History of Anthropology Exam 3

Panini

- an Indian scholar of Sanskrit wrote a grammar of Sanskrit that was discovered in the nineteenth century

- His work made Sanskrit the most important language for Indian scholarship

- The Astadhyayi, the work for which he is known, defined the Sanskrit language and was modeled on the speech of elite speakers of his day

- Although he cites earlier linguists in his work, he is considered the earliest important linguist

Catherine the Great of Russia

- was interested in languages and learning and promoted literacy and education in her realm

- provided support for a systematic collection of selected vocabularies on a world-wide scale

- during her reign, more Russians began to attend universities and an intelligentsia developed in Russia

- her own writings were translated in French, German, and English

Sir William Jones

- an English linguistic scholar, recognized through his studies the structural relationship of Sanskrit to Greek and Latin-Indo-European languages

- His work was published in the late eighteenth century (1786)

- He asserted that the comparison of contemporary languages spoken by chronologically earlier peoples

- His work and that of others served to remind anthropologists of the validity of the comparative method in studying languages cross-culturally

Thomas Jefferson

- held a highly political view of language

- believed that knowledge of American Indian languages would provide evidence of their origins

- had collected enough about American Indian languages to convince himself that they were more diverse than those of the Old World

- By the late 1780s, he and others had begun to collect vocabularies and other ethnological information from various American Indian groups

- the founder of the University of Virginia

- He championed education for an informed citizenry and encouraged language learning

- He collected vocabularies of Native American Languages and planned a publication of his work

Noah Webster

renowned for his contributions to American lexicography and education

Benjamin Smith Barton

- was a medical doctor and naturalist with expertise in botany and one of the first professors of natural history at the College of Philadelphia

- published one of the first books on the medicinal plants of North America

- compared the languages of North and South American tribes with those of the Old World to show that they had a common origin

Peter S. Du Ponceau

- was born in France but had fought in the American Revolution

- He was a lawyer who championed the work of other linguists and is responsible for the publication of many European linguists in English

- He was chair of the American Philosophical Society's History and Literary committee

John Pickering

- a lawyer who championed the publication of linguistic writers in America

- His orthographic system was the beginning of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

Albert Gallatin

A Synopsis of the Indians within the United States East of the Rocky Mountains and in the British and Russian Possessions in North America

John Wesley Powell

Introduction to the Study of Indian Languages

Joseph Henry

- First Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution

- envisioned a collection of data on Indians which he considered to be a part of anthropology, the natural history of mankind

- advised Powell to pay attention to the Indians in the area of his expedition

Leonard Bloomfield

- is credited with developing structural linguistics

- His textbook, Structural Linguistics (1933) is considered a classic

- taught at Yale University, an early center for linguistic studies in the United States

- stressed the scientific nature of linguistic research and developed formal methods for analysis

Ferdinand de Saussure

- primarily known for the Course of General Linguistics which he taught at the University of Geneva beginning in 1907

- considered to be one of the most important linguists of the 20th century

- His ideas influenced the development of structural linguistics

- to him, language is a system of signs (a semiotic system) and also a social phenomenon because it is produced by a language community

Edward Sapir

Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech

Roman Jakobson

Prague School of Linguistics

Noam Chomsky

- American-born linguist, anti war activist, and public intellectual

Taught at MIT until 2002; currently teaching at the University of Arizona (since 2017)

- best known for transformational grammar, an approach that consists of the analysis of deep structures and surface structures in language

- has been an advocate for cognitive anthropology

- His Syntactic Structures (1957) lays out the approach to transformational grammar

Indo-European languages

a family of several hundred related languages and dialects

American Philosophical Society (Committee on American Indian Languages)

- Founded in 1743 by Benjamin Franklin

- It is the oldest learned society in the United States

- It is active today, located in Philadelphia, and scholars may use its holdings

- championed early linguistic studies of American Indian languages

Orthography

a method of representing the sounds of a language by written or printed symbols

Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

the idea that language structures thought and that ways of looking at the world are embedded in language

Linguistic Relativity

view that characteristics of language shape our thought processes

Binary oppositions

a pair of opposites, thought to powerfully form and organize human thought and culture

Transformational Grammar

a system of language analysis that recognizes the relationship among the various elements of a sentence and among the possible sentences of a language

Deep structure

the underlying meaning of a sentence

Surface structure

in language, the sound and order of words

Paul Broca

- the Societe d'Anthropologie de Paris was founded

- an anatomist and anthropologist best known for his work on aphasia

- A part of the frontal lobe of our brains is named for him, a part that has to do with language

James Hutton

Theory of the Earth

Charles Lyell

Principles of Geology

Carolus Linnaeus

Systema Naturae

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

This man developed the first cohesive theory of evolution after his studies of biology; inheritance of acquired characteristics

Charles Darwin

On the Origin of Species

Thomas Robert Malthus

Essay on Population

Franz Joseph Gall

founder of phrenology

Phrenology

the detailed study of the shape and size of the cranium as a supposed indication of character and mental abilities

Samuel G. Morton

Crania Americana

Jeffries Wyman

first description of the gorilla; excavations in St. Johns River shell heaps

Frederick Ward Putnam

program of anthropometry of living American Indians

Earnest A. Hooten

Racial typing, compared African babies to young apes

Charles Davenport

studied human evolution, became promoter of eugenics, traced family histories to come up with mathematical model to predict occurrence of certain traits, didn't understand separation between science and social philosophy

Ales Hrdlicka

- Student of Broca

- First curator of physical anthropology 1903

-vWanted to mimic Broca's "institute" in America

- Focused mostly on research and building collections of remains at Smithsonian

- Established American Journal of Physical Anthropologists (AJPA) in 1918 (now AJBA)

Uniformitarianism

the theory that changes in the earth's crust during geological history have resulted from the action of continuous and uniform processes

Catastrophism

theory that states that natural disasters such as floods and volcanic eruptions shaped Earth's landforms and caused extinction of some species

Cephalic index

a measure of cranial shape, defined as the maximum width of the skull divided by the maximum length of the skull

Monogenist and Polygenist debate

Eugenics movement

a campaign that sought to improve the quality of humankind through carefully controlled selective breeding

Bishop James Ussher

Used the Bible to date the origin of the earth to 4004 B.C. in 1650.

Nicolaus Steno

- The development of stratigraphy

- what is lowest is oldest

- Stratigraphy provided a means of ordering the earth's strata and became the basis for the development of the ages of the earth

John Frere

1799 letter to Society of Antiquaries attesting to association of human tools and extinct animals in England

Christian Thomsen

Guidebook to Scandinavian Antiquities

Jens J.A Worsaae

Primeval Antiquities of Denmark

Jacques Boucher de Perthes

demonstration of association of extinct animal remains and humanly produced tools in France

Ephraim G. Squier and Edwin H. Davis

Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley

Cyrus Thomas

Report of the Mound Explorations of the Bureau of American Ethnology

Alfred L. Kroeber

Zuni Potsherds

Gordon R. Willey

Archeology of the Florida Gulf Coast

Prehistoric Settlement Patters in the Virú Valley, Peru

Willard Libby

developed radiocarbon dating

Walter W. Taylor

A Study of Archaeology

Stanley South

Pioneer of historical archaeology, he developed Mean Ceramic Dating using historic pot sherds from Brunswick Town, N.C.; pattern recognition

Lewis R. Binford

-Archaeology at Hatchery West

-"Archaeology as Anthropology"

-"Smudge Pits and Hide Smoking: The Use of Analogy in Archaeological Reasoning"

Watson, LeBlanc, and Redman

Explanation in Archaeology: An Explicitly Scientific Approach

Michael B. Schiffer

Behavioral Archaeology

Ian Hodder

Father of Post-Processual Archaeology; Contextual Archaeology; originally a Processualist but not satisfied with the limitations of it; interested in cultures role in shaping human behavior

Julian H. Steward

cultural ecology, multilinear evolution, Basin-Plateau Sociopolitical Groups

Cultural Ecology

The multiple interactions and relationships between a culture and the natural environment

Multilinear Evolution

used to explain common characteristics of widely separated cultures developed under similar ecological circumstances

Material culture

tangible, physical items produced and used by members of a specific culture group and reflective of their traditions, lifestyles, and technologies

Autonomous archaeology

prehistory, no written records, prehistory generated by archaeology is autonomous, determined by archaeologists that remove it from ground

Extinctions

Elimination of a species from earth

Immutability of species

The idea that each individual species on the planet was specially created by God and could never fundamentally change

Fossil

The preserved remains or traces of an organism that lived in the past

Chronology

the arrangement of events or dates in the order of their occurrence

Stratigraphy

the study of rock layers and the sequence of events they reflect

Stone-Bronze-Iron: Three Ages Hypothesis

Coined the terms Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age

Seriation

Arranging objects in sequential order according to one aspect, such as size, weight, or volume

Prehistory

the period of time before written records

Paleolithic

The period of the Stone Age associated with the evolution of humans

Neolithic

The period of the Stone Age associated with the ancient Agricultural Revolution

Moundbuilder Controversy

• Who build the mounds?

o Speculated that they were built by a mysterious lost race

o Ancestors of indigenous people of the native people? Not even a possibility

• Reflects racist views of native Americans

Cultural Historical

- This approach succeeded in establishing local and regional chronologies for North America

- The fundamental techniques used during this period was seriation based on either stratigraphic position of the cultural materials recovered, relative number of artifacts recovered from surface collections, and the creation of formal types

- These chronologies also created a common language permitting archaeologists to talk to one another about similarities and differences over geographical space

Processual (New Archaeology)

an approach to archaeology based firmly on scientific method and supported by a concerted effort aimed at the development of theory

Postprocessual

A paradigm that focuses on humanistic approaches and rejects scientific objectivity. It sees archaeology as inherently political and is more concerned with interpreting the past than with testing hypotheses. It sees change as arising largely from interactions between individuals operating within a symbolic and/or competitive system.

Style

a way of doing or expressing something, often tied to a specific time and place, that is recognizable through shared features in art, material culture, and artifacts

Type

a category of things that share a number of attributes that make them discrete from other things

Relative Dating

any method of determining whether an event or object is older or younger than other events or objects

Absolute Dating

any method of measuring the age of an event or object in years

Time-Placement Dating

the process of determining the age of archaeological sites, artifacts, and events, either relative to each other (relative dating) or in terms of specific calendar dates (absolute dating).

Works Progress Administration (WPA)

- This federal organization was one of the New Deal approaches to assisting out-of-work farmers, miners, and others

- Large archaeological crews undertook excavations at major sites in the eastern United States

- Many young archaeologists, mostly men, were hired to supervise these crews; many remained in the South and were founders of departments of anthropology

Conjunctive approach

A methodological alternative to traditional normative archaeology argued by Walter Taylor (1948), in which the full range of a culture system was to be taken into consideration in explanatory models.

Technomic

Artifacts people used directly with environment (knife).

Sociotechnic

artifacts which show social class

ideotechnic

artifacts which show a relationship

Ethnoarchaeology

The study of contemporary peoples to determine how human behavior is translated into the archaeological record

n-transform

Natural processes that affect the original patterning of archaeological remains

c-transform

Cultural (human) causes of deposition and disturbance, because of reuse of materials, agriculture, or other landscape transformations

transformational processs

the natural and/or human-caused events that alter an artifact or site after its initial deposition, influencing its preservation and the information it conveys

Agency

the capacity of individuals or groups to act independently and make choices, shaping their own experiences and environments, moving beyond viewing people as passive participants

American Anthropological Association (1900)

the umbrella organization for all of the sub disciplines

American Ethnological Society (1888)

the oldest professional anthropological organization in the United States; promotes research in ethnology and publishes the journal American Ethnologist.

Linguistics Society of America (1925)

a learned society dedicated to advancing the scientific study of language

American Association of Physical Anthropologists (1929)

a professional society for biological anthropologists, focusing on the study of human biology, evolution, and variation, with a focus on human and primate evolution, and biological bases of human behavior