Archaeology Mid Term Study
Jens Jacob Asmussen Worsaae
First "professional" archaeologist • Introduced inquiry into archaeology: excavation in order to answer questions - Demonstrated existence of middens, refuse deposits resulting from human activities, generally consisting of sediment - Documented potsherds, fragments of pottery Native of Denmark (1821-1885), fascinated by artifacts Received informal training from Christian Thomsen (1788-1865) who devised the typological scheme of Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age.
The Law of Superposition
In any pile of sedimentary rocks that have not been disturbed by folding or overturning, each bed is older than the layers above and younger than the layers below; also known as Steno's Law.
hominins
Mary Leakey (1913-1996) found evidence of members of the evolutionary line that contains humans and our early bipedal ancestors.
archaeological context
Once artifacts enter the ground, they are part of the __________, where they can continue to be affected by human action, but where they also are affected by natural processes.
Lewis R. Binford
Recognized need to: - address cultural evolution, ecology, and social organization - make use of scientific methods and quantitative techniques - scrutinize firsthand the operation of disappearing cultural adaptations
Principle of uniformitarianism
The principle asserting that the processes now operating to modify the earth's surface are the same processes that operated long ago in the geological past.
Sipapu
a Hopi word that loosely translates as "place of emergence." The original sipapu is the place where the Hopi are said to have emerged into this world from the underworld. Sipapus are also small pits in kivas through which communication with the supernatural world takes place.
Kiva
a Pueblo ceremonial structure that is usually round (but may be square or rectangular) and semi-subterranean.
type
a class of archaeological artifacts defined by a consistent clustering of attributes
Functional types
a class of artifacts that performed the same function, these may or may not be temporal and/or morphological types. Reflect how objects were used in the past. Often crosscut morphological and temporal types.
Absolute date
a date expressed as specific units of scientific measurement, such as days, years, centuries, or millennia; absolute determinations attempting to pinpoint a discrete, known interval of time.
Morphological type
a descriptive grouping of artifacts whose focus is on similarity rather than function or chronological significance. - Purely descriptive - No function ascribed, no chronological significance - No set rules for creating these types, although basic raw material (pottery, stone, shell, bone) normally serves as the first criterion
Total station
a device that use a beam of light bounced off a prism to determine an artifact's provenience and accurate to millimeters.
Dosimeter
a device to measure the amount of gamma radiation emitted by sediments. Often a short length of pure copper tubing filled with calcium sulfate, it is normally buried in a stratum for a year to record the annual dose of radiation.
datum point
a fixed reference used to keep control on an excavation
Pleistocene
a geological period from 1.8 million to 10,000 years ago, which was characterized by multiple periods of extensive glaciation.
Homo erectus
a hominin who lived in Africa, Asia, and Europe between 2 million and 500,000 years ago. These hominins walked upright, made simple stone tools, and may have used fire.
B horizon
a layer found below the A horizon, where clays accumulate that are transported downward by water.
C horizon
a layer found below the B horizon that consists of the unaltered or slightly altered parent material; below the C horizon is bedrock.
Period
a length of time distinguished by particular items of material culture, such as house form, pottery, or subsistence. Periods change over time Knowing how and when material culture changed over time and space is a first step toward explaining why those changes occurred.
Accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS)
a method of radiocarbon dating Counts the proportion of carbon isotopes directly (rather than using the indirect Geiger counter method) Thereby dramatically reducing the quantity of datable material required.
Temporal type
a morphological type that has temporal significance; Also known as time-marker or index fossil Demonstrable and specific chronological meaning within a particular region.
Faunalturbation
a natural formation process in which animals, from large game to earthworms, affect the distribution of material within an archaeological site.
Graviturbation
a natural formation process in which artifacts are moved downslope through gravity, sometimes assisted by precipitation runof
Cryoturbation
a natural formation process in which freeze/thaw activity in a soil pushes larger artifacts to the surface of a site.
Floralturbation
a natural formation process in which trees and plants affect the distribution of artifacts within an archaeological site.
Argilliturbation
a natural formation process in which wet/dry cycles in clay-rich soils push artifacts upward as the sediment swells and then moves them down as cracks form during dry cycles.
Old wood problem
a potential problem with radiocarbon (tree-ring) dating in which old wood has been scavenged and reused in a later archaeological site; The resulting date is not a true age of the associated human activity.
Archaeological culture
a regional manifestation within a culture area marked by a particular set of material culture traits.
Seriation
a relative dating method that orders artifacts based on the assumption that one cultural style slowly replaces an earlier style over time;
Water screening
a sieving process in which deposit is placed in a screen and the matrix washed away with hoses;
stratigraphy
a site's physical structure produced by the deposition of geological and/or cultural sediments into layers, or strata, to reveal age and original inhabitants
Test excavation
a small initial excavation to determine a site's potential for answering a research question.
Mean ceramic date
a statistical technique for combining the median age of manufacture for temporally significant pottery types to estimate the age of a feature or site.
Optically stimulated luminescence
a trapped charge dating technique used to date sediments; The age is the time elapsed between the last time a few moments exposure to sunlight reset the clock to zero and the present.
Phase
an archaeological construct possession traits sufficiently characteristic to distinguish it from other units similarly conceived; Spatially limited to roughly a locality or region and chronologically limited to the briefest interval of time possible. Phases are defined by temporal types, items of material culture that show patterned changes over time.
Marker bed
an easily identified geologic layer whose age has been independently confirmed at numerous locations and whose presence can therefore be used to date archaeological and geological sediments.
Attribute
an individual characteristic that distinguishes one artifact from another on the basis of size, surface texture, form, material, method of manufacture or design pattern.
Formal analogies
analogies justified by similarities in the formal attributes of archaeological and ethnographic objects and features; Rely upon similarities in "form." e.g. stone projectile points are assumed to be projectile points because they are similar to the stone tips found on the spears and arrows of many ethnographically known peoples.
Relational analogies
analogies justified on the basis of close cultural continuity between the archaeological and ethnographic cases or similarity in general cultural form; Must be "related" in some way. e.g. the archaeological and ethnographical case both come from societies with similar settlement systems, economies, or environments (such as, both are desert-adapted hunting and gathering societies)
artifacts
any moveable object that has been used, modified, or manufactured by humans, e.g. stone, bone, metal tools, beads, ornaments, artwork, religious and sacred items.
Geoarchaeology
applies the concepts and methods of the geosciences to archaeological research. • Objectives: • Place sites and artifacts in a context through the application of stratigraphic principles and dating techniques.
component
archaeological constructs consisting of a stratum or set of strata that are presumed to be culturally homogeneous. A set of components from various sites in a region will make up a phase
Arbitrary levels
basic vertical subdivisions of an excavation square. • They are used only when recognizable ―natural strata are lacking and when natural strata are more than 10cm.
assemblage
collections of artifacts of one or several classes of materials (stone tools, ceramics, b ones) that comes from a defined context
Two crucial characteristics of a good typology
1. Minimize the differences within each created type and maximize the differences between each type. 2. The typology must be objective and explicit. This means that the result should be replicable by any trained observer.
Gertrude Caton-Thompson
Advanced archaeology intellectually Studied settlement patterns: excavated village site in Egypt Conducted interdisciplinary work: surveyed the northern Fayum Desert in Egypt, working with a geologist Reconstructed the sequence of settlements Established their relationship to ancient lake levels Established the importance of site stratigraphy
New Archaeology
An approach that arose in the 1960s, emphasizing the understanding of underlying cultural processes and the use of the scientific method; today is sometimes called processual archaeology
Thermoluminescence
A trapped charge dating technique used on ceramics and burned stone artifacts anything mineral that has been heated to more than 500° C.
Electron spin resonance (ESR)
A trapped charge dating technique used to date tooth enamel and burned stone tools; It can date teeth that are beyond the range of radiocarbon dating.
Argon-argon dating
High-precision method for estimating the relative quantities of argon-39 to argon-40 gas; Used to date volcanic ashes between 500,000 and several million years old.
Relative date
dates expressed relative to one another(for instance, earlier, later, more recent) instead of in absolute terms.
Living floors
distinct buried surfaces where people lived.
Flute
distinctive channel on the faces of Folsom and Clovis projectile points formed by removal of one or more flakes from the point's base.
Cultural anthropology
emphasizes nonbiological aspects: the learned social, linguistic, technological, and familial behaviors of humans.
Experimental archaeology
experiments designed to determine the archaeological correlates of ancient behavior; may overlap with both ethnoarchaeology and taphonomy.
Culture history
explains differences or changes over time in artifact frequencies by positing the diffusion of ideas between neighboring cultures or the migration of a people who had different mental templates for artifact styles.
De Vries effects
fluctuations in the calibration curve produced by variations in the atmosphere's carbon-14 content; These can cause radiocarbon dates to calibrate to more than one calendar age. Calibration addresses the problem that radio- carbon years are not the same as calendar years.
Linguistic anthropology
focuses on human language: its diversity in grammar, syntax, and lexicon; its historical development; and its relation to a culture's perception of the world.
Trapped charge dating
forms of dating that rely on the fact that electrons become trapped in minerals' crystal lattices as a function of background radiation. The age of the specimen is the total radiation received divided by the annual dose of radiation.
In situ
from Latin, meaning "in position"' the place where an artifact, ecofact, or feature was found during survey or excavation.
Cultural depositional processes
human behaviors by which artifacts enter the archaeological record, including discard, loss, caching and ritual interment. 1. Discard - Everything eventually breaks or wears out and is discarded. 2. Loss - Example: An arrow that misses its target or a pot left at a camp. 3. Caching - Some items are intentionally left behind. 4. Ritual - Example: grave goods.
Reclamation processes
human behaviors that result in artifacts moving from the archaeological context back to the systemic context, as in scavenging beams from an abandoned structure to use them in a new one.
Cultural disturbance processes
human behaviors that modify artifacts in their archaeological context, as in the digging of pits, hearths, canals, and houses.
Reuse process
human behaviors that recycle and reuse artifacts before they enter the archaeological record.
systemic context
is a living behavioral system wherein artifacts are part of the ongoing system of manufacture, use, reuse, and discard.
Eolian sediments
materials transported and accumulated by wind (for example, dunes.)
Strata (singular stratum)
more or less homogeneous or gradational material visually separable from other levels by a discrete change in the character of the material- texture, compactness, color, rock, organic content- and/or by a sharp break in the nature of the deposition.
Analogy
noting similarities between two entities and inferring from that similarity that an additional attribute of one (the ethnographic case) is also true of the other (the archaeological case.)
Sedimentary rock
rock formed when the weathered products of preexisting rocks have been transported by and deposited in water and are turned once again to stone.
Reservoir effect
samples from organisms that took in carbon from a source that was depleted of or enriched in carbon-14 relative to the atmosphere may return ages that are considerably older or younger than they actually are.
Soil
sediments that have undergone in situ chemical and mechanical alteration.
Alluvial sediments
sediments transported by flowing water.
Time markers
similar to index fossils in geology, artifact forms that research shows to be diagnostic of a particular period of time.
Antiquarian
someone who studied antiquities (ancient objects) largely for the sake of the objects themselves, not to understand the people or culture that produced them.
Classical archaeology
the branch of archaeology that studies the "classical studies," particularly ancient Greece and Rome, and the Near East.
Terminus Post Quem Dating (TPQ)
the date after which a stratum or feature must have been deposited or created.
Space-time systematics
the delineation of patterns in material culture through time and space.
Geomorphology
the geological study of landforms and landscapes, including soils, rivers, hills, sand dunes, glacial deposits, and marshes.
Matrix sorting
the hand sorting of processed bulk soil for minute artifacts and ecofacts.
site formation
the human and natural actions that work together to create an archaeological site.
index fossil concept
the idea that strata containing similar fossil assemblages are of similar age.
Faunal remains
the interpretation of animal bones.
provenience
the location relative to a system of spatial data collection, is the most important thing about the artifact.
Deep time
the recognition that life was far more ancient than recognized by biblical scholars and that human culture had evolved over time.
Context
the relationship of an artifact, ecofact, or feature to other artifacts, features, and geological strata in a site.
Reverse stratigraphy
the result when sediment is unearthed by human or natural actions and moved elsewhere in such a way that the latest material is deposited on the bottom of the new sediment and progressively earlier material is deposited higher and higher in the stratigraphy.
Natural levels
the site's strata which are more or less homogeneous, visually separable from other levels by a change in texture, color, rock, or organic content.
Photosynthetic pathways
the specific chemical process through which plants metabolize carbon. The three major pathways discriminate against carbon-13 in different ways; therefore, similarly aged plants that use different pathways can produce different radiocarbon ages.
Anthropology
the study of all aspects of humankind - biological, cultural, and linguistic; extant and extinct- employing a holistic, comparative approach and the concept of culture.
Ethnoarchaeology
the study of contemporary peoples to determine how human behavior is translated into the archaeological record. Study living societies, observing artifacts, features, and material remains while they still exist in their systemic, behavioral contexts. Ethnoarchaeology links human behavior with archaeologically observable material remains.
Taphonomy
the study of how natural processes become part of the fossil record; in archaeology, it primarily refers to the study of how natural processes produce patterning in archaeological data.
Typology
the systematic arrangement of material culture into types.
Half-life
the time required for half of the carbon- 14 available in an organic sample to decay;
A horizon
the upper part of a soil, where active organic and mechanical decomposition of geological and organic material occurs.
Dendrochronology
the use of annual growth rings in trees to assign calendar ages to ancient wood samples.
Flotation
the use of fluid suspension to recover burned plant remains and bone fragments from archaeological sites
Formation processes
the ways in which human behaviors and natural actions operate to produce the archaeological record.
Biological anthropology
views humans as biological organisms; also known as physical anthropology.
Alfred Vincent Kidder
• Founder of Anthropological Archaeology • Using potsherds, explained how ceramic decoration could help determine cultural relationships among various prehistoric groups. Established archaeology as "the branch of anthropology which deals with prehistoric peoples" and the ultimate objective to move from things to people. - American Southwest Pecos Pueblo, New Mexico - Maya ruins of Central America
