ANP 203 Exam 1
According to the then-standard interpretation of the Bible, in the 19th century people believed the world was created in what year?
4004 BC
Archaeological Sites
A distinct spatial clustering of artifacts, features, structures, and organic and environmental remains - the residue of human activity.
In what year did Vesuvius erupt, burying Pompeii under layers of volcanic ash and Herculaneum in volcanic mud?
AD 79
Whose excavations at Pecos Pueblo in northern New Mexico from 1915 to 1929 established a chronological framework for that region?
Alfred Kidder (1885-1963)
With whom did archaeologists John Mulvaney and Rhys Jones stood shoulder to shoulder to prevent the destruction of cultural heritage?
Australian Aborigines
Nabonidus, king of __________, completed excavations and housed his finds in a museum.
Babylon
Studies of cutmarks on animal bones by which two archaeologists showed that humans with stone tools may have often been scavengers rather than hunters.
C.K. Brain and Lewis Binford
Ian Hodder, the most influential figure in the postprocessual movement of the 1980s and 1990s, is carrying out new excavations at which site in Turkey?
Catalhoyuk
Who produced the superbly illustrated books on the Maya in the 1840s after a visit to Mexico?
Catherwood and Stephens
What metal favors the preservation of organic remains by preventing the activity of destructive microorganisms?
Copper
The influential anthropologist Julian Steward highlighted the way human adaptation to environmental conditions could cause cultural change. What was the name he gave to this approach?
Cultural Ecology
The preservation of corpses in peat bogs varies widely and often depends on the particular conditions. One of the best preserved examples of a bog body is
Denmark's Tollund Man.
Which archaeologist discovered the Natufian culture and found fossil human remains crucial to our knowledge of the relationship between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens?
Dorothy Garrod (1892-1968)
Which one of these scripts was on the Rosetta Stone?
Egyptian and Greek
"On the Origin of Species" by Charles Darwin did not have an immediate effect on such archaeologists as Lieutenant-General Pitt Rivers.
False
19th century research into the antiquity of humankind proved the biblical notion that the world is only a few thousand years old.
False
Archaeology is impartial: it avoids being caught up in the social, political, and intellectual issues of the day.
False
Discoveries made by Louis and Mary Leakey indicate that our earliest ancestors date to only a few thousand years earlier than recognized at the beginning of the 20th century.
False
Giuseppe Fiorelli used plaster of Paris to fill the cavities left by decayed bodies at Nineveh.
False
Napoleon deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphic writing.
False
Perhaps the only drawback in the study of waterlogged wood is the impossibility of tree-ring dating such material.
False
Stone tools typically survive very poorly in the archaeological record, and are rarely discovered beyond approximately 5000 years ago.
False
Underwater artifacts can sometimes be recovered, although sea water is one of the most destructive forces. Once coated with a thick hard casing of metallic salts (e.g., chlorides, sulphides and carbonates) nothing can be done and the artifacts are permanently lost to time.
False
Contradicting the prevailing wisdom of the time, excavations led by ____________ at Great Zimbabwe (1929) confirmed that the site was of indigenous African origin.
Gertrude Caton-Thompson
Which early 20th century archaeologist, the author of "Man Makes Himself" (1936), was influenced by Russia's Marxist Revolution ?
Gordon Childe
Who was inspired by Marxist ideas in his book Man Makes Himself (1936) which argues that civilization had arisen in the Near East as the result of a Neolithic Revolution which gave rise to the development of farming, and later an Urban Revolution which led to the first towns and cities?
Gordon Childe (1892-1957)
Which British archaeologist combined environmental analysis with the collection and identification of organic remains to build up a picture not only of what prehistoric environments were like but what foods prehistoric peoples ate?
Grahame Clark (1907-1995)
Which American archaeologist discovered the Bronze Age site of Gournia, Crete in 1901 - the first Minoan town site ever unearthed - and classified the artifacts she found there according to their potential function?
Harriet Boyd Hawes (1871-1945)
Who successfully identified the location of the legendary city of Troy after conducting excavations at Hissarlik, western Turkey, in the 1870s and 1880s?
Heinrich Schliemann (1822-1890)
The tomb of Tutankhamun was discovered by _________ and __________ in 1922 in an amazing state of preservation due to the hot, dry climate of Egypt.
Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon
Artifacts
Humanly made or modified portable objects, such as stone tools, pottery, and metal weapons.
Which excavator of Çatalhöyük is famous for his engagement with a variety of groups with interest in the site?
Ian Hodder
Which Frenchman published the first evidence in 1841 of the antiquity of humankind and thus discredited the biblical notion that the world was created just a few thousand years before our own time?
Jacques Boucher de Perthes (1788-1868)
Which Scottish geologist introduced the principle of "uniformitarianism" which held that the stratification (layering) of rocks was due to processes which were still going on in seas, rivers, and lakes?
James Hutton (1726-1797)
Who was the father of Classical archaeology who published his first Letter on the discoveries at Herculaneum in 1762?
Johann Joachim Winckelmann
What team produced superbly illustrated books on the Maya civilization in the 1840s, after their travels in Yucatan, Mexico?
John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood
Which archaeologist uncovered a Neolithic farming village at a site in Jericho, Palestine which is commonly referred to as "the earliest town in the world"?
Kathleen Kenyon (1906-1978)
Who was the author of "Ancient Society" (1877), a work that strongly influenced Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels?
Lewis Henry Morgan
Which American anthropologist used Darwin's ideas on evolution and his own knowledge of Native North Americans to argue that human societies had evolved from a state of savagery (primitive hunting) through barbarism (simple farming) to civilization (the highest form of society)?
Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881)
Who pioneered the technique of total recording and printed descriptions of his meticulous excavations at Cranborne Chase in southern England which set a new standard in archaeological publication?
Lieutenant-General Augustus Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers (1827-1900)
Who were some of the key figures in the development of a sound methodology of scientific archaeology in the late 19th century and early 20th century?
Lieutenant-General Pitt Rivers and Dorothy Garrod; Dorothy Garrod and William Flinders Petrie; Alfred Kidder and Sir Mortimer Wheeler
Which husband and wife team pushed back the known dates of our immediate ancestors by several million years when they discovered the first of many fossil hominid (early human) finds in Olduvai Gorge, East Africa, after searching for almost three decades?
Louis Leakey (1903-1972) and Mary Leakey (1913-1996)
Excavations at the site of Ozette, Washington, were an excellent example of cooperation between archaeologists and indigenous peoples. The ___________, a Native American group, and archaeologist Richard Daugherty worked together to recover over 50,000 artifacts.
Makah
Which feminist archaeologist helped to spark off the current debate on gender roles in archaeology through her research in the Balkans, which created a vision of the centrality of a great Mother Goddess figure to the belief systems of early European farmers?
Marija Gimbutas (1921-1994)
Ecofacts
Non-artifactual organic and environmental remains which have cultural relevance, e.g. faunal and floral material as well as soils and sediments.
Features
Non-portable artifacts; e.g. hearths, architectural elements, or soil stains.
During the 20th century the first well-recorded excavations at the site of _________, which was buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, were carried out by Giuseppe Fiorelli.
Pompeii
What was the invention of American chemist Willard Libby (1908-1980) in 1949 which transformed archaeology?
Radiocarbon (C14) dating
Who formed the first cabinets of curiosities?
Renaissance princes
Pioneers of the well-focused research design included:
Robert Braidwood; Robert Adams; Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus; Louis and Mary Leakey.
One of the first to argue that the "Moundbuilders" were in fact ancestors of living Native American Indians was:
Samuel Haven
Who wrote The Archaeology of the United States (1856) in which he argued that ancestors of the Native Americans had built the hundreds of prehistoric mounds in the Mississippi valley, a claim later confirmed by John Wesley Powell and Cyrus Thomas?
Samuel Haven (1806-1881)
Which archaeologist brought precise techniques such as the grid-square method to his excavations at Harappa, Taxila, Charsadda, and Arikamedu in Pakistan and India?
Sir Mortimer Wheeler (1890-1976)
Where was Grahame Clark's landmark archaeological investigation in the 1950s, demonstrating how much information could be gleaned from what appeared to be an unpromising site?
Star Carr in northeast Britain
Who were some of the women pioneers in the early days of archaeology?
Tatiana Proskouriakoff; Mary Leakey; Dorothy Garrod
What was the name given to the approach adopted by a group of young archaeologists in the 1960s who sought to explain the archaeological discoveries they made through valid generalizations and to analyze cultures as systems which could be broken down into subsystems?
The New Archaeology
What artifact enabled the Frenchman Jean-Francois Champollion (1790-1832) to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphic writing in 1822, after 14 years of work?
The Rosetta Stone
The Danish scholar C.J. Thomsen (1788-1865) devised a system of classifying artifacts which proved to be very useful for the progress of Old World prehistory. What was its name?
The Three Age System
______________ is a classification system devised by C.J. Thomsen, for the sequence of technological periods (stone, bronze, and iron) in Old World prehistory. It established the principle that by classifying artifacts, one could produce chronological ordering.
The Three Age system
Who conducted "the first scientific excavation in the history of archaeology"?
Thomas Jefferson
Which President of the United States conducted "the first scientific excavation in the history of archaeology" while working on mounds east of the Mississippi River?
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
Arid conditions prevent decay through the shortage of water, which limits the ability of microorganisms to survive.
True
Except for special circumstances, survival of organic materials is typically limited to cases of extremes of moisture, such as very arid, frozen, or waterlogged conditions.
True
Fired clay, such as pottery or baked mud-brick, is virtually indestructible if well fired.
True
In the mid-1800's, Samuel Haven argued that there was a probable link between Native Americans and the Asiatic races.
True
Like anthropologist Julian Steward, British archaeologist Grahame Clark broke away from the dependence on artifacts of the cultural-historical approach and argued for the multi-disciplinary efforts of specialists to understand plant and animal remains.
True
Mary Leakey was an archaeologist who transformed our ideas of our early human ancestors.
True
Metals such as gold, silver, and lead survive well in the archaeological record.
True
One of the remarkable points about Ötzi, the Iceman found in the Alps, is that he was a prehistoric human preserved with his everyday clothing and equipment, rather than carefully buried or sacrificed.
True
Protected from outside climatic effects, caves may act as natural 'conservatories', creating local climates that can promote the preservation of organic remains.
True
Provenience is the horizontal and vertical position of an artifact within the matrix.
True
The hermeneutic or interpretive view rejects the attempts toward generalization.
True
________________ is crucial to reconstructing the original activity at a site.
Understanding what major activity or stage is being studied
One of the positive aspects of archaeology at the beginning of the new millennium is
a realization that cultural heritage is an important part of the human environment; archaeologists have an important role to play in achieving a balanced view of our present world based on an examination of the past; the task of interpretation is more complex than originally thought
Waterlogged sites, as found in lakes, swamps, marshes, fens and peat bogs, effectively seal organic material in an environment that is
anoxic.
Evolution, associated with Charles Darwin and highly influential on many other thinkers (such as Karl Marx, Oscar Montelius and others), also set the groundwork for the study of
artifact typology.
Cultural formation processes can be roughly divided into two types:
before a site is buried and after site burial.
Which of the following is not an ecofact?
ceramic sherds
The cold environment at Pazyryk in southern Siberia was a factor in the unusually good organic preservation in tombs there, resulting in the survival of the most fragile materials, including
clothing; wooden pillows; tattooed skin; felt
In North America, the influential anthropologist Julian Steward emphasized the importance of environmental adaptation in cultural change. This approach was termed
cultural ecology.
Henry Rawlinson's decipherment of ________ in the 1850s proved that the site of Küyünjik was biblical Nineveh.
cuneiform
In what ways can humans deliberately destroy the archaeological record?
digging burials into earlier deposits; defacing monuments of earlier rulers; warfare; new construction and road work
Primary context can be destroyed not only by looters but also by
encroaching seas; encroaching ice sheets; wind action; water action
What is androcentrism?
male bias
The survival of organic materials is determined largely by:
matrix and climate
A combination of salt and _______ aided in the preservation of a woolly rhinoceros at Starunia, Poland with skin intact.
oil
At the site of Pompeii, archaeologists have poured _________ into the cavities left where bodies decayed under ash layers. This process provides an accurate representation of the person who died.
plaster of Paris
Experimental archaeology involving the construction of an earthwork at Overton Down, England, indicates that
preservation was better in the chalk bank, and preservation of leather and pottery was unchanged after 4 years
Introduced by James Hutton and reaffirmed by Charles Lyell, uniformitarianism is the principle that:
processes at work in the past have to be the same as processes observable in the present.
What was invented in 1949 by the American chemist Willard Libby?
radiocarbon dating
Archaeological electrolysis is used to
remove metallic salts from objects that have been immersed in the sea.
The "Ice Maiden", found on Peru's Ampato Volcano, was most likely a:
ritual sacrifice.
Which of the following is (or is made of) an inorganic material?
stone tools
Jeremy Sabloff has characterized the archaeological time period that lasted from the late 19th century until about 1960 as ____________. The central concern of researchers at this time was the establishment of chronologies.
the classificatory-historical period
What prompted archaeologists to recognize the importance of identifying and accurately recording associated remains?
the discovery of stone tools and bones of extinct animals in sealed deposits
Who are some of the interest groups involved in the anthropological project at Çatalhöyük?
the local community; goddess worshippers; artists and fashion designers; foreign tourists
As part of the postprocessual movement, Ian Hodder and his Cambridge students stressed the influential argument that:
there is no single correct way to make archaeological inference; the goal of objectivity is unattainable; interpretation of the past involves choices that depend on the feelings and opinions of the researchers.
The aim of the experimental archaeology project at Overton Down, England, is
to discover what happens over time to materials (e.g. leather and pottery) buried in an earthwork.
