From the National Post, the best description of archaeology in a newspaper, ever:

Archaeology may be the most complicated art form created in the last 200 years, and one of the most valuable. It’s an art of unending disclosure, a system of imaginative scholarship that justifies itself through unpredictable revelations.While increasingly shaped by science, archaeology retains the quality it had when it was created in the 19th century: It always tells a story.[read the full story by Robert Fulford]

I like that. Archaeology as art, archaeology as story. I’d argue that ‘archaeology as game’ works, too… more on that later, as time allows.