Archaeology Review Exam 1

Terms and ideas from unit 1-2

Arid Preservation

Environments with good preservation of both organic and inorganic materials by lacking moisture and microbial activity that typically cause rapid decay

Cold Preservation

Recovery of ancient artifacts and organic remains that have been safely frozen in glaciers, ice patches, or permafrost for thousands of years.

Waterlogged Preservation

Groundwater excludes air to create an oxygen-free environment that preserves fragile organic artifacts like wood, leather, and textiles for centuries.

Rusted artifacts

The conversation and study of rusted iron artifacts require specialized techniques to halt oxidation and reveal original manufacturing details.

Natural Transformations

The environmental and physical forces that bury, alter, move, or destroy material remains after humans deposit them.

Cultural Transformations

The human activities and behavioral shifts that shape, alter and deposit material remains over time.

Recycling

The process by which past human societies gathered, modified, and reused or remelted discarded material culture to create new items.

Principle of Association

The rule states that artifacts or features found together in the same undisturbed layer of soil were deposited at roughly the same time and share a related depositional history.

Principle of

Superposition

In any undisturbed sequence of soil or rock layers (strata), the oldest layers lie at the bottom and progressively younger layers lie on top

Sub-Assemblage

Represents a distinct subset of items within a broader collection from a site, feature, or stratum.

Assemblage

A group of artifacts recurring together at a particular time and place, and representing the sum of human activities

Matrix

The physical material within which artifacts are embedded or supported (gravel, clay, or sand)

Provenience

The place of orgin or earliest known history of something; also the horizontal and vertical position of an artifact, ecofact, or feature within a matrix.

Artifact (Inorganic &

Organic)

Any portable object modified or made by humans (stone tools, pottery, metal weapons)

Feature

A non-portable artifact (hearth, architechual element, or soil stain)

Structure

Physical remains of past human architecture.

Ecofact

Non-artifactual organic and environmental remains that have cultural relevance (faunal and floral material, as well as soil and sediments)

Flinders Petrie

Egypt Exploration Society, Father of Egyptology, Seriation analysis (arranging artifacts in chonological order based on changed in style and popularity over time)

General Pitt-Rivers

Supervision of a qualified archeologist is necessary for an excavation, attention to detail, and research strategies: questions for which answers may be found in an excavation, systematic collection and recording, analysis and publication

Willard Libby

Radiocarbon dating

The New Archaeology

explicitly scientific framework of archaeological method and theory with a hypothesis rigorously tested, as the proper basis or explanation.

Three Age System

CJ Thomsen, chronological ordering of artifacts is possible by classifying them technologically.

Typology

Systematic organization of artifacts into types on the basis of shared attributes.

V. Gordon Childe

Prehisotric Europe

Context

The location and surrounding material and the relationship of an artifact or feature in space and time that gives it historical meaning.

Formation Processes

the human and natural events that create shape and alter and site over time

Dendrochronology

measuring how old wood is by messing the tree lines and comparing to older trees

Uniformitarianism

the geological processes shaping the Earth today—like erosion, weathering, and sedimentation—are the exact same processes that shaped it in the past

Mortimer Wheeler

grid method of excavation

Scientific Method

Logical step-by-step process used to gather data, test ideas, and explain past human behavior. Choose a problem, develop a hypothesis, write procedures, test, share conclusions.

Deductive Reasoning

process of elimination

Thomas Jefferson

1st scienfic excavation on his house

Lewis Binford

Hypothesis

Provenience

the exact 3-dimensional location that an artifact us found during and excavation

The Body at Belmont

Pre-Columbian American Indian and Taino settlement where the beginnings of human burials were found. Bodies were found face down with their arms around their heads.

Time Team: Utrecht

Old prehistoric Roman boat was found, oldest artifact from that time period, in almost perfect condition.

The Wheeler Site

Bodies were found in fetal position in small holes because they had less advanced tools to help them dig more effectively.

Time Team: Seahenge

The founding of an upside-down tree stump surrounded by wooden posts, signifying some sort of statue location. It was completely waterlogged because it was near the beach; there was a risk of further erosion, so they had to act fast.