Archaeology Test 1 Study Guide

What isotope has a half-life of 5370 years and can be used to radiometrically date organic materials up to 50,000 years old?

C-14, radiocarbon dating

what idea was introduced in 1859?

Darwins origins of species EVOLUTION

What mesoamerican culture produced a hieroglyphic record including a calendar with a zero date of August 13, 3114 BC, providing archaeologists with a means of calculation absolute historical dates?

Maya

What site in the Pacific Northwest experienced a mudslide that resulted in Pompeii-like preservation, including an assemblage comprised of 95% organic materials?

Ozette

Who was the first scientific archaeologist and what did they excavate?

Thomas Jefferson, and Mounds

Material Culture

anything perceptible by touch (material) that is give meaning by people (culture)

Antiquarian

armchair interest in the ancients

Artifacts vs. Ecofacts

artifacts: portable objects used, modified or made by humans eco facts: organic and environmental remains not made by humans

What evolutionary process creates domesticated plants and animals with traits beneficial to human populations?

artificial selection process

What is this artifact, comprised of flint bladelets and a bone handle, with residues indicative of plant processing?

blades with sickle sheen

What school of archaeology thought was primarily descriptive and generated lists of archaeology traits that yielded normative views of cultures?

cultural history

food ways

cultural, social, and economic practices relating to the production and consumption of food

Absolute dating

dates expressed as specific units of measure that pinpoint a discrete interval of time

Relative Dating

dates expressed in relation to one another

What dating method can reveal calendar ages to the exact year as well as localized climatic evidence, provided you are in an area that is seasonal and dry enough /wet enough to preserve the sample material?

dendrochronology

What dental condition indicates nutritional or other health stress experienced during childhood?

dental hypoplasias

Julian Steward

discovered an intimate relationship with nature/environment the "culture core" helped us to go farther up Hawks Ladder first modern attempt at asking why and how questions

if archaeologists limit their interpretations of the past to documented examples of cultural practices in the present, they are falling victim to the tyranny of?

ethnographic record

what techniques do archaeologists use to recover plant remains from archaeological sites by submerging sediment samples from excavated contexts in water and separating the contents?

flotation

Myth of the mound builders

found artifacts not attributed to American Indians Frauds attributed to the lost old world people 1894 - John Wesley Powell, Cyrus Thomas, and The BAE goal was to figure out who found it to be related to then native Americans

Jacques Boucher de Perthes

found thunder stones, called achueleon hand axes discovered in 1836, vindicated in 1859

Franz Boaz

founder of American anthropology looked at individuality

Morphological type

grouping of material culture similar group, shape, design

What Native American food was made from nixtamalized maize and played a role not inly in subsistence, but also in social and ritual activities?

hominy

What form of subsistence, which humans practiced for the majority of our existence on earth, did mid-20th century ethnographers describe as the "original affluent society"?

hunter-gatherer / foraging

What foundational principle of stratigraphy states that lower deposits usually are older than shallower deposits?

law of superposition

diagnostic artifact

like an index fossil

Culture area concept

maps of different areas that were associated with different cultures

Features

non-portable artifacts

Lewis Henry Morgan

observed communities - Iroquois created phrase-work of how to categorize "people"

Which specialized field of archaeology study includes the microscopic approaches of palynology and phytolith analysis?

paleoethnobotany

Diet

pattern of food consumption over time

sites

places where artifacts, ecofacts, and features are found

Which radiometric dating method can directly date volcanic rock or ash greater than 100,000 years old, and has been essential for dating major events in hominid evolution in Africa?

potassium argon dating

Where did archaeology come from?

ppl (arch bishop usher) wanted to go back to where the greeks were, began looking at how

What school of archaeological thought critiqued cultural history and emphasized the scientific method, including deductive reasoning, hypothesis testing, and quantitative data?

processualism

What three steps of plant domestication result in desirable traits like high caloric yield, easy accessibility of edible portions, and synchronous ripening?

propagation, cultivation, harvesting

What term describes the vertical and horizontal location of an artifact or feature?

provenience

Culture History

research and teaching society for ancestral heritage and for the advancement and preservation of German cultural monuments

What is scientific method in Processual archaeology

research design over data accumulation deduction and hypothesis testing over induction quantitative data over qualitative data archaeology as an anthropology not a history

Science vs Scientism

scientism: an exaggerated and misguided trust in the methods of science to yield absolute truth

What types of samples include foraminafera and oxygen ratios, which can reveal how glaciated and how stormy the oceans were in the past?

sea and ice cores

What dating method produces battleship curves, which assume the popularity of artifact styles predictably wax and wane over time?

seriation

What is the archaeological record?

sites, parts of sites (tombs, houses), pieces in sites (bowls, cups, ceramics) all physical evidence of past human society

Why do archaeologists study food?

something everyone does food quest is a part of everyones life offers lessons about food that resonate with present day challenges

Principles of Relative Dating

stratigraphy law of superposition shared material culture to identify discrete cultures (like goes with like) sometimes identifying patterns of temporal significance

cuisine

style of cooking and eating in particular to a cultural setting

At the end of an excavation, archaeologists usually throw a date penny into their units to establish the date when the unit was backfilled. What latin phrase describes this date?

terminus post quem

Ubiquity

the proportion of the samples that contain a plant relative to the total # of analyzed samples

What is archaeology?

the study of cultural continuity and change using the material remains of past human behavior

stratigraphy

the study of deposition of geological or cultural material of layers (strata)

What artifact, discovered by Jacques Boucher de Perthes in 1836 called into question the biblical timeline of this history of the earth?

thunder stones // archueleon hand axes

What type of archaeological evidence is defined as a place associated with the cultural practices or beliefs of a living community that are rooted in that communities history and are important to maintaining its cultural identity?

traditional cultural properties

Association

what else is found with the artifact

subsistence

what people extract from environment to survive

What specialized archaeological field is the study of the past human use of animals?

zooarchaeology

James Hutton

1726-1797 geology begins to take a stance in archaeology turning point - no more biblical framing

William Stukeley

British antiquarian and Stone hedge scholar studied local artifacts, and made nationalistic pride

What term describes things that are meaningful from the point of view of those within a given culture

Emic

Emic vs Etic

Emic - describes things that are meaningful from the point of view of those within a culture Etic - describes things that are meaningful from the point of view of those outside a culture

Tetto

First indigenous archaeologist

A.V. Kidder

Founder of Anthropological Archaeology. worked with living indigenous people looks at everything about everyone made connection between those living and this ancient Pueblo architecture

Not including the anthropocene, during what two geological epochs has our species, Homo sapiens, lived on earth?

Holocene and Pleistocene

What are the four-fields of anthropology?

Sociocultural Biological LInguistic Archaeology. *culture unifies the four*

Types of Material Culture

Technomic - function/job Sociotechnis - way it reflects the groups identity idiotechnic - symbolism, reflecting ideas of superiors

Archaeologists rely on several geological principles, including the idea that processes on earth today also operated in the past. What is the name of this principle?

Uniformitarianism

Midden

a collection of trash

What four stages describe the life history of an artifact, from its earliest engagement with people to its entry into the record?

acquisition, manufacture, use, discard

Archaeology of adaptation

adaptive perspective emphasizing jaw technology, ecology, demography, and economics define human behavior

Cabinets of curiosity

age of exploration, encountering new things people brought back pieces of what they find created collections of it to show off

in what region did the transition from the Medieval Warm Period to the Little Ice Age make maize agriculture untenable, as evidenced from the ward site and the Katie Griffith site?

ancient southern Appalachian environment