vocab arch
Sacred Place: a natural feature such as a cave or a mountain or a human-made structure which appears to have a vital role in the society.
Navel: the cosmological central place
Psychopomp: ancestors or specific gods act as intermediaries between the living and the dead.
Shaman: individuals with unusual supernatural powers. They have the ability to pass effortlessly into altered states of consciousness. Belong to the healer class.
Ideology: the knowledge or beliefs developed by human societies as part of their cultural adaptation.
Ethnography: analysis of living societies to aid in understanding and interpreting the archaeological record.
Ethnohistory: the study of history using oral and other traditional sources.
Astroarchaeology: the study of ancient astronomical knowledge using archaeological methods.
Culture history: description of human cultures derived from archaeological evidence.
Normative view of culture: view of human culture arguing that one can identify the abstract rules regulating a particular culture’s concepts of “normal behavior” through investigations of artifacts, a commonly used basis for studying archaeological cultures through time.
Components: the physically bounded portions of a site that contain a distinct assemblage which serves to distinguish the culture of the inhabitants of a particular land.
Phases: cultural units represented by similar components at different sites or at separate levels of the same sites, although always within a well-defined chronological span.
Regions: normally defined by natural geographic boundaries and displaying some cultural homogeneity.
Culture Areas: larger arbitrary geographic or research areas in which general cultural homogeneity is found.
Horizons: widely distributed sets of cultural traits and artifact assemblages whose distribution and chronology allow researchers to assume that they spread rapidly, often formed of artifacts that were associated with widespread, distinctive religious beliefs.
Traditions: persistent technological or cultural patterns identified by characteristic artifact forms that outlast a single phase and occur over a wide area.
Inevitable variation: cumulative culture change due to minor differences in learned behavior over time.
Cultural selection: process that leads to the acceptance of some culture traits and innovations that make a culture more adaptive to its environment; somewhat akin to natural selection in biological evolution.
Ethnoarchaeology: the study of living societies to aid in the interpretation of ancient ones-using ethnographies in an archaeological setting.
Experimental archaeology: conducting controlled experiments with ancient technologies and other methods to provide a basis for interpreting ancient human behavior.
Inductive reasoning: using specific observations to form general conclusions.
Deductive reasoning: forming specific implications from a generalized hypothesis.
Processual Archaeology: the study of the processes by which human societies changed in the past through systems or environmental approaches.
General Systems Theory: the notion that any organism or organization can be studied as a system broken down into many interacting subsystems or parts.
Feedback loop: when the outcome of one subsystem becomes the input in the next subsystem.
Cultural Ecology: the study of the ways in which human societies adapt to and transform their environments.
Cognitive Archaeology: using archaeological methods to study human motives, ideologies, and intangibles, aka “archaeology of the mind”
Cognitive-Processual Archaeology: an approach to archaeology that combines the methods of processual and postprocessual researchers.
Stasis: the state of little or no change.
Primate: mammals who live in trees, have larger brain sizes in comparison to other mammals, developed binocular and color vision rather than a high degree of smell, complex vocalizations, increased flexibility of upper limbs, and in some cases opposable thumbs.
Pleistocene: the evolution of the mammalian species was accompanied by a period of cooling and heating (the last geological era, sometimes called the Ice Age or Quaternary epoch).
Hominin: primates of the family Hominidae, which includes modern humans, earlier human subspecies and their direct ancestors.
Punctuated Equilibrium: Darwin viewed evolution as taking place gradually yet slowly, but the evidence that we see in early East African fossils indicates that something very different was occurring in which long periods of relative stability are followed by bursts of rapid change caused by new, selective pressures, perhaps in the environment or the organism itself.
Adaptive radiation: a burst in evolution when a single species fills a number of ecological niches, resulting in several new forms.
Monophyletic: descended from a single ancestor.
Homo heidelbergensis: 600,000 to 200,000 years ago. They were expert big game hunters and occupied a wide landscape from southern Africa to northern Europe.
Homo neanderthalensis: 350,000 to 30,000 years ago. They were highly intelligent people, had larger brains than modern humans, expert hunters, and coild engage in intellectual reasoning.
Composite tools: consisting of more than one component.
Diaspora: the study of the movement of people from their homeland to other areas, and the impact of that movement on the creation of new communities and identities.
Upper Paleolithic: late Ice Age World- 50,000 to 15,000 years ago.
Sunda: the sunken continent consisting of Vietnam, Malaysia, Sumatra, Java, Borneo, and the Philippines.
Wallacea: two large landmasses- present day Sulawesi and Timor.
Sahul: a combination of New Guinea, Australia, and the shelf between them.
Threshold populations: the minimum individuals required in order to provide a good or service to an area.
Burin: chisel-like tool used for grooving stone, antler, bone, and wood and for making rock engravings.
Groove-and-splinter technique: longitudinal grooving of antler and bone to produce long, parallel-sided grooves for making spear points, harpoons, and other artifacts.
Blade: long, parallel-sided flakes produced from pre-shaped cores with the aid of a punch; characteristic of many Upper Paleolithic peoples.
Venus figurines: depictions of women with no clear religious or symbolic meaning, also became quite popular.
Microlith: diminutive stone artifacts manufactured on tiny blades and used as barbs
and points for spears and later on arrows.