ANTH-3 Midterm

  • Enlightenment Paradigm - Philosophical movement calling for systematic reasoning in all fields; natural law and science; human culture and society emerged as a legitimate subject of rational inquiry

  • Science of Nature - key factor of archeology, new geological concepts; applied field geology, law of superposition, law of uniformitarianism

  • Stratigraphy - basis of archeological excavation, lower layers in excavation

  • Law of Superposition - Nicolas Steno (1669), William Smith (1815).  Sedimentary layers are deposited in a time sequence = stratigraphy

  • Law of Uniformitarianism - Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology (1830); Deposits were formed by processes observable today; Very slow and gradual change; Contra Ussher, the Earth was VERY old.

  • Material Culture and Culture Change - remains of a culture of a remote period in order to learn how people lived and how they used their environment. Why they lived that way

  • Antiquarianism - study of antiquities, material remains could be used to document conditions in the past, paralleled the rise of natural science

  • Three Age System - ordering of material culture, divided prehistory into a stone age followed by a bronze age and an iron age; progress of European prehistory and the study and classification of prehistoric artifacts, ordered chronologically

  • Antiquity of humankind - rejection of a liberal interpretation of the biblical account of early human history due to advances in geology, the possibility of a prehistory of humankind

  • Brixham Cave, UK - 1859 - Royal Society of Antiquaries gathers to test Boucher de Perthes assertion about assoc. of stone tools with extinct fauna Brixham Cave chosen for excavation: stalagmite layer sealed underlying archaeological deposits

  • Darwinian Evolution - Mid-nineteenth century - scholars accepted that species (and cultures) had changed over time but COULDN’T EXPLAIN WHY. Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859) provided a mechanism for gradual biological change over time. Evolution by Natural Selection, retention of beneficial traits within a species lead to change over time

  • Cultural Evolution - Savagery => barbarism => civilization => decadence; Lewis Henry Morgan, Ancient Society (1877)

  • Moundbuilders - thought to be a mythical and vanished race of moundbuilders who created hundred of mounds located around the Mississippi river

  • Theory - a set of ideas about the way the world works

  • Culture Historical Archaeology - early 20th century, cultural change through migration and diffusion and culture areas of what, when, where

  • Cultural Relativism - no universal standard by which to judge human progress

  • Historical Particularism - Each culture is the product of unique historical circumstances

  • Migration - how people moved across space and time, how these movements affected culture and society

  • Diffusion - how cultural traits spread from one society to another

  • Time/Space systematics - Organize cultural units within a temporal and spatial framework; Interpreted as migration of people or diffusion of ideas.

  • Processual Archaeology - sought to explain rather than simply to describe and to do so with science and the method of induction; objects reflect social/ecological process; culture as adaptive

  • Culture / Adaptation - how humans adapt to their environment and how we can understand many aspects of ancient societies

  • Post-Processual Archaeology - critique of processual archaeology, a wide variety of theoretical viewpoints embraces: material culture as symbolic, individuals and agency, social categories embedded in power relationships; multivocality, who owns the past

  • Primary/Secondary Goals of Archaeology - Primary: time, space, form  – Secondary: Pattern, process, meaning

  • Neolithic Megaliths of Western Europe - Ian Hodder (1984) long barrows shaped like neolithic long houses, contain dismembered bodies, locate d near the remains of an earlier house, symbolic communal attachments

  • Context - 3D relationship of material remains to each other

  • Association - Things found together in the same context were used together and record a pattern of behavior; Associations are non-random = patterned human behavior

  • Assemblage - reflects pattened human activities 

  • Site - 

  • Region - 

  • Regional Survey - Records distribution of artifacts and features across the landscape

  • Pedestrian Survey - done on foot or horseback, records visible site and when site is not visible, sample units by surface collecting, test pits, and auguring

  • Remote Sensing - new technology that uses different methods to detect sites from above; aerial photographs, drones with sensors, satellite images

  • Site Survey - suggests horizontal sturcture of individual sites

  • Sub-Surface Testing - shovel test pits/augers, geophysical survey

  • Site survey Methods - following the discovery of a site, this is employed to reveal its horizontal structure like surface survey or sub-surface methods

  • Geophysical Survey - magnetometry, soil resistivity, and ground penetrating radar; a way to collect information about the surface above the eath

  • Excavation - Reveals horizontal and vertical structure of a site

  • Arbitrary Levels - 10 cm, 20 cm, used when stratigraphy is invisible

  • Natural Levels - Unit excavated according to archaeological stratigraphy, real deposition units. Preferred method when possible.

  • Shovel Test Pits - digging holes into ground to quickly asses the contents of an area before a larger excavation

  • Test Units/ Trenches - diachronic patterns ideal for examining changes through time

  • Block Excavations - synchonic patterns provide a snapshot of activities across a site at one point in time

  • Sampling - a sample of data that is representative of the broader population of data

  • Judgement Sampling - unsystematic sampling done with prior knowledge

  • Systematic Sampling - units evenly spaced; squares, transects – useful to identify patterns in artifact distribution, less for site discovery

  • Random Sampling - units randomly spaced, best method for representative sample

  • Formation Processes - Micheal Schiffer (1970s),  how things move and are transformed as they move from systemic contexts into archaeological contexts

  • Behavioral Processes - represent stages of behavior; what specific kinds of behavior the data/material reflect.

  • Site Formation Processes - conditions and events that affect material remains from the termination of use to the time they are recovered

  • Natural Actions - differential preservation, natural disturbance, catastrophic event

  • Human Actions - reclamation, reuse, disturbance 

  • Archaeological Inference - Archaeological patterns are not a direct reflection of past human behavior. The need to distinguish behavioral processes from site formation processes

  • Analogy - a comparison between two things, using know information to understand the past

  • Middle Level (Range) Theory - Body of theory and practice that attempts to bridge the gap between the dynamics of past human behavior and its material consequences in the present; based in observation, experiment, analogy

  • Middle Level (Range) Research - how we define strong analogues: experimental archaeology, ethnographic and ethnohistoric analogy, historical archaeology, ethnoarchaeology

  • Experimental Archaeology - controlled experiments with analogous materials, technology, methods; aims to understand context of production and use of archaeological materials

  • Ethnographic Analogy - a direct historical approach, requires an uninterrupted historical and cultural link of present to earlier culture . meanings from historic times assigned to archaeological objects and contexts

  • Ethnoarchaeology - study living societies w/ some analogous aspects to archaeological cases; 19th century archaeologists saw non Europeans as living fossils, failed to consider changes in cultures over time, indigenous creativity, impacts of colonialism; now used with more care

  • Time-Space Systematics: site chronologies, regional chronologies, cultural chronologies

  • Relative Dating: The determination of chronological sequences without recourse to a fixed time scale, e.g. the arrangement of artifacts in a typological sequence, or seriation

  • Stratigraphy: The study and validation of stratification: the analysis in the vertical, time dimension, of a series of layers in the horizontal, space dimension. It is often used as a relative dating technique to assess the temporal sequence of artifact deposition

  • Sequences: the organization of artifacts into a chronological order based on their shared characteristics, styles, or functions

  • Typologies: The systematic organization of artifacts into types on the basis of shared attributes

  • Morphological Types: abstraction of multiple cases of similar artifacts

  • Index Fossils / Temporal Types: the remains of plants and animals that have existed only for a limited geologic period (presence in geological layers can be used to date the layer)

  • Cross-Dating: correlation of geological layers using index fossils

  • Nels Nelson at San Cristobal: stratigraphic excavation through undifferentiated midden trash, changing frequencies of temporal types used to construct a ceramic chronology 

  • Traditions: artifact assemblages that are enduring over time

  • Horizons: artifact assemblages that are brief in time but spread quickly over large areas (useful for cross-dating)

  • Stylistic Seriation; orders artifacts and attributes according to similarity in style

  • Flinders Petrie at Diospolis Parva

  • Frequency Seriation: A relative dating method that relies principally on measuring changes in the proportional abundance, or frequency, observed among finds (e.g. counts of tool types, or of ceramic fabrics)

  • Deetz & Dethlefson’s Gravestone Seriation: looked at stylistic change in colonial grave markers, excellent control of space, time, form

  • Limits on Relative Dating: starting point (which end is “up”), scale (how long of a time span), comparability (how do events in one area relate chronologically to events in another area)

  • Absolute Dating: The determination of age with reference to a specific timescale, such as a fixed calendrical system.

  • Historic Dates: Dated artifacts and stratigraphic reasoning, artifacts with documented production dates, historical sequences and regional chronologies

  • Terminus Post Quem: the date after which a layer must have been deposited -

  • Terminus Ante Quem: the date before which a layer must have been deposited

  • Historic Artifact Dating: Historical archaeologists often excavate sites that are shallow stratigraphically or even single component, recover assemblages filled with pottery of known production dates

  • Stan South Ceramic Dating: Archaeologist working on historical colonial sites South Carolina, sought a method for dating sites of the historic period using such evidence. Using TPQ/TAQ reasoning, argued you could date a feature by the earliest date of the latest artifact (TAQ), and the latest date of the earliest artifact (TPQ)

  • Tobacco Pipe Dating: Archaeologists noted long ago that bowl shape changed over time substantially (a clear temporal type) and have developed a number of methods for getting at absolute dates using pipestems 

  • James Deetz at Flowerdew Hundred???

  • Dendrochronology: The study of tree-ring patterns; annual variations in climatic conditions that produce differential growth can be used both as a measure of environmental change, and as the basis for a chronology.

  • Dendrochronology at Betatakin, AZ: In American Southwest, houses constructed with pine and fir beams, allows close chronological control of pueblo building phases

  • Radiocarbon (C14) Dating: An absolute dating method that measures the decay of the radioactive isotope of carbon in organic material

  • C14 Half life: Span (in years) over which half of the radioactive isotope originally present in a sample will have decayed (14C’s half-life: 5730±30 yrs)

  • BP vs BC/AD: Years “before present” vs. standard Christian era calendar date (to convert to standard Christian era calendar date (B.C./A.D.) must add or subtract 1,950 to/from calculated B.P. date)

  • The Bristlecone Pine Calibration: Radiocarbon dated many tree rings from oldest trees on earth, live plus dead samples, sequence with known dates

  • Colin Renfrew and the European Megaliths: Tree ring calibration of C14 time scale radically changed perceptions of Western European prehistory (Megalithic monuments in west earlier than early temples in Greece and Crete by thousands of years)

  • Potassium (K) - Argon (Ar) Dating: A method used to date rocks up to thousands of millions of years old, though it is restricted to volcanic material no more recent than c. 100,000 years old. One of the most widely used methods in the dating of early hominid sites in Africa.

  • Thermoluminescence (TL) Dating: A dating technique that relies indirectly on radioactive decay, overlapping with radiocarbon dating in the time period for which it is useful, but also has the potential for dating earlier periods. It has much in common with electron spin resonance (ESR).

  • Zooarchaeology: The identification and analysis of faunal species from archaeological sites, as an aid to reconstructing human diets and to understanding the contemporary environment at the time of deposition

  • Paleoethnobotany: (also archaeobotany) The recovery and identification of plant remains from archaeological contexts, used in reconstructing past environments and economies

  • Recovery Methods: Screening, Floatation, and Soil Sampling

  • Analytical Methods: Identification (identifying the species, part/element, and any modifications present), Quantification (determining patterns in the identified specimens), and Interpretation (identifying the cultural practices that produced the observed patterns)

  • NISP: Number of Identifiable Specimens

  • MNI: Minimum Number of Individuals that must have been acquired to get the total bones present in the sample

  • The role of Middle Range Theory: Distinguish cultural vs natural process affecting bone or plant remains

  • Cultural Modifications: cut marks, saw marks, burning (bone modifications provide valuable information on culinary practices in the past)

  • Taphonomic Processes: The natural processes affecting remains from death to recovery (it also involves the microscopic analysis of tooth marks or cut marks to assess the effects of butchery or scavenging activities)

  • Slave Subsistence: Feeding enslaved laborers was at the heart of the plantation economy. Documentary sources are plant ledgers and individual accounts and Archaeological sources are faunal remains and botanical remains.

  • The “Livestock Thesis”???

  • Subsistence Triangle: Provisioned (food provided by enslaver), Produced (food provided by enslaved laborers in slave quarters), Procured (food collected or hunted in the wild by enslaved laborers). 

  • Cannon’s Point Georgia: Georgia Plantation Excavated by John Otto. Identified lots of wild fauna and trapping and line fishing. 

  • Jefferson’s Monticello: Virginia home of Thomas Jefferson, family, and slaves (1770-1826). Mansion plus slave quarters (Mulberry Row, field quarters)

  • Element Quality: “high-quality” elements contain a lot of animal flesh, other “low-quality” elements have very little meat but could be cooked in stews to add fat and flavor