Anthropology test 2 chapters 4-6

Absolute dating

(chronometric dating) Any dating method that determines the age of a fossil, rock, artifact, or archaeological feature on a specified time scale

Surface collection

: a collection of pottery and stone artifacts made from the surface of the soil around a possible site.

Geographical information system (GIS)

A computerized methodology that brings together data from several sources and integrates them with a geographic reference map

Glaciation

A condition when the land surface is covered with sheets of glacial ice

Carbon 14 dating

A dating method that establishes the date or period of an organic artifact or feature from relative proportions of radioactive carbon to non-radioactive isotopes

Optical Stimulated Luminescence (OSL)

A dating method that measures electrons trapped within the crystalline structure found in quartz and feldspar after being buried in the earth. Crystals in these grains absorb energy from trace amounts of radioactive material in the soil and rock. When exposed to light, the electrons are released and can be measured to estimate the date they were buried

Potassium argon dating

A dating method that measures the decay of an isotope of potassium into argon, used to date minerals, clays, and sediments over 100,000 years old in igneous rock that was laid down as volcanic ash

The use of MtDNA sequencing and the establishment of haplogroups allowed researchers working on the Hoyo Negro project to establish

A high degree of overlapping genetic similarities with the indigenous people (Native Americans)

Ethnopoetics

A method of recording oral poetry, stories, ritual language, and nearly any narrative speech act as verses and stanzas rather than as prose paragraphs to capture the format and other performative elements that might be lost in written formats.

Breccia

A rock composed of broken fragments or minerals cemented together by fine-grained matrix

Research committed to making social change and improving the lives of marginalized people is called

Action research

Ethnography of Speaking

An anthropological approach to language that distinguishes the ways that people actually speak from the ideal ways that people in any culture are suppose to speak

Fieldnotes

Any information that the anthropologist writes down or transcribes during fieldwork

Informant

Any person an anthropologist gets data from in the study community, especially people interviewed or who provide information about what they have observed or heard

Interview

Any systematic conversation with an informant to collect field research data, ranging from a highly structured set of questions to the most open-ended ones.

Among cultural anthropologists, fieldwork involves

Building personal relationships within the community, learn to expect the unexpected or learn to handle the unexpected and be flexible with what the community does.

Chronometric dating techniques used by archaeologists help establish

Can help determine the age on a specified time scale relating to other fossils

Cultural anthropologists do research by

Doing long-term fieldwork living in a community, focusing on the holisitc approach in the traditional social life, and using cultural relativism which is judging a culture through it's perspective not a different culture's perspective.

Which of the following is the defining methodology for the discipline of anthropology?

Fieldwork, living in a community as one of the people gathering information on them

Remote sensing techniques are

Geographical information systems (GIS), aerial surveys, and regional surveys. They use technology to determine what the geography was like in the past and use heat sense technology.

In order to be certain that a particular area holds promise for paleoanthropological research, what is first used to evaluate the site?

Geological and landscape review, determining the geological aspects and determining what the landscape once looked like when it had beings living there.

Geomorphologists

Geologists who study the formation and structure of the earth's surface

Which term refers to the knowledge about other people that emerges from relationships?

Intersubjectivity

. ___________ questions encourage informants to talk about what they find particularly meaningful.

Open-ended

If you wanted to understand very early, non-living human beings, you would likely engage in

Paleoanthropology

The study of ancient plants as a means of reconstructing prehistoric environments is known as ________________.

Paleoethnobotony

Which type of interaction may include playing basketball, cooking, dining, or having coffee with informants?

Participant observation

_____________ is a key element of anthropological fieldwork because it is a systematic research strategy of "just hanging out."

Participant observation

Habitation sites

Places where people lived at some time in the past

The ability to document changes in pottery styles in non-living societies happens through

Pottery shard analysis

One of the methods that archaeologists can use to determine potentially useful areas to excavate involves the use of

Preliminary surface surveys and test pits, regional surveys, aerial surveys, Geographical information systems (GIS), and remote-sensing

The comparative method

The comparing of two different cultures

Fossilization

The process by which hard tissues like bone and teeth slowly turn to stone, as molecule by molecule, the hard tissues turn to rock keeping the shape of the original bone.

Intersubjectivity

The realization that knowledge about other people emerges out of relationships with and perceptions of each other

Participant Obersevation

The standard research method used by sociocultural anthropologists that requires the researcher to live in the community he or she is studying to observe and participate in day-to-day activities.

Paleoenthobotany

The study of ancient plant remains to reconstruct a picture of prehistoric environments and human-plant interactions.

When anthropologists go into the field

They study from a holistic perspective and have to be conscious of how they act towards those they are studying

. Using life history interviews, researchers are able to

Understand how this person's age and gender affect the community

thermoluminescence dating

a dating method for estimating dates of pottery that has been fired.

Tree-ring dating (dendrochronology)

a dating technique that counts years by establishing a standard pattern of thick and thin tree rings and matching the ring pattern in a wooden artifact to a point on this sequence

Pleistocene

a geologic period in which much of the land in the northern hemisphere was covered by glaciers. These ice sheets retreated about 12,000 years ago.

Haplotype

a group of distinctive inherited genes

In attempting to understand the way that ancient humans actually lived, paleoanthropologists Richard Leakey and writer Roger Lewin described the difficulty involved as being like a

a jigsaw puzzle with most pieces missing

. An anthropologist who practices participatory-action research would most likely use this method in

a low income neighborhood which has been affected by the dumping of toxic waste

Test pit

a preliminary excavation, usually of a single 1 meter by 1 meter square (or half meter square) to see if artefactual material exists at the site and to assess the character of the stratigraphy.

Seriation

a relative dating method that analyzes changing styles of pottery or other artifacts over time to situate any particular assemblage of artifacts into a time series of styles and designs.

What kind of data do anthropologists gather from doing interviews?

all of the information given to them/ research information

Chronometric dating

any dating method that determines an age of a fossil, rock, artifact, or archaeological feature on some specified time scale

Relative dating

any dating techniques provide us with rough assessments of the age of a fossil, artifact, or archaeological feature relative to other fossils, rocks, artifacts or features.

Sites

any location that shows evidence of human activity including those with monuments and buildings.

Which locations would you likely find an anthropologist doing fieldwork?

anywhere, you can study rednecks or third world countries

As a method, the ethnography of speaking draws on the technique of

communication

Early anthropologists used the _______________ method to establish models of social evolution

comparative

. Bronislaw Malinowski developed the ______________ method, which requires the researcher to live with people for years in order to develop the "native's point of view."

ethnographic

The method linguistic anthropologists use for recording oral poetry, stories, and ritual language is _______________.

ethnopoetics

Cultural anthropologists use just three methods—interviews, field notes, and participant observation.

false

In order to study culture one must travel to distant, far-off places.

false

The only useful way that we can understand non-living human ancestors comes from the study of fossils.

false

Cultural anthropology is one of the most quantitative of the social sciences.

false, qualitative

_____________ happens under special environmental conditions and can turn hard tissues into stone.

fossilization

If you wanted to study patterns of kin relations in a community, which method would you use?

genealogical method

Which method would be best when doing a study on the genetic propensity for cancer in a given population?

genealogical method

When archaeologists recover and analyze ancient non-fossilized remains, such as the teeth found in Hoyo Negro, they are most likely to use

genetic data analysis/ DNA analysis

_____________ are important for an anthropologist to write down because they reflect his or her private observations, which can also be useful data

headnotes/fieldnotes/mentalnotes

Anthropologists often disguise the identity of their ______________.

informants

haplogroups

lineages that share certain haplotypes

Fieldwork

long-term immersion in a community, normally involving firsthand research in a specific study community or research setting where people's behavior can be observed and the researcher can have conversations or interviews with members of the community.

Residue analysis

microscopic analysis of the residues of plant and animal foods, especially starches, on pottery or tools.

Environmental changes make it essential that an archaeologist understand the proximal relationship of ___________ and habitation sites.

past humans and evidence

Use-wear

patterns of wear and tear on an artifact that is presumed to be due to use.

Alluvial soil

rich, fine grained soils deposited by rivers and streams

Trace fossils

soft tissues such as organs, skin, and feathers that do not fossilize but sometimes leave impressions or traces on the sedimentary rock that forms around them.

If you wanted to have consistent responses, what kind of interview would you use?

survey interview

If you studied the deeply buried remains of a 15,000-year-old funerary site in the Gobi Desert you would be least likely to analyze

the age of any artifacts/ DNA anaylsis

Anthropological linguistics

the branch of anthropology that studies human being through their languages

Headnotes

the mental notes an anthropologists makes while in the field, which may or may not end up in formal fieldnotes or journals

Which project would likely require the assistance of a geomorphologist?

the study of a landscape change

stratigraphy

the study of layers of soil or rock and how they were deposited.

Cultural anthropologists face an ethical responsibility in their work and so must disclose to informants

to tell them the reasons of the study

The ability to discover ancient remains and draw inferences about our earliest human ancestors is sometimes helped by

trace fossils

A critical reason for taking field notes is that there may be a long lag time between fieldwork and writing and publishing about it.

true

Anthropologists believe that the "native point of view" is better than their own.

true

If the exact location of a fossil or archaeological artifact is not known it is usually impossible to determine an accurate date for it.

true

Studying pottery is an important part of understanding ancient cultures because potsherds break but never completely decompose under normal environmental conditions.

true

Archaeologists are making a mistake when they clean samples of potsherds for analysis/

true, it destroys archaeological evidence

A word that best describes participant observation is

unstructured, "Hanging-out"

Interglacials

warm periods between ice ages, usually referring to warm periods during the Pleistocene