Archeology Exam 1

any movable object that has been used, modified or manufactured by humans

developed in the 18th century by Scottish geologist James Hutton. age of the Earth is around 4.55 billion years

The First “Archaeologists”; Began drawing and recording monuments and artifacts as art objects; extensive looting of archaeological sites

Circus strongman; discovered egypts treasures. Did crazy stuff

Focus on Egypt; First to excavate a village, rather than focus on tombs Goal was to reconstruct everyday life Work in Great Zimbabwe

First professional; Radical shift in excavation strategy; No longer about finding artifacts, instead about answering questions

Archaeology as science; Moved beyond reconstructing to explaining the past How to connect material culture to behavior?

Argued for careful excavations; placing objects within their context; Established basic chronologies for ceramics in the Southwest and Maya

African origin; past is used to justify the present

Coined the term “Paleoindian”; Focus on what finds MEAN in the grand scheme of lifeway i.e. migrations, technology, subsistence

Adaptive Approach; Interest in understanding the processes of culture change; People live within a cultural system (organic)

Main interest in where cultures were and when? Where did they move?; How and why did culture change?; External Influences: migration/diffus

6th Century BCE; Rebuilt ruined temples; Researched earliest accounts of kings; Looked at the physical remains of culture!

6000 year time depth based on the Old Testament; 6pm 22 October 4004 BC world created

Uniformitarianism; Dynamic Geologic Processes; Geologic Deep Time

Discovered stone tools in association with extinct animal species

Processual vs. Post-processual; Process of theory of Archaeological Inquiry

High Level Theory: General Theories of Human Cultural Behavior

How do you link material remains to human behavior?

Basic observations in need of interpretation, the creation of data

Culture is learned, shared, symbolic; Dogs as pets vs. food; Culture as adaptation vs. ideas

Emphasis on ideas, thoughts, shared knowledge, symbols Energy crisis example How do internal factors affect culture change? Individual/Group

plant or animal remains found at an archaeological site

nonportable archaeological evidence such as fire hearths, artifact clusters, garbage pits, etc.

Food remains (bone, seeds, pollen, etc.); Unmodified stones

an artifact’s location relative to a system of spatial data collection; Hierarchical: Country, State, County, Site, Unit, Position and Orien

Some areas have a lot of agricultural land; agricultural land that has been...

Expect to find burned daub walls, the clay used in daub contains iron, which when heated all redirect to magnetic north; Think of an MRI

a sample survey method used in rejions where rapid soil buildup obscures buried archaeological remains; circular pits across a survey unit

the distribution of archaeological sites across a region

the movements and activities reconstructed from a settlement pattern

a geological process whereby fine sediment is blown away by the winds and larger items, including artifacts, are lowered onto a common surf.

Gumshoe; Aerial; Pedestrian; Remoe sensing and judgement vs random sample

Type of remote sensing, areal photos; geophysics

Sends signals down to see if there is any artifacts or anything down in the ground

measures the strength of magnetism between the earth’s magnetic core and a sensor controlled by the operator

A screening process in which deposit is placed on a screen and the matrix is washed away with hoses; essential where artifacts are small

a small initial excavation to determine a site’s potential for answering a research question

the basic vertical subdivision of an excavation unit, used only when easily recognizable “natural” strata are lacking or when natural strat

a vertical subdivision of an excavation square that is based on natural breaks in the sediments, sometimes called stratigraphic levels

the zero point, fixed reference used to keep control over the locations of artifacts, features and so on, on a dig

the field study that applies the concepts and methods of the geosciences to archeology research

the human and natural actions that work together to create an archeological site

the geological principle that in any pile of sedimentary rocks that have not been disturbed by folding or overturning, bed older below

Human behaviors that result in moving artifacts from the archaeological context back into the systematic context

human behaviors which artifacts enter the archaeological record, incliding discrd, loss, caching and ritual interment

geological layer whose age has been independently confirmed at numerous locations and presence can be used to date sediments

Sedimentary rock

sediments that have undergone in situ chemical and mechanical alteration

Layers of soil ontop of soil

flora, fauna and cryourbation

volcano eruption and created some famous fossil