in Later Prehistory ISBN 0-85224-425-8
• Richard Hodges - Dark Age Economics: the Origins of Towns and Trade, A.D. 600-1000 ISBN 0-7156-1531-9
• Roger Moorey - A Century of Biblical Archaeology ISBN 0-7188-2825-9

Births

Deaths

• September 18 - Pei Wenzhong, founding father of Chinese anthropology, buried at Peking Man Site in Zhoukoudian, China (b. 1904).^[5]
• October - Michael J. O'Kelly, Irish archaeologist (b. 1915).^[6]