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Archaeology Exam 1
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| The archaeological record | humanity's imprint on the earth/comprised of stuff that humans have left behind |
| artifact | objects that are made, modified and/or used by people |
| feature | non portable artifacts |
| ecofact | objects that provide info about the environmental context of human activity. Ecofacts are natural things like pollen, grains, seeds, and soil. |
| structure | complex constructed features |
| site | places where people lived or worked in the past that contain artifacts |
| humanitys imprint | the archaeological record is finite, non renewable and always changing |
| material culture | artifacts with which people surround themselves |
| archaeological research design | formalizes "what we want to know, the methods we plan to use, and the contribution the answer is expected to make" in a detailed written way. |
| archaeological theory | helps archaeologists to understand what they've dug up |
| antiquarianism | the appriciation of beautiful objects from antiquity |
| paleontology | the study of dinosaurs |
| dimensions of archaeology | form, space, and time |
| form | chemical or physical attributes of artifacts or features |
| space | where it happened |
| time | when an event occured |
| archaeology | study of the material record of the human past to interpret and explain that past |
| culture history | organizing archaeologicla observations in a chronicle of events |
| the New archaeology | W. W. Taylor/processual archaeology |
| Middle Range Theory | helpful guidelines for the reliable interpretaion of small scale archaeological patterns |
| dynamics and statics | ethnoarchaeology |
| who, what, when, where, how, and why questions | big questions = why did these people live like this? big questions can not be answered right away but must be turned into small ones |
| Nabonidus | 6th century b.c. Babylonian ruler who conducted his own excavations at Ur. |
| Cyriac | drew monuments and copied inscriptions. considered the first archaeologist. wrote 6 volume Commentaries that were desroyed in a fire. |
| Thomas Jefferson | in 1784, he excavated mounds on his property in Virginia |
| Squire and Davis | ancient monuments of the Mississippi Valley |
| Increase Lapham | mapped effigy mounds in the southern part of Winconsin. adding data about the size, shape, contents, and distributions of the mounds in the eastern woodlands. |
| Heinrich Schliemann | set out to prove that Hisarlik was the famous Troy. problem oriented approach |
| The Queen of Sheba and Great Zimbabwe | colonials would not believe that african "savages" could have built the huge palace at great zimbabwe |
| Midwestern Taxonomic System | W. C. McKern. influential, detailed hierarchy of terms. (component and focus = specific)(aspect, phase, pattern, and base = general |
| Julian Steward | mid 20th century anthropologist who focusedb attention on cultural ecology (the study of culture change by means of environmental adaptation. |
| Graham Clark | invited specialists in natural sciences like botony and zoology to participate in his research at the Mesolithic site of Star Carr. |
| A. V. Kidder | prepared the first regional systhesis of the american southwest |
| Walter W. Taylor | New Archaeology |
| Lewis Binford | thought that archaeology was challenging because comtemporary observations must be translated into statements about the past. |
| William Rathje and the Projet du Garbage | helped us understand the causes of modern consumption and discard patterns by sampling trash and excavating landfills. |
| Interpretive archaeologies | use diverse intellectual sources for empathetic interpretation of the past. |
| post processual archaeology | no single reasearch process or reading of the archaeological record can be judged more correct than another. |
| context | allows the meanings of artifacts to be understood. based on 3 types of info: provenience, matrix and association. |
| matrix | material in which the artifact is found. ex: soil |
| provenience | discovery location described from a datum point. x, y, and z coordinates |
| association | what is found with the object/spatial relationships. helps us to understand the function of the artifact |
| deposition | loss, discard, abandonment, and burial |
| erosion | nature moving the sediment |
| deposition processes | process by which things enter the archaeological record. |
| N Transforms | natural transforms such as physical characteristics of artifacts, context and associations of artifacts, weathering and erosion. |
| C Transforms | cultural transforms are recycling, reuse, and trampling |
| loss | people lose things which hel to date when they lived in a particular area |
| discard | objects that are thrown away |
| abandonment | people abandon places ex: their food source migrates |
| burial | people and objects get buried giving us clues as to who they were and how they lived |
| storage | people store things in order to easily find them again |
| caching | kind of like storage |
| taphonomy | study of the natural processes that act on organisms between the moment of death and the time of their discovery. |
| uniformitarianism | realtes present and past processesand conditions of formation and transformation |
| transformation of the archaeological record | many processes act on the record and change it over time |
| recycling | the reuse of a material of an object while turning it into another object |
| maintenence | the taking care of something |
| reuse | the use of an object that has been discarded but the object is in the same form |
| trampling | people walking around on the artifact and pushing in into the earth |
| preservation conditions | some environments can preserve organic materials better than others |
| organic materials | foodstuffs, baskets, wood, and human remains |
| wet environments | waterlogged areas such as bogs and swamps |
| dry environments | deserts preserve things such as baskets, textiles, leather and even mummified people |
| cold environment | can preserve organic materials such as whole wooly mammoths |
| natural disasters | mudslides and volcanos such as pompeii preserve artifacts |
| geologic time | eons, eras, periods, and epochs |
| Can oscar see down my pants pocket? | Paleozoic era. cambrian, ordovicain, silurian, devonian, mississippian, pennsylvanian, and permian. |
| People eating olives may put pits here. | Cenozoic Era. Paleocene, Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene, Pliocene, Pleistocene, and Holocene. |
| time | a dimension on which we can array objects and events |
| sequence | constructed from temporal relationships, they document trajectories of change |
| the three age system | invented by Christian J. Thomson, it revolutionized archaeology |
| temporal | having to do with time |
| relative chronology | tell us when things occured and the duration for when they occured by relating artifacts to one another |
| stratigraphy | study and interpretation of strata (layers of sedimentary deposits) |
| Christian Thomsen | three age system (stone, bronze, and iron) |
| Paleolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic | paleo is the oldest, neo the most recent |
| seriation | style change and they do so in a particular way |
| profile | walls of a hole that archaeologists dig. the strata can most often be seen as stripes of different colored soil on these profiles |
| superposition | formulated by Nicholas Steno in 17th century which says that bottom layers are older than the upper layers |
| original horizontality | most sediments originally accumulated as horizontal layers in restricted basins |
| lateral continuity | sediments are deposited in continous layers but their characteristics can change horizontally |
| sediments + artifacts = sites | sites form in places where sediments accumulate together with the artifacts left by people |
| stratigraphic correlation | linking strata from different locations based on their sedimentary characteristics |
| biostratigraphy | the stratigraphic distribution of fossils |
| index fossil | fossils that are distintive time markers for specific intervals of time |
| clovis point | fluted projectile points made around 11,500-10,800 in n. america |
| coelacanth | lobe finned fish. poor index fossil because they have a wide range of existence |
| Nels Nelson | Tano ruins of New Mexico. recorded 4 different pottery styles at different depths. observed that the relative frequences of the different styles changed with the depth |
| Sir Flinders Petrie | first use of seriation (sequencing) in archaeology |
| Battleship curve | appearence, waxing, acme, waning, and disappearence |
| artifact deflation | the process by which the wind blows the smaller finer particles of sediment away from the heavier artifact |
| cryoturbation | disturbance of the matrix by freezing and thawing |
| ethno-archaeology | making observations on behavior |
| expierimental archaeology | preforming expieriments in order to replicate the behavior of a past society |
Created by:
kohlki