Anthropology Chapter 4: Researching Human Beings and Their Past

When anthropologists go into the field

(all of the above), go with the flow of everyday life, change the focus of their question to fit what they are seeing, have a set of questions that they want to ask and have answered

Among cultural anthropologists, fieldwork involves

(all of the answers are correct) learning the local language, becoming involved in people's lives, spending a significant amount of time in the field

Geographical information systems (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 the 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.

Haplotype

A group of distinctive inherited genes.

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 texts.

Breccia

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

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 supposed to speak.

Absolute dating (or chronometric dating)

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

Chronometric dating

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

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.

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

False

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

False

Geomorphologists

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

Haplogroups

Lineages that share certain haplotypes.

Fieldwork

Long-term immersion in a community, normally involving first-hand 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.

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

Participant

Habitation Sites

Places where people lived at some time in the past.

Alluvial soil

Rich, fine-grained soils deposited by rivers and streams.

Anthropological linguistics

The branch of anthropology that studies human beings through their languages.

Headnotes

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

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 people's relationships with and perceptions of each other.

Participant observation

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.

Paleoethnobotany

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

Surface collection

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

Thermoluminescence dating

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

Tree-ring dating (or 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.

Which locations would you likely find an anthropologist doing fieldwork?

a factory, NY city, mental institution, neighborhood, the amazon (all of the above)

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.

Test pit

a preliminary excavation, usually of a single 1 meter by 1 meter square (or half meter square) to see if artifactual 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.

Which project would likely require the assistance of a geomorphologist?

a study of landscape change

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

a study of low-income neighborhood where a toxic waste dump is located

Remote sensing techniques are

a way to correlate magnetic and locational data

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

action research

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

anthropologist would like to study the specific location, the contents of the funerary site, and which civilization is tied to the site

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.

Cultural anthropologists do research by

building personal relationships over a long period

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

calcite dating on the teeth

Chronometric dating techniques used by archaeologists help establish

chronology

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

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

false

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

field work

_____________ 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

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

head notes

Anthropologists often disguise the identity of their ______________.

informants

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

interview

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

jigsaw puzzles with most pieces missing

Residue analysis

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

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

open ended

What kind of data do anthropologists gather from doing interviews?

opinions on upcoming elections, details about court cases life, histories terms for biological species, all of the above

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 ________________.

paleoethnobotany

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

participant observation

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

participant observation

Use-wear

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

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), remote-sensing

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

reasons that they are doing their research

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

seriation

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.

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

steambeds

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

survey interview

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

test pits

Stratigraphy

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

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

to connect the ancient remains found at the site to contemporary indigenous groups in the area and establish genetic continuity

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

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

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

Using life history interviews, researchers are able to

understand how a persons age affects his or her role in the community

A word that best describes participant observation is

unstructured

The comparative method

uses data from many different societies

Interglacials

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