ANTH exam 2

Radiocarbon dating can extend back

45,000 years

What was the approximate average grade on Exam I?

77

Thermoluminescence dating of stone tools from Qafzeh Cave in Israel indicates that Homo sapiens were in the Near East by how many years ago?

92,000

Which of the following dating methods is/are most likely or most commonly used to calibrate rates of obsidian hydration less than 45,000 years old?

Argon-argon, trapped charge

Projectile point typologies discussed in class today applied to all but which of the following places?

Asia

Which of the following terms best refers to the investigation of what it is that specifically distinguishes justified belief from opinion?

Epistemology

Where on earth are the words Paleolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic used as the names of archaeological periods?

Europe

What primary site-formation process resulted in the downward movement of rocks in the fire-cracked-rock taphonomy (aka actualistic) experiment carried out in the Kootenai Valley of NW Montana?

Floralturbation

Which of the following terms refers to analogies justified by similarities in the formal attributes of archaeological and ethnographic objects and features?

Formal analogy

Nutritional deficiencies are examples of stress indicators classified as

Growth arrest features

To tabulate ________, you must count bone frequency by element to find the most abundant skeletal element.

MNI

Which of the following feature types is often all that remains of some ancient houses, as illustrated by ethno-archaeological research among the Mikea of Madagascar?

Post holes

Which of the following is NOT a trapped charge dating method?

Radiocarbon dating

Which of the following is NOT among the chapter titles/topics covered in Part II of ANTH 202-502?

Reconstructing Social and Political Systems of the Past

Who derived the provocative approach of obtaining a "mean ceramic date" to overcome disagreement about the utility of terminus post quem ceramic dating in historical archaeology?

Stanley South

What happens to bones, stone tools, ceramics, beads and figurines after the fieldwork?

They are conserved

T or F: Clay pipes hold great potential as time-markers because they generally broke within a year or so of their manufacture.

True

T or F: Cost is a factor of how an archaeologist excavates and dates a site.

True

T or F: Functional types cannot reflect how objects were used in the past.

True

T or F: Only after documenting temporal and spatial change in selected artifacts can we hope to reconstruct what people actually did in the past.

True

T or F: Terminus post quem (TPQ) refers to the date before which a stratum or feature must have been deposited or created

True

T or F: Typologies must be objective and replicable.

True

The index fossil concept is attributed to a British geologist named:

Will "Strata" Smith

What materials yielded radiocarbon ages for archaeological components at the Richard Beene site?

Wood charcoal and soil bulk carbon

A set of human burials that comes from a limited region and time period is:

a burial population

The authors suggest that Oscar Montelius would have benefited from:

a master stratigraphic sequence with a deep stratigraphic profile

Classifications are formulated with which of the following in mind?

a specific purpose for the classification

An example of an attribute would be:

a vessel shape and size

Early on in archaeological pursuits, which type of dating method was technologically unattainable?

absolute dating method

If they have not decayed with age, changes in the pubic symphysis can be an indicator of

age of the individual

"The Battle of Bighorn took place on June 25, 1876." This is an example of:

an absolute date

A collection of artifacts from one or several classes of materials that comes from a defined context is called

an assemblage

Research with present day hunter-gatherers suggests that

ancient populations had plenty of leisure time, adequate diets, and low levels of disease

Subdivisions of culture areas are correctly called

archaeological cultures

Although human bone is distinctive, archaeological skeletal remains

are often fragmented and weathered, making them difficult to identify

Which dating method was used to estimate the age of Homo erectus?

argon-argon

James Ford referred to the shape of popularity curves to determine chronology as:

battleship curves

Bioarchaeologists are accustomed to working with well-defined sets of remains from grave sites, each from a separate individual. This is why

bioarchaeologists are not concerned with issues of MNI or NISP

The study of the human biological component evident in archaeology is:

bioarchaeology

Which pathologies in prehistoric bones are easy to identify?

breaks

Hypothesis testing is only as robust as the "if...then" type of arguments called:

bridging

While Nelson sought ________ types at San Cristobal, he could have looked at function or other purposes

chronological

Stillwater Marsh skeletons exhibited ________, an eye orbit surface manifestation symptomatic of iron deficiency.

cribra orbitalia

What dating technique did Andrew E. Douglas develop?

dendrochronology

Optically stimulated luminescence is used to date ________ while Thermoluminescence is usually used to date ________.

eolian sands; ceramics

George Miller and Richard Burger relied upon ________ in Chavin de Huantar to get a sense of fauna exploited there.

ethnographic analogy

T or F: Analysis of long bone cross sections helped archaeologists determine that, overall, people living at Stillwater Marsh did not walk much, but women walked more than men.

false

T or F: Bone collagen is an inorganic component of bone.

false

T or F: Ishi was unfortunately buried against his instructions after his death.

false

T or F: Palynology is the study of exceptionally old plants.

false

Zooarchaeologists are specialists who focus on:

faunal analysis

The animal remains recovered from an archaeological site are referred to as:

faunal assemblage

Evidence of pollen at Shanidar Cave (Iraq) is indicates that

flower heads thought to be "bouquets" of ritual significance may have been the result of rodents.

Analogies justified by similarities in the formal attributes of archaeological and ethnographic objects are:

formal analogies

Analogies that rely on similarities in form are called

formal analogies

When modern archaeologists expect to encounter human remains, they involve a bioarchaeologist

from day one

At Stillwater Marsh, when human burials were excavated, the Native Americans were:

given genuine authority, respect, and power

What was it of Ishi's that anthropologist Alfred Kroeber wrote to the Smithsonian Institution in 1916 to ask whether they wanted to have for their collection?

his brain

Middle level research aims to provide archaeology with the tools needed to

infer behavior from contemporary behaviors and events

The sipapu "place of emergence" pit in ancient structures was interpreted through living Pueblo use of:

kivas

As recounted by ethnoarchaeologist Bram Tucker, the Mikea group he studied had suffered several crop failures and were relying on ovy, a wild tuber. What food did Tucker purchase and share with the Mikea?

manioc

In the 19th century, archaeology and archaeological sites were viewed as little more than:

mines in which to prospect artifacts.

Taphonomy aids in weeding out or incorporating patterns that result from which of the following processes and, thereby, facilitates interpretation of human roles in shaping the archaeological record?

natural

Determination of a skeleton's sex can be observed by the subpubic angle. The angle is wider in

obtuse in females and not in males

Archaeologists learn to identify bone through classes in human anatomy and:

osteology

Morphological types are descriptive and abstract groupings of individual artifacts that focus on

overall similarity rather than function or chronological significance

The study of ancient disease patterns and disorders is:

paleopathology

________ helps to reconstruct past environments through the analysis of ancient pollen and spores.

palynology

Because they fuse at known rates, which bones help calibrate age?

parietals

A space-time systematic is what the archaeologist uses to try and explain a

pattern

Experiments designed to determine the archaeological correlates of ancient behavior are important because

people no longer do the same things today

What is archaeology's basic unit of space-time systematics that combines both spatial and temporal patterns in material culture?

phase

Which of the following were among the time markers, similar to index fossils in geology, discussed in class?

projectile points, soda bottles

Whereas "distal" refers to ends of bones farther from the body's center, ________ refers to bone ends closer to the body's center.

proximal

The index fossil concept allowed correlation of:

random artifacts

With competing hypotheses accounting for the same body of facts, it remains that most hypotheses are:

reasonable

The Law of Superposition is most important for what kind of dating?

relative

Prior to 1950 most dates for archaeological work were:

relative dates

The Index fossil concept relied on the presence or absence of distinctive kinds of artifacts, but seriation

relied on changes in the artifacts or styles

Which protocol stipulates how to select among the competing hypotheses?

scientific

The time of year that a site was used relies upon determination of ________ through faunal study.

seasonally

The first step in organizing materials from the field is to:

simplify

Sometimes the specimen is so difficult to identify because of modification that it can only be assigned to:

size classes

The study of how organisms become part of the fossil record is called

taphonomy

A second essential step in faunal analysis identifies the specimen to the level of:

taxon

By pursuing related shifts in lifeways, drawing from evidence from settlement patterns, demography, cultural ecology, social organization, and religion we can learn about complex issues related to

the ancient people who made and used them

The geological and archaeological assertion that processes modifying the earth are the same as those of the geological past is known as:

the principle of uniformitarianism

Conventional comparative anatomy classes are insufficient because:

they deal with whole bones rather than broken ones

Which of the following terms equates best with the word "atlatl," a tool that was used in recent history by ethnographic groups as diverse as the native people of the Arctic and Australia?

throwing stick

Archaeologists call strata in widely separated sties that contain the same distinctive artifact forms

time markers

T of F: Alfred Kroeber brought in the Yahi native, Ishi, who inadvertently began teaching Dr. Pope and Kroeber about Indian bow technology and practice.

true

T of F: The Holocene is the pre-Pleistocene geological epoch that began about 10,000 radiocarbon years ago.

true

T or F: A pollen diagram shows the proportional shift in pollen frequencies between stratigraphic levels within a site.

true

T or F: Ancient hunting practices were inferred from a pattern in the faunal data at the Hudson-Meng site in Nebraska

true

T or F: Hastorf and Johannessen found that wood has an important symbolic dimension in the Andes.

true

T or F: Paleodemography reconstructs parameters such as life expectancy at birth, the age profile of a population, and patterns in the ages of death.

true

T or F: The Agate Basin Site indicates that the Folsom hunters did not rely heavily on meat storage

true

Through what mechanism do archaeologists get a working handle on general variability in material culture?

typologies

Which of the following principles (i.e., concepts) is most important or fundamental to middle-level theory and related research that seeks to explain archaeological patterns?

uniformitarianism

Bones left by ancient hunters at a killsite or butchering site can be affected by:

weathering, butchering practices, and carnivore scavenging