The answer is no, not really. Archaeology as a discipline only really began to emerge in the late 19th century. Prior to that most excavators of ancient artefacts tended to really be antiquarians – collectors of things that were old. They were not restricted to the relatively narrow field that archaeology developed into, nor did they show much care for how they extracted or obtained artefacts. In the first half of the 19th century collectors generally valued artefacts for their aesthetic qualities not their historical data. This changed over the 19th century through a process of systematisation and precision to become the modern discipline of archaeology.

To go back to the ancient world, though, there is simply nothing approaching the kind of awareness of archaeology. Not to say they were ignorant or uninterested, they simply didn’t approach artefacts with the same kind of consciousness or methodology. Historiography itself is a pretty different beast in the ancient world (I am talking about the Classical and Antique periods in the Mediterranean), let alone study of artefacts.