ANT 102 Midterm

CFoE: Training

You have years of investment in an initial credential, and your abilities have been reviewed

CFoE: Time

You have stayed engaged, have a track record, continue developing new skills, learn new ones

CFoE: Talent

May involve deeper feel or understanding, drive, natural intelligence

CFoE: Testing

Peer evaluation and affirmation

Anthropology

A social science that studies the origins & diversity of human societies across space & time.

How is anthropology different from other disciplines that study humans?

the perspective of CULTURE

Culture

the array of learned behaviors & ideas you acquire by being brought up in a certain society & that you come to think are normal.

Why does archaeology allow us to address culture in the past?

It identifies patterns in material traces and links them to the behaviors & ideas that created them!

What does it mean to say that archaeology as anthropology is holistic?

•Diverse realms of human experience are interconnected and must be understood as parts of a whole

•Draws from many different disciplines

KCoA: Comparative

Seeks to understand the full scope of human complexity.

KCoA: Cares about change over time

Seeks reasons for social and cultural change.

KCoA: Field Based

Research involves deep engagement with real conditions.

Research Design

a plan for collecting data you need to answer the question.

Archaeological Site

Any place where there is material evidence of human activity in the past.

Archaeology

The investigation of the human past through the scientific study of physical traces and their context.

EoA: Artifact

Any object made or modified by humans (Arrowhead)

EoA: Feature

Non-portable elements of archaeological sites (Hearth)

EoA: Ecofact

Organic material that has archaeological significance (Coprolites)

EoA: Environmental Data

•Sediments, soils, and their contents

•Pollen grains and vegetation remains

•Cave formations

•Other geological formations

Goal of horizontal excavation

to document human activities at a particular point in time

Goal of vertical excavation

to document how human activities changed over time

Archaeological Context

WHERE an artifact, feature, or ecofact is found.

AC: Matrix

The soils and sediments that contain archaeological remains

AC: Provenience

The specific horizontal and vertical position of an artifact, ecofact, or feature.

AC: Association

The other artifacts, ecofacts and features that something is found with.

Archaeological Survey

a set of statistically-sound strategies for describing human activity across a whole landscape

Pedestrian Safety

Systematic coverage of an area by walking across it at regular intervals

What does LiDAR see?

A very detailed 3D map of the ground surface.

Sub-surface/geophysical survey

non-invasive techniques for seeing under the ground that use electromagnetic signals to detect archaeological targets.

Relative Dating

Ordering things or events chronologically relative to each other – but not giving an absolute calendar date

Absolute Dating

Determining a date expressed in specific units of measurement (days, centuries, millennia, etc.)

Stratigraphy

The vertical layering of horizontally-laid deposits: Oldest at bottom,  youngest and more recent at top

AD: Radiocarbon dating

•Works on things that were ALIVE: organic materials

•Tells how long it’s been since the tissue stopped taking in radioactive carbon from the atmosphere by measuring how much of it has decayed

Good for about 50,000 years

AD: Dendrochronology

the scientific method of dating annual growth rings in trees to the exact calendar year they formed

Archaeology Approach: Scientific

Humans, their bodies, products, & environments are observable.

Anthropologists collect, record, and analyze data.

Anthropologists generate, test, and support or reject hypotheses.

Archaeology Approach: Humanistic

Humans are “meaning makers” that invent complex symbol systems.

Understanding requires radical listening, empathy, creativity.

Studying them entails ethical obligations not to harm or exploit.

Science

An organized PROCESS that helps bring our ideas about the world more closely in line with how the world actually is.

Induction

•First, observe a series of conditions that need explaining

•Then, ask a question about the reasons for those conditions

•Finally, come up with a set of reasonable explanations:

Deduction

•Testable expectations:  What should we expect to observe in the world if one of these statements is true?

Hypothetico-deductive method

•Creatively inducing reasonable hypotheses

•Logicially deducing their testable expectations

•Testing the hypotheses in the world to see if they hold

•Evaluating whether the hypotheses are supported

SM: Step 1

Ask the question

SM: Step 2

Create a hypothesis as an answer to the problem

SM: Step 3

State testable expectations for the hypothesis

SM: Step 4

Go to the world: gather evidence

Bioarcheology

the scientific study of human remains from archaeological sites

Inca

A complex society of South America, centered around the ancient city of Cuzco, the largest, last empire of pre-Columbian Americas (1250-1572), colonized and conquered by the Spanish 1530-1570, who transformed Inca society into a set of marginalized   indigenous groups who still occupy Peru

Social Complexity

•internal differentiation:  how many sub-groups and roles are there?

•hierarchical organization: how stratified is the society?

Political Organization

How is power organized in a society?

Incan characteristics of a state-level society

•Formal institutions of government:

•Centralized authority

•Multi-ethnic army

•Administrative class / bureaucracy

•Urban centers & monumental construction projects

•State-controlled religion, art, architecture

•Highly socially stratified

•Highly productive cereal-based agricultural economy

Incan appeared at random

False: The Inca were only the last in a great line of Andean Civilizations.

IIS: Agricultural Intensification

•Creating unique biotic environments through massive landscape modification to maximize food supply and surplus (Terraces)

IIS: Storage

•Collcas (storage structures)

•Ensured food security in an unstable climate

Visible sign of Inca dominance and authority

IIS: Roads

•25,000 miles of roads connecting Cuzco with imperial provinces

Goods, information, people

IIS: Architecture

Inca-style tight-jointed masonry is used to establish and symbolize the presence of the state across the realm (not used in all architecture)

•System of forts and administrative centers: Defined/protected boundaries and established Inca presence

Sun temples: Inca religion imposed over local religions

IIS: Bodies

•High-elevation sacrifices: CAPACOCHA: using the bodies of subjects to mark the boundaries of empire and propitiate the gods

IIS: Labor Mobilization

•Mit’a: compulsory labor (still used in the Andes!) owed by every man in a community to the Inca state but families and lands of laborers were cared for during absence

IIS: Military Force

•Permanent generals and officers of Inca ethnicity

•Drafts (mit’a) of soldiers from different ethnic groups across the empire

200,000-man force at its height

Cosmology

a society’s understanding of the shape and order – physical and moral – of the universe, and the human place in it.

Incan Cosmology

The Inca realm is TAWANTINSUYU: “the four parts together”

•Divisions of the empire radiate from the center

•Cusco was “the navel of the universe”

The city is a microcosm of the cosmos

Ceque System

Cosmological integration of an enormous landscape

42 ritual (not physical) pathways that link the heart of Cuzco with 328 Huacas

Huaca

•revered locations or shrines

•Revered places associated with water

•…each maintained by different social/family groups

Cubit

A measurement from the elbow to the tip of the middle finger

Royal Cubit

The current reigning Pharoah’s cubit, used as a measuring tool for architecture projects

Pyramids appeared suddenly without transition

False

•The Great Pyramid at Giza is only the BEGINNING of 3,000 years of Egyptian monumental production and history

•And it’s at the TAIL END of a gradual evolution of a tradition of royal tomb construction

Significance of the tombs at Hierakonpolis

Examples of Pre-dynastic elite tombs

•Mud brick subterranean chambers covered by a perishable superstructure

Mastaba

•trapezoidal structures covering a subterranean burial chamber

Horus Name

Indicates divinity of king

Importance of pyramid of Djoser and Sneferu

Shows transitional period of development of pyramid design

Main elements of a pyramid complex on the Giza plateau

•Pyramids

•Satellite “queens’” pyramids

•Boat pits

•Mortuary temples

•Causeways

•“Valley” temples

•Cemeteries

•Towns

•Quarries

•DUMPS

•Massive quantities of quarry and ramp debris

Residential garbage from the 4^th-6^th Dynasties

What are the pyramids of Giza made from?

Limestone (pyramid core) : comes from the Central Field quarry

cut with copper chisel and wooden mallets

Fine limestone (casing): comes from Tura

Granite (tomb and passage lining): comes from Aswan

How was stones removed from the quarries?

Recent discovery at the Hatnub alabaster quarry: stone ramp flanked by shallow stairs with deep post holes

How was the stone moved from the quarries to the construction sites?

•Hard-surfaced hauling tracks / transport roads of limestone chips and mortar, sometimes with wooden boat timbers laid crossways

•On the Nile and on canal networks

Evidence for transport methods

•Art: tomb paintings made by the Egyptians themselves

•Physical remains:  Tools, artifacts/objects, roads, quarries

•Experimental archaeology: We can replicate ancient methods today to demonstrate that humans are capable of moving big rocks

Carved and painted depictions, written descriptions of boats moving stones in Egyptian art

How was stone placed into the body of pyramids?

Ramps

Evidence of Ramps

•Remains of ramps

•Impressions of ramps

•Dumps of ramp material at Giza

Importance of celestial north and stars to Egyptians

They are a destination for the transfigured souls of the dead – especially the king! – and constitute a divine society.

North for Egyptians was not a direction, but a sacred landscape.

Gnomon

The pointer or vertical element of a sundial or shadow clock that casts a shadow to indicate time and solar movement.

Stretching the cord

A method for extending the north line over long distances.

Significance of excavation of pyramid towns

Egyptian labor and resources managed by a bureaucracy:

•The state and TEMPLES collected, stored, and re-distributed produce & livestock

•drafted and organized manpower for specialized labor

•Maintained irrigation and flood protection works

•Organized major state construction projects

Ka

Individual aspect:

•Spiritual essence that existed alongside the human form

•Its true home is in the sky; it returns there upon death but must remain anchored to the living world to exist properly there

Communal aspect:

•divine essence that nurtured all existence, traced back to the original Creator god Khnum

•The pharaoh was the KA of his people – he was their animating force

•He was literally understood as sustenance, or food – a nourisher of the kingdom

•His KA had to be properly revived and protected so that all people could thrive

Ba

•Not the body; but a physical mode of existence that expresses the force of someone’s personhood.

•Anchored to the body or other physical manifestations during life

•Stars are the ba forms of gods.

The BA of KINGS:

•anything that expressed his personal power and charisma

•His armies

•His cities

Most important physical anchor for a BA is the CORPSE,which must be firm, perfect, enduring, whole

Mummy

•A ba form: the perfected physical anchor for a person’s soul

Akh

•The union of the BA and the KA, properly anchored in an incorruptible physical reality on earth.

•Maintained by

•proper burial rites

•continued ritual offerings in the tomb.

•The well-being and prosperity of the person’s family, subjects, and the earthly realm as a whole depended on the integrity of the soul after death.

Who are the Maya

•An ancient and a modern people of Mexico and Central America

•1,200 B.C. - present

Characteristics of Maya

•Divine kingship expressed in

•Tombs

•Stelae

Thousands of sites, large and small

“Layer cake” construction of monuments over decades and centuries, phase after phase.

Sophisticated agricultural intensification

Emblem Glyphs

certain motifs were found predominantly at certain ancient cities. Royal titles of kings, from particular cities, that mark them as divine beings.

How did the Mayan leaders legitimize authority

•Embodying divinity

•And portraying this embodiment in spectacle! 

•High-impact public ritual theater

Great city plazas can be thought of as amphitheaters.

What are the key iconographic elements present on the sarcophagus of King Pakal of Palenque?

The Great White Bone Centipede’s mouth: An earth opening; a portal between the world of the living and the world of the ancestors

A bowl filled with blood-letting tools and a bloody birth orifice, the earth’s womb

The World Tree / Axis mundi: connects the realms of the cosmos

Maya stela:  a Maya ruler of Copan dancing as the Maize God, A.D. 720

What does the sarcophagus of King Pakal depict

The dead king being reborn from the bony portal of the underworld through the cosmic womb of the earth facilitated by blood sacrifice to travel up the cosmic pillar / world tree into the sky as the infant maize god.

Where is Mayan hieroglyphic writing found

“Name-tag” inscriptions on ear ornaments

Painted vases with descriptions of the doings of royalty and deities

Rare murals depicting scenes of warfare

The Codex Dresden, one of 4 Maya divinatory almanacs painted on bark paper composed around A.D. 1200

How was the writing system lost

The Spanish worked to eradicate elite Maya knowledge because it threatened colonial power and conversion to Catholicism. Hundreds of books were burned.

Clues for decipherment

1.Diego de Landa accidentally helped:

•He got Maya scribes to write out what he thought was an “alphabet” with corresponding Spanish letters.

2.    The Maya liked to accompany pictures with texts. 

3. Many modern Maya languages are still spoken and have dictionaries.

Logographs

Word signs

Syllables

phonetic signs that have a sound value

Basic Rule of deciphering Mayan words

•String the syllables together from left to right and top to bottom

•Drop the final vowel

What did archaeological survey at places like Tikal reveal about the nature of ancient Maya cities?

They are densely inhabited “garden cities” with central civic/ceremonial areas and extensive residential areas interspersed with cultivated lands.

How did the Maya feed a large population

•Agricultural intensification: increasing the productivity of existing land

•Raised fields

•increases fertility,

•improves drainage,

•creates micro-environments

•Bajos: low-lying swamps with  naturally-occurring ponds

Huge variety of features: Berms, low terracing, canals, redeposition of fertile soils in less fertile locations

Slope Terracing

What did LiDAR reveal about Mayan populations

•Covered 2,000+ km²

•Found 61,480 structures

•Population density of 80-120 people/km² at height of Classic period (A.D. 650-800)

•Total population of central Maya area: 7-11 million people

What did LiDAR reveal about Mayan Agriculture

Landscape much more heavily modified for agriculture than previously thought

•LOWLAND WETLANDS: Enormous drained field systems

•UPLAND TERRAIN: Linear stone features: contour terraces, check dams

CONCLUSION: Regional agricultural economy of tremendous complexity

capable of supporting dense populations.

Over how many years did the abandonment of the great classical cities occur?

219 years (790-919 AD)