Archaeology Lecture Review

Flashcards covering key vocabulary and concepts from the archaeology lecture notes, including definitions of archaeological terms, methods, dating techniques, and schools of thought.

Archaeology

The discipline that uses material evidence to answer questions about the human past.

Archaeology (Americas)

One of four fields of anthropology, along with linguistic, cultural, and physical anthropology.

Archaeology (Old World)

An independent discipline often connected to history.

Anthropology

Investigates human diversity and similarity.

Scientific Method Steps

Come up with a question, formulate a testable hypothesis, make a prediction, conduct an experiment, analyze the results.

Archaeological Research Problem

Should guide specific research questions, link work to larger anthropological issues, and be answerable in a reasonable amount of time.

Cross-cultural Archaeological Studies

Seek regularities in human behavior by comparing multiple cultures, typically involving two or more relational variables.

Ethnoarchaeological Studies

Link behaviors to material outcomes.

Archaeological Case Studies

Explore one example of a larger phenomenon.

Equifinality

When two different behaviors could lead to the same material outcomes.

Nicholas Steno's Major Method Contribution

Stratigraphy.

Four Major Models of Human History (Antiquity-Renaissance)

Cyclical, Steady-state, Degeneration, Evolution.

Stratigraphy

The study of layers (strata), including formation, destruction, and relationships.

Unilinear Cultural Evolutionism

The position that all societies will eventually develop substantially the same cultural practices, technologies, and institutions, leading to a single scale of social evolution.

Lewis Henry Morgan's Social Evolution

Divided social evolution into stages based on the belief that cultural behaviors are closely integrated, causing cascades of changes.

Moundbuilders

Native American societies, mainly in the eastern United States.

Cyrus Thomas' Proof (Moundbuilders)

Used ethnographic accounts of bone curation and burial, and the absence of non-Native American artifacts before the Colonial period.

Ossuary (as found by Thomas Jefferson)

Bones deposited in layers separated by earth, with bones within each layer scattered, not articulated.

Three Age System

Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age.

Paleolithic

Old Stone Age: archaic Homo and early Homo sapiens contemporaries.

Mesolithic

Middle Stone Age: Homo sapiens hunter-gatherers.

Neolithic

New Stone Age: farmers with ground stone axes.

Christian Jürgensen Thomsen's Solution

Closed finds and analysis of decoration and style to date materials where technologies overlapped or varied.

Stratum

A layer of deposition.

Stratigraphic Interface

A surface of a stratum.

Stratigraphic Unit

Either a stratum or an interface.

Basin of Deposition

The bounded area where a stratum is formed.

Layer Interfaces

Upper surfaces of strata.

Feature Interfaces

Where strata have been partially destroyed.

Stratigraphic Sequence

A model of the order in which strata and interfaces were created, produced by researchers through interpretation.

Harris Matrix

Diagram representing strata and interfaces in their order of creation.

Strata in Harris Matrix

Represented by rectangles.

Interfaces in Harris Matrix

Represented by ovals.

Key Factors in Artifact Preservation

Temperature, humidity and moisture, oxygen, soil acidity, enclosure or protection.

Provenience

Where an artifact came from within a site.

Archaeological Context

An artifact’s relationship to other artifacts, features, and strata.

Provenance

The general origin of an artifact and its history of custody.

Wheeler Box-Grid Method of Excavation

Leaving balks of unexcavated soil between closely spaced excavation units on a grid.

Step-Trenching (purpose)

To prevent collapse of excavation unit walls.

Archaeological Typology

Grouping artifacts in categories.

Kinds of Archaeological Types

Functional, Decorative, Morphological (shape and composition), Descriptive (decorative + morphological), Chronological.

Emic Types

Categories that mattered in a past society.

Etic Types

Categories created by archaeologists.

Chronological Types

Artifact types used for estimating the age of a deposit, like index fossils in paleontology.

Modal Analysis

Describing everything that can be different (modes) about a functional type.

Type-Variety Analysis

Grouping artifacts in types defined by modes that consistently occur together, extending to smaller categories like varieties and broader ones like groups or wares.

Archaeological Seriation Assumption

Style and production techniques are more likely to be communicated and learned than re-invented, so formal similarity should correspond to historical continuity.

Frequency Seriation

If the percentages of artifact types in a deposit match the percentages typical of a given period, then the deposit may have been made during that period.

Occurrence Seriation

If an artifact type was made only after a known date, and it appears in a sealed deposit, then the deposit cannot have been made before that date.

Archaeological Seriation

Arranging types by similarity.

Battleship Curve

Represents the changing frequencies of artifact types over time.

Sutton Hoo Ship Burial Dating

Dated using Frankish coins through occurrence seriation (not earlier than latest coins) and frequency seriation (when earlier coins were still in circulation).

Genetic Dating (Human Genome)

Uses Mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA because they are not recombined during sexual reproduction, so differences are due to random mutation at a constant rate over time.

Varves

Layers of sediment deposited at the bottom of a lake or pond each year, with light, fine sediment from snowmelt in summer and dark sediment from freezing surface in winter.

Dendrochronology

Dating method based on tree rings forming once a year.

Isotopes

Variants of an element that have the same number of protons, but different numbers of neutrons.

Half-life

The period of time by which half of the unstable, radioactive isotopes of an element in a sample have decayed into a more stable isotope.

Radiocarbon Dating

Determines how long ago an organism died by measuring the proportion of radioactive carbon (14C) to stable carbon isotopes, as 14C decays at a constant rate after an organism stops taking up CO2.

Before Present (BP)

Years before 1950.

Thermoluminescence Dating

Dating method where accumulated electrons trapped in a crystal lattice due to background radiation are released by heat, indicating how long ago the object was last heated.

Thermoluminescence Dating (suitable artifacts)

Ceramics.

Archaeological Culture

Assemblages of artifact types that consistently appear together.

Culture Historical Archaeology

The position that archaeological cultures represent the lifeways of discrete, unified, and stable ethnocultural groups, with migration driving changes in material culture.

Historical Particularism

The position that cultures are produced by their unique, contingent histories and could have turned out differently.

Cultural Relativism

The position that there is no universal standard of cultural development, and no single path human societies must take, so cultures are not more primitive or more advanced.

Key Figures of Culture Historical Archaeology

Gustaf Kossinna, Franz Boas, and Vere Gordon Childe.

Explanations for Shared Cultural Practice

Independent invention, Migration, Diffusion.

George McJunkin's Folsom Site Discovery Importance

Stone points found with bones from bison extinct for about 9,000 years, showing humans had been in the Americas for a long time.

Modern Indigenous Europeans (Genetic Ancestry)

Mostly a mix of European Hunter-Gatherers (Mesolithic), Early European Farmers (Neolithic), and Steppe Pastoralists (Bronze Age).

Linear Pottery

Associated with Early European Farmers.

Corded Ware Pottery

Associated with Steppe Pastoralist invasions.

Bell Beaker Pottery

Spread through both migration and communication, in different times and places.