archaeology

Goals of Archaeology

1. Stewardshop 2. Constructing Culture history 3. Reconstruction ancient lifeways 4. Explaining cultural and social change 5. Understanding the archaeological record

Augustus Lane Pitt Rivers

1827-1900 - was an English army officer, ethnologist, and archaeologist.[1] He was noted for innovations in archaeological methodology, and in the museum display of archaeological and ethnological collections - He viewed archaeology as an extension of anthropology and, as consequence, built up matching collections of archaeological and ethnographic objects to show longer developmental sequences - to support his views on cultural evolution - he estates Pitt Rivers inherited in 1880 contained a wealth of archaeological material from the Roman and Saxon periods. He excavated these over seventeen seasons, from the mid-1880s until his death. His approach was highly methodical by the standards of the time, and he is widely regarded as the first scientific archaeologist to work in Britain. His most important methodological innovation was his insistence that all artefacts, not just beautiful or unique ones, be collected and catalogued

Archaeological Sites

A place where traces of ancient human activity are found - Archaeologist's archive - Classified according to activity (e.g. burial sites, habitastion sites)

Space

A precisely defined location for every find made during an archaeological survey and excavation - Vital dimension of archaeological context - Latitude, longitude, depth, measurement - Distances between one point and another are telling - Grid coordinates and GPS to examine settlement distributions

Cultural Resource Management

A type of archaeology concerned with management and assessment of the significance of cultural resouces such as archaeological sites - Dominant activiy in North American archaeology

Adaptive View

A way of looking at culture that assumes that econmics, technology, population density, and ecology are key facts in shaping human behavior - Adaptive strategies are adopted by humans to ensure their culture operates with their ecosystem - Nonbiological means which humans adapt to their environment

Historical Materialist Approach

AKA post-processual archaeology - Reaction against emphasizing cultural processes over people - Focuses more on competing individuals and groups as opposed to cultural processes - Individuals and their agency cause change - Focuses more on minorities as well (e.g. native american pov)

Dating

Absolute dating methods rely on using some physical property of an object or sample to calculate its age. Examples are: Radiocarbon dating - for dating organic materials Dendrochronology - for dating trees, and objects made from wood, but also very important for calibrating radiocarbon dates Thermoluminescence dating - for dating inorganic material including ceramics Optically stimulated luminescence or optical dating for archaeological applications

Archaeology: Loss of Innocence (Clarke)

- Archaeology is beginning to critically examine itself - New scientific methods open up new possibilities for the discipline - We must embrace change and adapt - Old system can't keep up with new information - However, new archaeology is not infallible

Revolution in Archaeology: Paul Martin

- Archaeology is rapidly changing away from culture history - Old method is hard pressed to answer "why" - Martin thinks processual archaeology is absolutely revolutionary - New goals of archaeology are to seek trends and laws of human behavior - Archaeology as more of a science than a history

Concept of Types: Ford & Steward

- Basic conceptual tool of culture is the type - Measuring device for culture history - Reconstruct culture history from a very limited range of cultural material -- Norm, deviation, more deviation = possibly explained by migration, different behavior patterns, etc - Cultural drift - Can focus on use, looks, chronology, which changes it (e.g. Gamma Gamma houses)

Normative View of Types

- Changes in item types = drift, migration, etc while similarities = adhering to conservative values system - Ideas flow like a stream through regions

Archaeology as Anthropology: Lewis Binford

- Culture Anthropology analyzes artifacts in a vaccuum without realizing that artifacts operate in operational sub-systems of the total cultural system - Historical context doesn't explain processes of cultural change: Yes there was a migration, but why? - C

Processualism

1950s and 1960s reaction against Culture History - Focus on the how and why of past events - Influenced by biology ecology, computing - V Gordon Childe - Graham Clark - New way of thinking how to do archaeology - Generalizing rather than specifying - "New archaeology" - Search for regularities and generalizable development - Emphasis on processes

Geometric Method

A dissection method - Excavator lays out a rectangular trench, then levels deposits down into exposed walls displaying straigraphic profile - 3d Pic from top to bottom Never looks at layers for what they actually are

Analogy

A form a reason whereby an identity of an unknown thing or relation is inferred from those known - Archaeologist need to use this Bridges the gap between the observed present and interpreted past

Culture Classification

A group of types that share a distinctive set of characteristics - Usually named after the modern place it was identified at

Technology

Aspect of culture - Looks at environmental impact on culture - Info about how resources are harnessed, and how they give "birth" to certain behaviors

Site Assessment

Assessing the significance fo an archaeological site without excavation - Accurate mapping and recording of precise geographic location, given name nd number, basis for an entry in a database - Surface collection of artifacts - Subsurface investigation using electronic detection methods to acquire info for reseach design

Normative view of Culture

Assumes that abstract rules govern what a culture considers normal behavior - Ignores sometimes change is not brought about by advantage or invention - Culture history

Strengths of Systems Thinking

Avoids problem of mentalism - Avoids monocausal explanations - Source of optimism for archaeologists

Tribes

Bands (Autonomous, self sufficient groups) but with more social and culturual orgaization - Kin based social mechanisms - Turns into chiefdom when headed by an inidivudal with ritual, political power

Functional Types

Based on cultural use or role rather than outward appearance - Should reflect precise roles made by the members of society that created it

Salvage Archaeology

Born after WWII - Concern over destruction of archaeological sites - Sponsored by UNESCO

Three age System

Christian Jurgesen Thomsen (1788-1865) - National Museum of Antiquities in Netherlands - Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age to Classify prehistoric past

Culture as a System

Clark - Intercommunicating network of attributes or entities forming a complex whole - Systems are the way that they are because of adaptation - Systems are more or less observable - Systems can be modeled and simulated on a computer - Subsystems are affected by feedback - Closed system: Negative feedback results in equilibrium - When one thing changes in the system, everything changes in the system - But cultures are open systems: Positive feedback stimulates change - Subsystems are linked to one another and explained by function - Archaeologists can examine the links between subsystems in terms of correlation rather than cause and effect - Cause is not important, change overall is

Invention

Creation or evolution of a new idea - Can study the ways in which invention spreads by tracing it to its origin - Some inventions develop independently and simultaneously in many parts of the world, such as agriculture

Lew Binford's Typology

Criticism of Ford - How can just type arrangement tell us anything? - Reject just "drift or migration" - Reject 'aquatic view of culture' - Culture should not just be measured with a single variable - Many variables function independently - Primary function variation: Directly related to the use of the item - Secondary Functional characteristics: Byproducts of the social context - e.g. Large pots = shared, saving

Feminist Archaeology

Critiquing archaeology - Gender is culturally constructed, and part of studying culture - Janet Specter - Fact is a myth, no objective practice - We must try and understand the individual - We must understand power and identity without ignorig gender

Phase

Cultural unit reepresented by like components on a different sites, or different levels on the same site

Elliot Smith

Culture Historian - Diffusion and culture migration/culture routes spread similar ideas from egypt all the way to south america. (e.g. mummification, pyramids) -Cultural routes/culture migration and diffusion

Steward

Culture historian - Direct historical approach: Working from the known to the unknown - History plus stratigraphy and seriation - Ethnography can help us understand materials in their cultural context - Known tribes comparison to tribes of the past

Christopher Hawkes

Culture historian - Text aided archaeology helps to give context - Diffusionist

Binford's Criticism of Ford's Types

Culture should not be measured with a single variable - Pots are not people - Culture is not just assciations, traits, and features, but adaptation to the environment - How can we access ideology? - Desciptive categorization is almost useless

Ethnoography

Culture, technology ,and economics of society

Multilinear Cultural Evolution

Cumulative process that results from cultural adaptations over long periods of time - Recognizes there are many evolutionary tracks, with differences resulting from individual adaptive solutions - Brings systems theory and cultural ecology together - AKA systems-ecological approach

Social Evolution

Darwin's biological ideas as applied to society - Natural selection becomes new metaphor used by social therorists - Herbert Spencer: Survival of the fittest - Lewis Morgan & Edward Taylor: Unilinear Cultural Evolution - Savagery -> Barbarism -> Civilization - Modern time is the pinnacle - Nomads, herders, to agriculture, but with value judgments attached

Chronometric Chronology

Dates in the form of date ranges estrablished by statistic probability - Radiocarbon dating, luminescence dating

V Gordon Childe

Diffusionist - 1892-1957 - Pushed culture history to its limits - Became Marxist in outlook - Pushed for more explanation and less description - Marks the transition from Culture History to processualist ideas - Distinct ethnic and social groups

Vertical Excavation

Digging limited areas for specific information on dating and stratigraphy - Used to obtain samples, establish sequences of ancient building construction, and to salvage sites that are threatened - Limited space

Julian H Steward

Direct historical approach - Working from the known to the unknown - History plus stratigraphy or seriation - Ethnography

Superpositioning

Direct stratigraphic relationship - Helps archaologists order types into a time framework/sequence - Older types into a time framework/sequence - Older types are at lower levels, etc - repeated observations of direct stratigraphic relationships help archaeologists construct an overall master sequence of types - Stratigraphic seriation: Shwos only the relationships of artifact types to each other

Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Dating

Directly counts the actual number of carbon 14 atoms in a sample - Can give dates from very small samples, therefore not damaging the artifcs

Excavation Team

Director, deputy director, excavation team, find managers, specialists

Assemblages

Dissimilar subassemblages of artifacts (e.g. hunter's bow and gatherers basket) - Reflects the patternning of the shared activity of the group

Evolutionist School

European archaeologists who Adopted 3 stage model of prehistory - Influenced by ethnographers who interpreted socities they encountered

Grecomania

Europeans modeled themselves after Greece and Rome, starting from the Renaissance - Europeans wanted to believe they were superior because they were direct descendants - Cultural glory of Greece and military glory of Rome - Restricted to very upper class - Romantic notions that seep into popular culture - "Invented tradition" begins to solidify

Interpretation

Everything is brought together into an interpretive synthesis to answer research questions posed in the original design

Heinreich Schliemann

Fascinated with Homer and the Odysses - "Discovered" mythological city of Troy - Found burials at Mycenae - Believed he had found King Agamemmnon

Cultural Resources

Natural and artificial features, artifacts associated with human activity - Unique and non renewable - Govt protects on public land, but harder on private land - Identified and assessed through surface survey and limited excavation to see how important they are at a site - Must be managed - However ,not enough money and space to store all CRS

Archaeology

Indirect study of people from the past through making connections with objects - Scientific study of peoples and cultures of the past - Science of eliminating possibilities of error - Art of interpretation - Illuminating the present, material evidence - We want to know about ourselves - Builds on many other disciplines - Diachronic: Changes over time - Synchronic: Changes over space Looks at cultural changes - Only way to find out about the people being studied

Potsherd

Individual pot fragments

Obsidian Hydration

Natural glass formed by volcanic activity that absorbs water from its surroundigs - Helps to develop absolute and relative chronology

Johann Joachim Winckelmann

Father of art history and classics - Examined Herculaneum materials - History of art in antiquity, studies through the lens of form and style - Leads to systematic studies of material culture - Documented how antiquity art evolved from classical to present

Post Processualism

Feminist/Marxist archaeology - Understanding past using active mode of culture - Study people n a human time scale - Focus on the individual, small scale - Not just focused on authorities and big figures - People are not passively controlled by systems

Stages of Archaeological

Field Work Finding archaeological sites (remote sensing and ground survey) - Documentary evidence: sites found through research (E.G. Heinrich Sleiman)

Survey

Field walking - Eyes on the ground - Trying to find the best area for excavation - Statistical sampling - Defining data universe then deciding where to sample

Stages of Archaeological Fieldwork

Finding a site by accident or by survey - Asessing the site non-intrusively - Excavation

Processing and Analysis

Finds are cleaned, identified, and catalogued in the field before being transported to the lab

Uses and Abuses of Diffusionism

First steps of archaeological research, expanded knowledge base - Transformation of archaeology into respected discipline - Impact on nationalistic movements - Reinforced the colonial agenda of Europeas - Reinforced racism on a political and policy level

Gender and Archaeology

First wave: Women acknolwedged in history - Second wave: Writing histories of women - Third Wave: Last 20 years: Examines dynamics of power, social context of gender, not just focused on women - Processual archaeology is usually anonymous, interested in general processes instead of individuals

Ideational Approach

Focuses on the complex sets of perceptions ,conceptual assigns, and shared beliefs and understandings that underlie the ways in which people live - Culture is what people learn - Cognitive code: You can't understand culture without understanding the human mind

Flood Tablets

Found in Assyria - Gave evidence of far earlier civilizations

Probabilistic Sampling

Most archaeologists use this as a means of relating small samples of data to larger populations (e.g. political opinion poll) - Improves the likelihood that the conclusions reached from a survey or excavation on the basis of samples are relatively reliable

Ideology

Most difficult to access - Beliefs and practices - Symbols and symbolism - How?

Descriptive Types

Most elementary descriptions based on physical/external properties - Commonly used for sites where functional interpretations are impossible

Cognitive Processual Archaeology

Broad ideal that covers numerous approaches - Archaeology of the mind: religion, bellief, etc - How did peopel think?

Stratigraphy

Build up of things into layers - Gives us context - Law of superposition: What is underneath is going to be older than what is above it - Provenance: Where the artefact comes from in the matrix on the site Horizontal stratigraphy: Space Vertical Stratigraphy: Time

Pothunters

Treasure hunters that excavate sloppily and sell away artifacts

Dendochronology

Tree ring dating - Each ring can be carbon dated

Why Categorize

Typology allows us to see patterns in data - Form and function - Often no way to know in advance what the significance of any category system might be - No one categorization is necessarily more correct than another - Patterns let us interpret

Law of Superposition

Underlyig levels are earlier than those that coverthem - Fundamental to stratigraphy

Seriation Techniques

Used to place artifacts in chronological order - Popularity peaks at specific moment in time - Plotting frequencies as a set of bars - "Battleship curve" - Helpful to cross date sites as well

Simple Random Sampling

Used when nothing is known ahead of excavation - Used when an archaeologist wishes to obtain an unbiased sample of artifacts (e.g. excavated samples are chosen at random)

Cluster Sampling

Usually archaeological samples are not sets of sites, artifacts, bones, or seeds. More typically they are sets of spaces or volumes. Whenever we sample a population of spaces or volumes, and then act as though we sampled a population of sites, artifacts, or features, we are cluster sampling. Cluster samples can be very convenient and efficient, so long as we are sure that the cluster or clusters we include in our sample contain a good mix, so that we can assume that they are like a microcosm of the whole population - Useful when you want to examine the properties of inidvidual sites, not of arbitrary units in a grid

Mound Sites/Tells

When the same site is occupied for centureis and successive generations lived atop the same place

Uniformitarianism

William "Strata" Smith (1789-1839) - Earth was not formed by divine creation but natural processes: Erosion, weathering, geological strata he assumption that the same natural laws and processes that operate in the universe now have always operated in the universe in the past and apply everywhere in the universe. - Charles Darwin, Strata Smith

Historical Archaeologists

Work on site and study problems from periods which written records exist - Excavate settlements, cities - Text aided

Direct Historical Approach

Workin backward from well documented levels of history to prehistory

Marxist Archaeology

Power relations - Modes of production as the social/political system - Modes of production and who controls them results in conflict - Human socities have been characterized by struggle until they cannot sustain themselves and collapse - Links between archaeology and politics - Class, gender, ethnicity, racial struggle - Main focus = ideology

Artefact

Portable - Modified or created by human behavior - Simple tools (1 piece) and compound tools (more than 1 piece) - Artefacts and geofacts (look man made but are actually natural) - Not just a finished product, also discarded material

Stewardship

Preserving and conserving the material remains of the past - Archaeology's primary goal - Overriding obctive - Cultural resource management and salvage work

Secondary Context

Primary context that is disturbed by later activity, natural or human

Ideological Artifacts

Primary functional comtext in the ideological component of the social system (e.g. religious iconography) - Avoid historical explanations for any changes, pay attention to adaptive changes - Basis of group awareness and identity, as well as solidarity

Sociotechnic Artifacts

Primary functional context in the social sub-systems of the total cultural system (e.g. King's crown) - Changes in complexity of these artifacts tells us about change in the social ssytem and helps to explain social change - Binford - The more complex and vast the sociotechnic items, the more developed the society

Ideotechnic

Primary functional context is in ideology (e.g. religion, beliefs) - Any religious iconography - Avoid historical explanation, look at adaptive explanations - Basis of group awareness, identity, slidarity

Sociotechnic

Primary functional context is in the social sub-system of the cultural system - e.g. King's crown - Changes in the complexity of these objects helps us to map social change

Technomic

Primary functional context of an artifact is coping directly with physical environment - Correlation with environmental variables (e.g. no fishhooks in the desert)

Typology

Process of arranging or ordering objects based on attributes (shared characteristics) - Stylistic attribute form attribute, technological attribute - Most typologies are etic: constructed by archaeologists and don't necessarily match the categories of the people that produced them - Modern understanding and biases - Emic: Categories produced by the producers, very hard to

Stratigraphic Observation

Process of recording, studying, and evaluating stratified layers - Deposited horizontally but studied vertically - LAw of association - Subtle color and texture changes

Compliance Process

Project is designed and carried out within tightly drawn legal boundaries

Alfred Kidder (1885-1963)

Put the American Southwest on the archaeological map through large scale survey - he saw a disciplined system of archaeological techniques as a means to extend the principles of anthropology into the prehistoric past and so was the originator of the first comprehensive, systematic approach to North American archaeology. - Strategies of locating and excavation became a "blueprint" of archaeological practice - Reconnaissance (ground and research survey) - Selection of criteria for ranking remains of sites chronologically - Seriation into probable sequence - Stratigraphic excavation - Detailed regional survey

Relative Chronology

Putting things in a relative sequence without specific dates - Arranging finds in a chronological sequence - Establishing chronological relationships between sites and cultures - We're never exactly sure how much time has passed between each events

Stone

Reductive/subtractive technology - Stone is shaped by removing flakes (Debitage) - Conchoidal fractures help identify rock as humanly modified - Petrological analysis can identify source of stone

Absolute Chronology

Refers to dates in calendar years, exact

Surface Collection

Representative samples of artifacts and activities on site

Archaeological Theory

Requires learning new vocabulary - Historical view of development of thought - Culture history: Doing archaeology without theory? - Processualism/New archaeology - Post processualism

Herculaneum

Resort town near Pompeii, discovered before Pompeii - Resettled, one of the first archaeological spots - Focus mainly on treasure hunting for collectors and antiquarians, instead of preservation and research - Tunnels of Herculaneum

Paul S. Martin

Revolution in archaeology - Archaeology has been redefined so many times - New goals, redefinition of culture, new methods

Munsell Chart

Soil change color chart - Color chart - Helps to aid in deciding soil color - Reddish soils: Iron compounds Grey soils: Oxygen poor conditions

Aerial Photography

Sometimes possible to see subtle changes inn soil - Shadow sites, sometimes misleading - Reveals things you can only see at bird's eye view

Civilization

State organized society - Operates on large scale with centralized agriculture, social, political insitutitions - Class stratification and inequality, privilege of a few

Anthropology

The holistic and comparative study of all humanity

Datum Point

The point where the GPS is taken

Technomic Sub-System

The primary functional context in of the artifact is coping directly with the physical environment -Variability of efficiency, nature of available resources - We can correlate these items with environmental variables, giving us the nature of extinct environments - Binford

Residuality

The re-use of old wood in later structures - All wood must predate the contexts in which it is found

General Systems Theory

The search for the ways human populations do things that other systems do - Caused archaeologists to think of human culture as open systems regulated in part by external stimuli - Looks at many agents of culture change not just one

Palynology

The study of minute fossil pollen grains as a means of studying ancient environments - Unnart von Post - Archaeologists realized this new technique offered a chance to study ancient societies in the context of their environment - Precursor to cultural ecology

Culture-historical archaeology

an archaeological theory that emphasises defining historical societies into distinct ethnic and cultural groupings according to their material culture. - Gustaf Kossinna - Cultural-historical archaeology had in many cases been influenced by a nationalist political agenda, being utilised to prove a direct cultural and/or ethnic link from prehistoric and ancient peoples to modern nation-states, something that has in many respects been disproved by later research and archaeological evidence.

Augustus Lane Pitt Rivers

brought science and military precision to archaeology - Documentation and survey, Scientific Survey

Subassemblages

A collection of artifacts associated with a single individual (e.g. a hunter's bow and arrow)

Tradition

Lasting artifact types, assemblages of tools, architectural styles, etc that last longer than one phase

Subassembleges

Patterned sets of artifacts used by occupational groups (e.g. weapons ,shoes, tools)

David Clark

"Loss of innocence" - Self consciousness - Critical self consciousness - Archaeology has to keep up with times and technology

Hawkes

- Ladder of inference: It's easiest to understand processes that create sites, then economics and production, then politics, but ideology is hardest - Culture historian - Archaeology goes beyond the where and when - Historical context paired with artifacts and ecology - Must also study relevant and related peoples of modern times - Believed in diffusion either primary (actual moving) or secondary (trade) - No text archaeology will never properly understand context because primary text is needed

Ethnoarchaeology

- Living Archaeology - Studying the process by which abandoned settlements turn into archaeological sites - Mass of observed data on human behavior in which they can draw up suitable hypotheses to compare with finds from excavations

This is not an article about material culture as text (Hodder)

- Material culture is not a language, it cannot tell us somehting out of nothing, similar to typology's telling in Culture History days - Motive that is given by processural archaeologist was probably not how the creator described or intended their object or how the culture themself understood the object - Relies on unconscious culture = Artist is playing into a system they are unaware of - Creates extreme cultural determinism

Postprocessual Archaeology (Hodder)

- Outlines theories of social change in which the individual, actor, culture & history are venter - People don't just passively react to external stimuli but are active and create their own change - Breaking split between archaelogy and social sciences - You can't understand general behavior withut understanding the inidvidual - Individuals act on culturally fueled beliefs, so culture is embedded in behavior - Processual doesn't care abut the person behind the system, too scientific, too deterministic, discounts social actors - Practical use may not be all (e.g. Safety pin = punk)

Specter's Feminist Archaeology

- Women's place in the Dakota village: They held it down while men were away - Perspective of aboriginal women, and the story of one girl in particular - Post processual: Focusing on the individual - An artifact as situated in its individual use and context

Criticisms of Processual Archaeology

- Too scientific - You can't understand general behavior withut understanding the inidvidual - Individuals act on culturally fueled beliefs, so culture is embedded in behavior - Processual doesn't care abut the person behind the system, too scientific, too deterministic, discounts social actors - Practical use may not be all (e.g. Safety pin = punk) - People don't just passively react to external stimuli but are active and create their own change - Material culture is not a language, it cannot tell us somehting out of nothing, similar to typology's telling in Culture History days - Motive that is given by processural archaeologist was probably not how the creator described or intended their object or how the culture themself understood the object - Relies on unconscious culture = Artist is playing into a system they are unaware of

Statistical Sampling

: Arbitrary: You set the perameters 1. Simple random sampling 2. Stratified random sample 3. Systematic sample 4. Stratified systematic unaligned 5. Adaptive sampling

Social Systems

: Aspect of culture - Roles, statuses, political system, economic systems - Macro and micro scale - Other social systems?

General Analogy

: Broad comparisons that can be documented across cultural traditions

Step Trenching

: Deep layers - Good for finding ancient things - Higher water table - Safer method

Weaknesses of Systems Thinking

: Doesn't explain where systems come from historically - Explanations are too dependent on adaptation - Alternative explanations to function - Still doesn't address why - Ideology of control

Archaeology as Science

: Positivism: Separate theory from method - Hypothesis testing - Untestable statements: Outside realm of science! - Hypothetico-deductive-nomological (HDN) Model - Logical positivism - Extreme belief - looking for covering laws across all time and space, sweeping generalizations - Untestable statements were utterly without value, don't look at morality, ethics, etc

The Renaissance

: Revival of learning and renewed cultural awareness - Exciting cultural movement that began in Italy in the late 1300s - Thinkers of that time saw themselves as part of a golden age - Bubonic plague, reengineering of society, looking into the past for inspiration - Beginning of archaeological exploration - Renaissance upper class wanted to be Greek and Roman

Site Formation Processes

Agencies, whether natural or cultural, that have transformed the archaeological record and site Culture = Human behavior such as re-use, discard Non cultural = natural process such as erosion - Shows the archaeological record is not solely a direct result of human behavior (C-transforms) and naturally created (N-transforms). C-transforms that might have affected an assemblage at an archaeological site include purposeful and accidental discard of objects or burning and demolition of structures. N-transforms could include earthquakes or rodent burrowing or vegetation growth or normal decay.

Gustaf Kossinna

Aided the development of German Nationalistic archeology - Made the leap from classifying cultures in the past to equating them with contemporary social and political units - Documented the "master Aryan race" - 1858-1931

Cultural Anthropology

Analysis of human social life: both past and present - How do human cultures adapt to enviroment?

Social Anthropologists

Analyze social organization

Franz Boas

Anthropologist - Merged anthropology and archaeology Rigorous analysis with ethnographic data - Tied onto direct historical approach in American archaeology - Work contributed to the creation of the Midwestern Taxonomic System - Known to the unknown

Assemblage

Appearance of a number of categories together in a temporal or spatial context is also known as assemblage When artefacts, ecofacts, and features are all found together - Connection between all of them - Matrix: All the surroundings of your assemblage - Diverse group of artifacts that reflects the shared activity of a community - Found at a single site

Stratified Sampling

Archaeologist uses previous knowledge of an area, to structure further research (e.g. topographic variation) - Allows one to sample some selected units intensively and less thoroughly

Culture History

Archaeology in the 19th and early 20th century - Descriptive, chronological, focused on typological classification - Doing archaeology without any explicit theoretical foundations - Mainly descriptive - No theory, no explanations, not out to prove anything - Chronology, what happens when - An approach to archaeology that assumes artifacts can be used to build up generalized pictures of human cultures in time and space - What happened where and when? - Dominant until the 1950s - First vital stage of all archaeological research - A way of describing the past, but does not explain "why" - Inductive, general, events instead of processes (in a vaccuum?)

Ford & Steward

Basic conceptual tool of culture is the type, which can help us construct cultural histories from a very limited range of cultural material - Can be used for more than just pottery - Needs to be used with history - Fictional gamma-gamma culture - Cultural drift (norm, deviation, more deviation) - Morphological type: Based solely on form Historical-Index type: Defined by form but focuses more on chronology (e.g. pottery) Functional Types: Cultural use/role (e.g. stone, bone) - How different is typological difference? Splitting vs lumping

Systems Theory

Bertalanffy attempted to construct a general systems theory that would explain the interactions of different variables in a variety of systems, no matter what those variables actually represented. A system was defined as a group of interacting parts and the relative influence of these parts followed rules which, once formulated could be used to describe the system no matter what the actual components were.[1] Binford stated the problem in New Perspectives in Archaeology, identifying the Low Range Theory, the Middle range theory, and the Upper Range Theory. The Low Range Theory could be used to explain a specific aspect of a specific culture, such as the archaeology of Mesoamerican agriculture. A Middle Range Theory could describe any cultural system outside of its specific cultural context, for example, the archaeology of agriculture. An Upper Range Theory can explain any cultural system, independent of any specifics and regardless of the nature of the variable - At the time Binford thought the Middle Range Theory may be as far as archaeologists could ever go

Imperialism and Colonialism

Colony: Country or area under the full or partial political control of another country, typically a distant one, occupied by settlers of that country - Farming settlements for retired veterans of Roman army in newly conquered territories - Inspired Europe to create their own empire - Wanted to bring "civilization" to the world - Slave trade established - Imperialism: Develops an idea of the inherent superiority of Europe, and by extension, the concept of "race" - Justified practices through classical history - White man's burden

Ethnology

Comparative study of societies, generalized human behavior

Ethnographic Archaeology

Comparing still living peoples to those in the past and making connections - Very simplistic - Working backwards from the known to the unknown

Law of Association

Context in space is based on associations between artifacts and other evidence of human behavior around them - Law that they are contemporary if they are in the same archaeological horizon - Helps to order artifacts in chronological sequence

Archaeological Research Design

Context: Design should reflect a larger set of goals and fit into a larger body of archaeological knoweldge - Meaningful questions/hypoetheses to beginn - Definitions of data to be collected, and methods to be used to collect it. Flexible - Info about ho wyou well analyze your finds - Accomodations to "real world" things and who/what it will be presented to

Radiocarbon Dating/Carbon-14

Dates organic remains using material that was once living - Half life, quarter life, etc is compared with life of living materials - Counts beta particles admitted as a result of radioactive decay - Radiocarbon dating is a method of determining the age of an object by using the properties of radiocarbon, a radioactive isotope of carbon. The method was invented by Willard Libby in the late 1940s and soon became a standard tool for archaeologists. It depends on the fact that radiocarbon, often abbreviated as 14 C, is constantly being created in the atmosphere by the interaction of cosmic rays with atmospheric nitrogen. The resulting radiocarbon combines with atmospheric oxygen to form radioactive carbon dioxide. This is then incorporated into plants by photosynthesis, and animals acquire 14 C by eating the plants. When the animal or plant dies, it stops exchanging carbon with its environment, and from that point the amount of 14 C it contains begins to reduce as the 14 C undergoes radioactive decay. Measuring the amount of 14 C in a sample from a dead plant or animal such as piece of old wood or a fragment of bone provides information that can be used to calculate when the animal or plant died. The oldest dates that can be reliably measured by radiocarbon dating are around 50,000 years ago, though special preparation methods occasionally permit dating of older samples. - he development of radiocarbon dating has had a profound impact on archaeology. In addition to permitting more accurate dating within archaeological sites than did methods previously in use, it also allows comparison of dates of events across great distances.

Formulation and Implementation

Define research problem - Perform background studies, including documentary research - Determine team composition, size and duration of field season - Budgeting - Permits and funding

Chronological Types

Defined by form but are time markers - Types with chronological significance - Attributes that show change over time

Multidimensional Classification

Derived from the specific intersection of three or more specific dimensions, such as decoration, shape

Process of Archaeological Research

Design and formulation; dialogue between research question and data, what you're going to dig, questions you are asking, what activities are conducted on this site, research design - Implementation and data acquisition - Processing and analysis - Interpretation - Publication

Invasion

Destruction levels in archaeological record - Hard to prove

Excavation

Destructive, usually a carefully planned blance between digging and preservation - Context must be documented - Archaeologists dig only when they must

Basic Goals of Archaeology

Determining form, function, process, and meaning

Interpretation in Culture History

Diachronic, change ascribed to internal and external stimuli - Internal: Inevitable variation, cultural invention, cultural revival

Processual Archaeology

Ecological and evolutionary approach to explaining the past - Deductive, hypotheses, testing against data

Orientalism

Edward Said - Way of coming to terms with the Orient based on its special place in the European Western Experience - Defining the east is a good way of defining what the west is/is not - West = classical, Hellenistic, literature East = dangerous, exotic, over the top

Three Level Sequence of Human Development

Edward Tylor - Savagery (Hunting) - barbarism (Farming) - Civiliation (present) - Unilinear cultural revolution

Old Copper Complex

Efficiency is only one side of the adaptive coin - Must also take into account effiency to use and gather material as well as to make - Copper may be a more efficient tool, but takes way more time to make than chipping simple flint - Copper was also sociotechnic, buried with the dead

New Archaeology's Key Points

Emphasis on cultural evolution - Emphasis on systems thinking: Culture is an extrasomatic means of adaptation - Optimism about accessing the past - Interconnected systems to adapt - Culture adapts to external environment - Stress on scientific approaches - Societies go from simple to complex (Culture history????) Culture as evolution - Doesn't want itself to be seen as history - Stresses idea of cultural processes, asking why, links to ideas of cultural evolution - e.g. Pottery motifs/decoration aren't very important, just superficial. Instead, what is the form influence? - Trend to be more explicit about one's biases - Variability: Material in statistical terms - Anthropologically oriented

Populatin

Evolve across a landscape because of environmental change, interactions between people, shifts in population density - Clear cause and effect between population and agricultural productivity of an area

Diffusion

External stimuli for change - Culture is fluid, cultural stream - Diffusion: Transmission of ideas, forms, artifacts from an origin point outward - Elliot Smith - Hyperdiffusionism - Influenced by evolutionary ideas - Ignores colonialism, racism, imperialism - Assumption that many major human inventionns originated in onen place, then spread - Over a distance - trade, migration, invasion

Implementation

Fund raising, getting permission, access to land, acquiring equipment

Remote Sensiting

GPS, satellites and aerial photos to find sites

GIS

Geographic Information Systems - Computer aided systems for the collection, storage, retrieval, and analysis of spatial data - Mapping statistics,l modeling, data points, tophography

William "Strata" Smith

Geologist - Blew creationism out of the water - Product of industrial revolution, infrastructure - Theory of uniformitarianism, soil layers, it must take time for soil to accumulate and form, but that doesn't fit in with 6,000 years of creationism - Fossil finds - Birth of stratigraphy - Uniformitarianism, Fossil finds, and Darwin's publications begin to undermine creationist ideas

Trade

Goods and commodities being mutually exchanged - Appears in archaeological recrd - Usually in a central place, and then goods are redistributed through another central place like a market - We can trace trade

GPR

Ground penetrating radar - Remote sensing - Area is smoothed and GPR is used to try and find abnormalities

Subsurface Detection Methods

Ground penetrating radar, metal detectors, electromagnetic surveys, magnometer

Communities

Groups of households that interact with each other - Permanency of settlements - Importance of family and kin ties - Networks of human interaction

Antiquarians

History of archaeology began in European renaissance - Fascination with classical civiliation - People of wealth collected and dug up for sport - Precursor to Archaeology

Settlement Archaeology

How archaeologists study households, communities, and cultural landscape - Patterns in houses, storage pits, etc - Reveals how individuals and communities relate to one another

Old Copper Conplex

In archaic period, fine and superior copper tools were being produces, while in woodland times, was used for non utilitarian items - May have been superior, but took very long to make, were not being reused - Was instead a sociotechnic item, a status symbol

Stylistic Types

Items such as dress used to convey information by displaying it in public (e.g. aztecs dressed according to rank)

LiDar

Light Detection and Ranging - Form of aerial photography, laser pulses and produces high density elevation data - Optical equivilent of radar - Yields accurate and dense digital models of topography - Laser altimetry

Middle Range Theory

Linking arguments between past and present - Understanding static data and past dynamics - Use the present to bridge the gap between present static and past dynamic - Ethnographic fieldwork - Actualistic studies: Observations and recordings of activities taken in the actual, the here and now (Ethnoarchaeology) - Again, the marriage of archaeology and anthropology - Formally independent of development of a general theory - Based on uniformitarian conditions: Assume that conditions in past were the same as present - Became incredibly influential - Logically made sense, but was it achievable? - Still based on assumptions - If cultures are unique, no MRT - Problems with analogy: Formal analogy: If some element of 2 things situations are similar, others but be also Relational analogies: Cultural or natural connection between 2 contexts - Cultural continuity

Single Component Sites

Material reflecting only one culture is found - More than one is a multi-component site

Archaeological Record

Material remains of past human activities and behaviors: Archeological data - 3 main types of archaeological data: artefacts, ecofacts, features - Construction of ancient cultures from data, the archaeological records - Based on the scientific recovery of data from the ground

Archaeological Interpretation

Material that we work with exists in the present, but what we want from it is the past, archaeological paradox - We need to use analogy

New Archaeology's Critique of Culture History

New Archaeology is not a single set of beliefs or theories, but united in a general dissatisfaction with traditional Archaeology - Need to be more scientific and anthropological, hypotheses must be tested - Science was the way forward - Critique of normative view of culture, critique of culture history's focus on artifacts at the expense of people - Pots are not people - Culture History is too obsessed with typology - New Archaeology: A set of questions rather than a set of answers

Open Area Excavation

No boxes - Prevents wrongly oriented balks - Good for sites with a short occupational history, the materials are fairly close to the surface

Features

Non portable human made remains - Simple and complex - Post holes, middens, hearths, monumental architecture - Helps define an area of activity - Structures such as houses

Archaeological Culture

Normative view: People do things and leave things behind, and we cannot access both adaptive and ideational aspects of these objects - Behaviors generate an archaeological record - Societies past and present share same basic features of organization - Used to describe a past group - Hypothetical cultural entity - Group of objects: We assume the users share a common identity

Sampling

One of the most important tasks an archaeologist faces is discovering sites in the landscape. Unless a site is clearly visible, it is necessary to use various methods of subsurface testing, from simple test pits dug by hand to technologically advanced methods of remote sensing such as ground penetrating radar and magnetic surveying. However, because it is generally unfeasible to test an entire survey area, the archaeologist must decide on the sampling strategy that best suits his or her purposes non-probabilistic sampling is used when the archaeologist is most interested in already visible or suspected sites and does not need to sample elsewhere. Probabilistic sampling is used when it is necessary to have a representative sample of the sites in a region (the "sample universe"), but it is possible to sample only a small percentage of the whole - Simple random sampling This strategy is the simplest form of probabilistic sampling. Sampling units are selected on a completely random basis. The greatest drawback to this strategy is that, depending on the dispersion of the randomly selected numbers, large parts of the region may be left out of the sampling completely. For example, note the concentration of units towards the bottom of the aerial photo and the relatively sparse areas in the center. - Systematic sampling In this probabilistic strategy, sample units are evenly distributed throughout the sample universe. The areas of low sample concentration that can be a problem in random sampling are avoided in systematic sampling. However, in an unusual situation in which the sites are regularly spaced in a pattern approximating the layout of the sample units but slightly offset from it, it is possible to miss every site. Stratified random sampling Also a form of probabilistic sampling, stratified random sampling attempts to minimize variability within different zones (or "strata") in the sample universe. The sample universe is divided into large natural zones and each is designated the amount of sample units proportional to its area. The position of units within each area is determined by random sampling. Stratified systematic or systematic unaligned sampling This probabilistic strategy combines the characteristics of simple random sampling and systematic sampling into a single strategy that limits their drawbacks. The sample universe is divided into smaller, regularly-spaced regions, then a sample unit is chosen randomly from each of these regions. The sample units are evenly dispersed, but not so regularly positioned as to miss equivalently positioned but offset sites.

Christian Jurgenson Thomsen

Opened the National Museum of Antiquities in Copenhagen - Three Age System implemented - Did not want to destroy sites, thought they should be collected and preserved in a museum - One room for stone age, one room for bronze age, one room for iron age

Ecofacts

Organic and environmental remains - Bones, seeds, pollen - Distinction between artefact and ecofact are blurred - Not modified

Charles Darwin

Origin of Species - Uniformitarianism, Fossil finds, and his publications begin to undermine creationist ideas

Theory

Overall framework within which a researcher operates - Traditional scientific terms: theory is a general explanation while hypothesis is a specific proposition put forward for testing

Settlement Patterns

Part of analysis about human adaptation to enviroenment - Helps us to examine trade netwrks, explanation of envrionment - Relatinships between individuals and landscapes - Can explain placement of specific things

Specific Analogy

Particular comparisons within a single cultural tradition - Defend use on 3 grounds - Cultural continuity, comparability in environment, and similarity of cultural forms

CRM phases

Phase I: Survey Phase II: Testing Phase III: Data recovery

Component

Physically bounded portion of a site that contains a distinct assemblage which serves to distinguish the culture of the inhabitants on a particular level

Harris Matrix

Plotting trenches and spatial relations - Layers/Loci - Difference in dirt color signifies a different layer - Room for mistakes - Stratigraphy

Lewis Binford (1931-2011):

Said archaeology made virtually no contribution to explanation - Archaeology = anthropology - Archaeology = science - We need to reexamine analogy - Archaeological record is static - But we look at past dynamics Argues that culture history is inadequate, artifacts operate in operational subsystems of a total cultture system - Specific historical explanations do not explain processes e.g. WHY was there a migration? - Against aquatic view of culture, "stream" of culture

Mortimer Wheeler

Sampling excavation variant on the geographic method - Boxes in shallow sites informal grids allowig hi to monitor the stratified layers in the baulks between the boxes

Karl Weber

Scientific and systematic documentation and excavation of Herculaneum - Trying to understand how ancient Romans lived - 1712-1764

Element sampling

Selecting arbitrary grid samples over a large area - Useful for estimatig densities of archaeological sites over a research area

Stylistic Seriation

Sequence dating - Flinders Petrie (1853-1942) - Arranging things in a chronological fashion - Petrie arranges pottery in 9 different types - 30-80 numbered pottery - Earliest way to organize chronology - In archaeology, seriation is a relative dating method in which assemblages or artifacts from numerous sites, in the same culture, are placed in chronological order.

Geophysical Survey

Shovel test - Auguring and coring - How much stuff and where you should start digging - Magnetometry, resistivity survey, ground penetrating radars

Industries

Similar subassemblages at a site which were made at the same time by the same population

Box Grid Excavation

Sir Mortimer Wheeler - Baulks in between squares to see stratigraphy, avoid mistakes - Different people will be digging - Military precision

Horizontal (Area) Excavation

Stratigraphic excavation, exposing large areas of the site to expose layouts - larger settlements - Can be recorded with a total data station: An electronic distance measurig device with recording

Culture

Structure of lives and environment - Group distinction and identity - Social norms and behaviors - Generational traditions and values - History of the group, beliefs - Adaptive system, an interface between ourselves, the environment, and other societies - Language, economics, technoloogy religion

Reconstructing Ancient Lifeways

Study of ancient human behavior, not just artifacts - Subsistence: How people make their living or acquire food - Environmental Models - Human interactions - Social organization and religious beliefs

Paleoanthropology

Study of culture and artifacts of earliest humans - Stone technology, art, hunting and gathering, prehistory

Cultural Ecology

Study of ecological relationships btween human cultures and their environments, other cultures - Julian Steward - Based on general sysstems theory - Exploring strategies they use to adapt, such as religionn

Physical Anthropology

Study of human biological evolution, and variations among different populations - Studies or ancestors: Gorillas, chimps

Bioarchaeology

Studying deceased people through DNA, like the iceman - Facial reconstruction, forensic archaeology, palaeopathology - Can tell us disease, malnutrition, injuries, sex, age, even occupation if it is telling on bones

Loci

Subdivision of site into relevant areas

Site Testing

Subsurface radar technology - Test pit/test trenches: Carefully dug trenches to anticipate subsurface stratigraphy and occupational layers - Reference points for planning and entire dig - Shovel pits are smaller to establish the boundaries of shallow settlement sites and features

Migration

Sudden appearance of new artifacts, local materials modified in form, style, or function, presumably by new comers - Source for immigrant population must be identified - Artifacts used as indicators of population movement must exist in the same form at the same time in both the homeland and newly adopted home. - e.g. English settlers in north america - Smaller scale: slaves

Taxonomy

System for classifying materials, objects, and phenomena used in many sciences - Organizes data into manageable units: separating finds (e.g. food, stone, bone) - Describes types to group many artifacts by their common attributes - Identifies relationship between types - Helps to study assemblage variability int he archaeological record - An etic classification - Involves organizing typology around one dimension such as decoration, breaking it into increasingly specific units

Patterns of Discard

Tangible remains of the past - Archaeologists can see a patterned reflection of the culture that produced them

Spatial Analysis

The analysis of spatial relationships both within sites and over much larger areas

Provenience

The location of artifacts, helps us understand context

Cultural System

The means whereby a human society adapts to its physical and social environment - Depends on ability to adapt to natural environment - Explains cultural and social change - Culture systems are in constant state of change (cultural process)

Primary Context

The original position of the artifact within time and space

Arbitrary Sampling:

You set limits and units will be regular in size and shape

Stratigraphic Excavation

dissection - Exposing each layer one by one - Following sequence of defining the layer as you go along