Anthropology Material Culture Quiz Review

James Deetz

had an expansive view on what material culture is; believed that material culture is not just tangible things but things that have the capacity to be captured, a manifestation of that which is socially learned; looked at transition of forms of gravestones in different grave lots in New England over time and saw that the etchings in the gravestone represented people’s change in ideas about life and death as well as a change in religious theologies

William Rathje

started off comparing cultures in Mexico and South America to those of more modern cultures; took a tangent and started doing ‘garbology’ in order to understand how people live their lives

impression management

often what people say they do is not what material records prove they actually do owing to how people want to give off good impressions to those around them

looting

removal of artifacts from archaeological sites without the recording of information; causes archaeologists to lose the temporal sequence information of the site

open area excavation

taking each layer of a site off one layer at a time in order to understand what is happening all across a site one “slice” at a time

areal view

trench like excavation

grid pattern excavation

series of separated square trenches

stratigraphy

branch of archaeology concerned with the order and relative position of the strata and their relationship to the geological timeline

profile

side view of an archaeological site

law of superposition

new layers of sediment are on top of older layers of sediment; newer layers of sediment can disturb or cut through older layers

excavation

involves taking a site apart in the reverse order from which it was formed in order to preserve the context of the location

relative dating

technique used in archaeological anthropology; sequence of development of an archaeological site; not just a matter of depth but taking apart a site in the reverse order in which it formed in order to understand how it was formed

absolute dating

outside the realm of archaeological anthropology; determines exactly how long ago something is from/how long ago it died; includes carbon-14 dating, argon potassium dating

terminus post quem

means ‘the date after which’; a technique used for relative dating in archaeological anthropology that is use when an artifact is found with a date on it; the date on the artifact is used to sequence the layers of sediment it was found in

magnetometry

looks for magnetic signatures or burned soil in soil samples (anomolies)

ground penetrating radar (GPR)

looks for changes in the density of the soil

LiDAR

aero view of archaeological sites that shows minute differences in elevation and trace of human activity that otherwise may not be able to be seen or noticed on foot

artifact

made by people that can be removed from the site

feature

made by people but can not be removed from the site without altering it in some way

urban revolution

when people started living in large groups and communities; one of the first places this is seen is in Ancient Egypt; brought forth social inequality that was not present in smaller societal groups

chronology

when did something happen, what happened at the same time, how are they similar; trends and patterns noticed through time

frequency seriation (battleship curves)

show different forms and their range in popularity over time

stylistic seriation

developed by Sir William Finders Petrie; put one form of an item linearly one after another in order to understand the transitions/transformations from one form

dendochronology

tree ring patterns; relative to the patterns in the area, and only tells you when the tree died

typology

makes sense of the variety of the material culture we encounter; looks at variation in form

foraging

hunting and gathering; the form of food production and society seen through the majority of hominin evolution

pastoralism

care for and herding of animals

horticulture

slash and burn, swidden cultivation, shifting cultivation

intensive agriculture

modern way of food production seen in western culture where advanced tools and machinery are used in order to make amends to the land

Neolithic (Woodland America)

period of time in the america’s when people started to settle down and domesticate plants and animals

sedentism

living in one place permanently

Patty Jo Watson

stated that there is a lot of grey area in domestication; are the plants actually being domesticated or are the changes random?; plants have to be foraged for a long time before showing changes representing human intervention

Marshall Sahlins

believed that hunters and gatherers were the first affluent society; these societies benefited from less time input to getting food as well as getting food with a breadth of nutritional values; these societies lacked stratification in social standing because of the limited reliance people had on one another (if they had personal hunting and gathering skills and a conflict arose, they could up and leave); hunting and gathering is a societal mechanism that reduces violence and inequality

ethnoarchaeology

analyzes life ways; ethnographic study of living people and their material worlds for the purpose of better understanding the links between behavior and material culture

Lewis Binford

analyzed how the Nunamuit people supported themselves in their polar environment

Gordon Childe

interested in when cities became the popular living/societal style

primary (social) living styles

cities, state organization, class stratification, concentration of surplus, full time labor specialization

secondary (material) living styles

monumental public works, long distance exchange, writing, arithmetic and astronomy and geometry, standardized artwork

societal complexity

number of different roles and activities performed by the individual

band < tribe < chiefdom < state

achieved status

one has authority over others owing to their stance in society that was earned owing to their personal qualities

ascribed status

authority is passed down and/or not owing to characteristics of the individual

coercive functions present in the state

convincing individuals to do things; eg. people must have been convinced to build the impressive archaeological sites we know of today

integrative functions in the state

taking individuals in from less complex societies and putting them in the center of the more complex society in order to give them a purpose larger than themselves and family to identify with