Defined as any object made or used by people, artifacts of numerous shapes, sizes, origins and uses are found throughout the "Stargate" series. The original stargate was an artifact created by a progenitor race known as the Ancients, who used it as an interstellar highway across the galaxy. The stargate was first introduced to humans in ancient Egypt. Symbiotic alien marauders known as the Gou'ld landed in Egypt, uncovered the stargate, enslaved the native humans and transported them across the galaxy for use as host bodies and slave labor.
The original stargate was discovered in 1928 in an excavation site in Giza, Egypt. The stargate was transferred to the United States and kept in a bunker in Colorado until decoded by anthropologist Daniel Jackson. Subsequent excavations revealed ancient sites in Antarctica, where another stargate was found. Further excavations have been conducted on alien worlds in the television series "Stargate SG-1."
Anthropology is a field of science that studies biological, cultural, linguistic and social aspects of past and present human civilization; archaeology is a subfield of this larger study. In the "Stargate" franchise, anthropology is adapted to study alien civilizations, as well as human civilization on foreign worlds. Most anthropology within the "Stargate" series comes in the form of cultural and linguistic studies as the stargate teams attempt to understand and communicate with alien cultures.
The original "Stargate" film was based on an Egyptology theme, using the impressive craftsmanship of the pyramids at Giza as a premise for ancient aliens. The film followed archaeologist and Egyptologist Daniel Jackson and an American special operations team into the stargate and across the galaxy to a desert planet called Abydos. The human inhabitants of this planet were descendants of ancient Egyptians, spoke a dialect of ancient Egyptian and built structures of similar construction.