North American Archaeology Exam Review

Flashcards covering ethics and history in North American archaeology, Indigenous community collaboration, the peopling of the Americas, Archaic trends, Mississippian chiefdoms, and Upper Midwest cultural sequences.

Antiquarianism

The study of material remains and historical relics of the past that focuses primarily on the physical objects themselves rather than the people, culture, or scientific context behind them.

Archaeology

The scientific study of human history and prehistory through the excavation and analysis of material culture, focusing primarily on understanding past peoples rather than merely collecting objects.

Notes on the State of Virginia (1787)

A work authored by Thomas Jefferson following his systematic excavations of an Indigenous burial mound at Monticello, widely regarded as the first archaeological excavation in North America.

Morrill Act (1862)

Legislation enacted under President Abraham Lincoln that established land-grant colleges across the United States, allowing individuals living far from urban centers to pursue higher education degrees.

Antiquities Act (1906)

US federal law granting the president authority to designate national monuments from federal lands to protect historic or scientific features, while establishing an excavation permitting system and penalties for looting.

Servicemen's Readjustment Act (1944)

Legislation known as the GI Bill that provided returning military veterans with substantial financial benefits, including government funding for college education.

Archaeological Resource Protection Act (1979)

Federal legislation specifically regulating archaeological excavations, protecting resources on public and tribal lands, and setting standards for the custody and curation of recovered collections.

Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) (1990)

Federal law outlawing commercial trafficking of Native cultural items and requiring federally funded museums to inventory and repatriate human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony.

Community-Based Archaeology

An archaeological approach in which Indigenous and local community members hold an active, decisive role in formulating research questions, choosing fieldwork methods, and managing project outputs.

Consultation (in Indigenous Archaeology)

A bottom-up approach where an outside researcher formulates the research questions and objectives independently before presenting them to the Indigenous community.

Collaboration (in Indigenous Archaeology)

A top-down partnership where the researcher works directly with the Indigenous community from the outset to define community goals and priorities, building the entire research program jointly.

Last Glacial Maximum (LGM)

A peak glacial interval lasting until approximately 19,000 years ago during which massive Cordilleran and Laurentide ice sheets covered northern North America and exposed the Bering Land Bridge.

Clovis Culture

A widespread Paleoindian complex originally believed to represent the earliest human migration into the Americas, characterized by fluted projectile points first documented near Clovis, New Mexico.

Clovis Point

A large, leaf-shaped Paleoindian stone projectile point characterized by a distinctive concave channel or flute flaked off the base to facilitate attachment to a spear shaft.

Kelp Highway Hypothesis

A coastal migration model proposing that early maritime travelers used watercraft along the Pacific Rim, supported by rich, continuous kelp forest ecosystems providing marine mammals, fish, and edible seaweed.

American Trail Migration Routes

A comparative map of proposed early migration pathways into the Americas, contrasting the interior ice-free corridor land route with the Pacific coastal migration route past sites like Paisley Caves, Monte Verde, and Debra L. Friedkin.

Paisley Caves

A pre-Clovis archaeological site located in Oregon containing coprolites and stone tools that provide evidence of human occupation dating to approximately 14,300 years ago.

Monte Verde

A well-preserved pre-Clovis archaeological site in southern Chile containing organic architectural remains, food remnants, and lithics indicating human settlement older than 14,000 years ago.

Buttermilk Creek Complex / Debra L. Friedkin Site

A stratified pre-Clovis archaeological site in Texas that yielded an extensive assemblage of stone tools dated to roughly 15,500 years ago.

White Sands Footprints

Fossilized human tracks discovered on the former shoreline of Lake Otero, New Mexico, showing adults and children tracking a giant ground sloth, dated via Ruppia cirrhosa seeds and optically stimulated luminescence.

21,000 to 23,000 years ago during the Last Glacial Maximum

Younger Dryas

A sudden, severe cold reversal from 12,800 to 11,700 years ago that abruptly halted the post-glacial warming trend and delayed the melting of continental ice sheets.

Overkill Hypothesis

The proposition that expanding Paleoindian hunters arriving around 13,000 years ago rapidly drove roughly 38 to 100 genera of Pleistocene megafauna to extinction through unsustainable hunting pressure.

Danger Cave

A Great Basin cave site in Utah occupied from approximately 9000 BCE to 7000 BCE, providing early archaeological evidence of broad-spectrum foraging and small-seed processing, primarily pickleweed.

Arctic Small Tool Tradition (ASTt)

A microlithic Paleo-Inuit cultural tradition originating in Siberia around 3200 BCE, characterized by micro blade technology which was good for mobility. Spreading across northern North America, giving rise to Independence I, Saqqaq, and Pre-Dorset cultures.

Thule Culture

Came from the Burnik and Punuk traditions. Ancestral to the Inuit! population originating in coastal Alaska around 1000 CE that migrated rapidly eastward into the Canadian Arctic and Greenland around 1200–1250 CE, specializing in open-water bowhead whaling. With a Umialiit-Kariyit Structure.

Umialiit

A prominent Thule and historic Inuit social role referring to whaling boat captains who acquired high status, leadership authority, and prestige through hunting prowess and wealth.

Big Three Archaic Trends

The three primary cultural developments that defined the North American Archaic period (8000–1000 BCE): sedentism, long-distance trade, and ritual elaboration.

Shell Mound Archaic

A Late Archaic regional tradition (3500–1000 BCE) centered along southeastern river systems like the Ohio River, featuring massive anthropogenic shell mounds up to 40 feet tall and early sedentary settlement without agriculture. Shell mounds indicate that communities can invest heavily in the landscape and return to the same locations without agriculture. Human remains are sometimes found in shell mounds

• Increased evidence for long distance trade

  • Lithics-Benton interaction sphere

  • Great lakes copper

Indian Knoll

A Late Archaic Shell Mound site in Ohio County, Kentucky (3000–2000 BCE), designated a National Historic Landmark, notable for over 1,100 human burials, 23 intentional dog burials, and differential grave goods. Recovered artifacts included marine shell beads, copper, and nonlocal cherts, showing that Late Archaic groups maintained extensive trade networks spanning far beyond their immediate river valley

• Unequal distribution of grave goods–Evidence of social hierarchy?

• representing some of the earliest and most systematic evidence of ritualized animal burial in the Americas.

Maritime Archaic Architectural Models

Two archaeological frameworks outlining Maritime Archaic domestic architecture: the Functional/Seasonal Model (seasonal movement between pithouses and summer dwellings ca. 6000–5500 B.P.) and the Evolutionary Model (structural evolution from 6500 B.P. pithouses to 40–100 meter multi-segment longhouses).

Maritime Archaic

A subarctic cultural tradition (7000 to 3500 BCE) extending from Maine through Atlantic Canada, Newfoundland, and Labrador, marked by marine-focused subsistence and longhouses. Evolution of houses: Pit houses->above ground houses->long houses

• Long houses are often a signal of community integration

  • However still likely some social hierarchy

Trade Network: They engaged in long-distance trade, notably mining and distributing translucent Ramah chert from northern Labrador down as far as Virginia.

Ramah Chert

A high-quality, predictable flaking tool stone found exclusively in the Torngat Mountains of northern Labrador that served as an essential marker of long-distance Maritime Archaic exchange networks.

Cahokia

The largest pre-Columbian Mississippian civic-ceremonial center and urban polity in North America, situated in the American Bottom near modern St. Louis, which experienced a rapid population boom around 1050 CE.

monks mound was where the big men lived

Southeastern Ceremonial Complex

woodhenge aligned with celestial calendar

Woodhenge (Cahokia)

A series of large celestial calendar circles made of upright red cedar posts at Cahokia, designed to align with the solstices, equinoxes, and major astronomical events.

Monks Mound

A massive, four-terraced earthen platform mound standing roughly 100 feet tall at the center of Cahokia, representing elite power, social inequality, and centralized civic organization.

Mound 72

A ridgetop burial mound at Cahokia used between 1000 and 1200 CE, famous for elite individual burials and five mass graves containing hundreds of sacrificed individuals.

Moundville

A major Middle Mississippian administrative and ceremonial center on the Black Warrior River in Alabama, featuring 29 platform mounds surrounding a 300-acre central plaza enclosed by a palisade.

Southeastern Ceremonial Complex (SECC)

A widespread network of shared religious cosmology, ritual regalia, and symbolic iconography across Mississippian chiefdoms, centered on a three-tiered universe of the Above World, Middle World, and Underworld.

Terrestrial Plant Threshold

An ecological dividing line determining whether foraging groups prioritize big-game hunting or plant cultivation; areas in southeastern Minnesota fall below this threshold, allowing the adoption of food production.

Grand Mound (Smith Site)

The largest Middle Woodland burial mound in Minnesota, located on the Rainy River and affiliated with the Laurel culture, containing 193 individuals exhibiting bone perforation and red ochre treatment.

Oneota

An Upper Mississippian cultural manifestation appearing around 1225–1250 CE in the Upper Midwest that developed out of local Woodland populations, bridging Woodland and Mississippian traditions.

Blue Earth Phase

A regional Oneota phase (1225/1250–1500 CE) situated near Red Wing, Minnesota, defined by shell-tempered globular jars, catlinite disc pipes, scapula hoes, and open agricultural villages lacking burial mounds.

Orr Phase

A late protohistoric Oneota cultural phase (1625–1700 CE) characterized by Allamakee Trailed ceramic jars, early European glass and metal trade goods, cemeteries, and burial mounds.

Psinomani

An archaeological culture appearing around 1100 CE in Minnesota and adjacent regions, distinguished by Sandy Lake ceramics and identified as the direct material ancestor of the Dakota people.

Oceti Sakowin

The Seven Council Fires alliance comprising the Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota nations, organized through matrilineal kinship, seasonal rounds of bison hunting and wild ricing, and an ancestral homeland centered at Bdote.

Folsom Culture

A nomadic Great Plains Paleoindian hunting culture following Clovis, recognized by delicate, fluted projectile points embedded in extinct bison ribs and temporary base camps such as the Hanson site in Wyoming.

Old Copper Complex

North America's earliest metalworking tradition (9500 to 4500 years ago), centered around Lake Superior, involving cold-hammering and annealing 99% pure native copper into utilitarian implements and ornaments.

Eastern Agricultural Complex

An indigenous plant domestication suite developed in eastern North America between 500 BCE and 200 CE prior to the adoption of maize, comprising sunflower, squash, goosefoot, sumpweed/marsh elder, erect knotweed, and maygrass.

Olsen-Chubbuck Site

A Paleoindian Plano tradition site in Colorado (8500–6000 BCE) providing evidence of communal big-game hunting, where hunters drove nearly 200 bison into an arroyo bed as a catastrophic trap.

American Dark Ages

A transitional period (400–900 CE) between the Late Woodland and Mississippian eras marked by decreased long-distance interaction, fortified boundaries, diminished monumental ritual, and the introduction of maize and the bow and arrow.

Troyville Earthworks

A prominent Woodland mound complex in Catahoula Parish, Louisiana, which originally featured nine platform mounds including an 82-foot (25-meter) Great Mound at the confluence of three rivers.

Itasca Bison Kill Site

An Early Archaic site in Minnesota dating from 6500 to 3800 BCE, consisting of a domestic campsite and a butchering locus containing the processed remains of an extinct bison species.