ANT 2140

Where is the "archaeological record"?

It includes phenomena both above and below the ground surface It is all around humans, forming the physical medium or reality in which they live

According to the video, why was archaeologist Vere Gordon Childe's notion of a "neolithic revolution" or "farming revolution" later criticised?

It seems to imply a progressionist view of human history, as if a farming way of life is an inevitable advance over hunting and gathering

What was so important about the Three-Age System when it was developed?

It was a way to arrange archaeological materials in relative time, in the absence of documentary evidence

According to the video, what was so important about finding ochre mineral at Blombos Cave?

It was used as a colored paint, suggesting symbolic meanings could have been communicated, which is a modern human behavior

According to the reading, what is the oldest known site of human habitation in Australia?

Madjedbebe

What is the technical term for the physical medium in which archaeological materials are found?

Matrix

What is the relationship of Morgan's 3 stages of cultural evolution to Thomsen's Three-Age System?

Morgan purposely devised his scheme to complement Thomsen's, hoping that archaeologists could thereby find material evidence of "savage state cultures

What major cultural group provides evidence for the early transition from foraging to farming cereal grains in the Fertile Crescent?

Natufian

Which archaeologist classified similar artifacts into types, such that artifacts within a type could be cross dated?

Oscar Montelius

How did archaeology contribute to the 19th century view of human history as propelled by constant technological progress?

19th century labels for the "ages" of humankind were based in the assumption that technology became more sophisticated over time

How did the author of the reading characterize the "Anthropocene"?

A new geological epoch proposed to mark how human practices have irreversibly changed the earth

What is the earliest stone tool technology that has been found outside of Africa?

Acheulean

Which statement most fully explains how archaeology can be relevant to our contemporary lives?

Archaeology is relevant because it is concerned with the present as well as the past

Where and what group had the largest known land empire based on a herding economy?

Central Asia - the Mongols

Which of the following is NOT considered and influential Antiquarian?

Charles Darwin

Which of these paired names do NOT go together in archaeology's history?

Childe and Schiemann

Why was the "neolithic revolution" important?

Childe called it a "revolution" because it started a historical trajectory of increasing societal complexity, allowing for the development of civilization

What is the technical term for the archaeological remains of a single occupation or use of a site?

Component

Which radiometric dating technique was used on the fossil hominin skull found by Mary Leakey in 1959, and how?

Potassium-Argon could date the volcanic deposits that separated the strata that contained fossils

Which major dating technique is the most useful for the Holocene Period (after the last ice age)?

Radiocarbon (Carbon 14)

According to the pottery video, which of the following is NOT a typical function of clay vessels?

Smelting

Which of these was NOT a major stimulus for change in archaeology as a science in the 20th century?

Continued refinement of the 19th century theories of universal cultural evolution to better reveal how some cultures progress over others

Why was the Raymond Dart's Identification of the "Taung Child" as a new bipedal primate species not accepted in the early 1920s?

Conventional wisdom, based on 19th century fossil finds, was that humans evolved in Asia or Europe, not Africa

Why is the concept of stratification and stratigraphic excavation important in archaeology?

Stratification is the succession of individual layers of deposits, providing information on site formation Using the Principle of Superposition, archaeologists can determine the relative dates of a site's strata and thus the materials they contain

The observation that there were thousands of earthen mounds in Eastern North America gave rise to what popular Romantic notion in the US?

The Myth of the Moundbuilders

How were the 1920s excavations of King Tut and Ur in Mesopotamia the same or different?

The Ur excavations were directed towards reconstructing daily life, not royal death treatment

What is an "archaeological imagination?"

The ability to identify a material phenomenon as originating in the past, even as it exists in the present

All of the statements below about the "archaeological record" are true EXCEPT

The archaeological record refers to peoples of the past, no younger than at least 50 years ago

What major problems and challenges confront archaeology in the 20th into the 21st centuries?

The high rate of destruction of archaeological sites and materials

What are the advantages of using subsurface techniques to locate sites?

They are non-destructive and can locate remains difficult to see from the air or the ground surface

How did European observations of peoples elsewhere in the world lead them to change their understanding of their own European history?

They realized that their ancestors had once used primitive stone tools like those in America, but the Europeans believed they had changed and progressed, unlike the Indians

Why did Dr. James Davidson take his field school students to Bulow Plantation?

To gather material evidence of a history of a people left out of history books To teach the students how to detect the presence of people who are now absent

What major international organization is concerned with preserving cultural heritage on a global scale?

UNESCO

The theory that the same slow natural processes observable on earth today also happened in the past is called:

Uniformitarianism

What is distinctive about Clovis type projectile points?

a "flute" or channel runs up the length of the tool from the base these bifacial (2-sided) tools were consistently made in the same shape

What is so special about copper and gold?

all of the other answers are correct

What does the saying "three stones make a wall" really mean in archaeology?

archaeologists must infer the existence of phenomena that cannot be directly observed in the field

How are artifacts and features alike or different?

artifacts and features are both human-made, but only artifacts are portable

How should "technology" appropriately be considered in archaeology (and other disciplines)?

as the art or skill in knowing how to make things

According to the videos, how does potassium-argon dating compare to carbon dating?

both techniques use natural radioactive decay to determine the age of something

According to the video, how did bronze-working seem to change society?

bronze could make more effective edged weapons (swords, daggers), providing advantages to an emerging military leadership

Why were the Skhul Cave and Qafzeh Cave sties in Israel important to research on early humans?

buried Homo sapiens individuals showed that modern humans had left Africa at least 100,000 years ago

Oldowan Industry tools can best be described as

choppers, knives, and scrapers, most likely for butchering animals

How do domesticated animals compare to their wild (ancestral) counterparts?

domesticates are typically smaller than their wild counterparts

When excavation is over, responsible archaeologists are expected to do all these tasks EXCEPT:

fence the archaeological site to prevent people or animals from falling into open excavation pits

The general act of finding and assessing archaeological sites is called

field survey

Which of the following are NOT microscopic materials used to assess the environment or subsistence practices?

fish scales

The search for archaeological sites by "remote sensing" includes

geophysical or subsurface techniques

According to the video, which technique finds features under the earth's surface using sound waves?

ground penetrating radar

Which of the following is an example of a reductive (not additive) technology?

ground stone tool-making

Compared to the culture historians, what did the "new" or processual archaeologists want to know about artifacts?

how they were made and how they functioned

According to the reading, what is the basic theory of entanglement?

humans depend on things that depend on humans and other things

Why did archaeologist Carl Knappett say all humans have been cyborgs?

humans have always used tools to extend their bodily capacities

What does it mean to say that "archaeology is a non-repeatable experiment"?

it acknowledges the fact that archaeological sites are finite, non-renewable resources

According to the video, why is the notion of palimpsest useful to archaeologists?

it encourages archaeologists to investigate the history of sites via their material traces

Why are professional archaeologists so concerned with the context of archaeological materials in the ground?

it is essential for interpreting their relationships to each other and thus how the site was formed

What is the principal advantage of excavating at a site, as opposed to foregoing excavation?

it is the only way to determine formation processes that created the stratification of a site

What is "presentism", and is it a problem, or is it useful?

it presumes the present is the standard against which to judge the past, and is a bias that archaeologists and historians need to be aware of

Why does the Lake Mungo site stand out among the earliest archaeological sites in Australia?

it provides evidence for intentional burials, including the use of red ochre on the bodies

Pastoralism is still important today for all of these reasons EXCEPT

livestock herding practices do not contribute to climate change, unlike agricultural practices

What do archaeologists, like other scientists, do, at the most basic level?

look for patterns in the physical world - in their case, patterns related to human experiences

How do humans make or change themselves when they make artifacts?

making artifacts creates or affirms special social statuses for some craftsmen repetitive actions of making objects enhances certain motor skills and muscle memory

According to the reading assignment, what is the state of "theoretical" archaeology today?

many different theories are now available for archaeologists to use

Why have there been multiple theories guiding archaeological research, instead of just one?

over the history of archaeology new explanatory theories have been adopted to overcome the limitations of existing ones

In the ethnoarchaeology video about East Africa, it was explained that

pastoral (herding) peoples need pottery vessels especially during dry periods to cook food to supplement their diet

According to the reading, why is it important to consider the individual properties of materials when making something out of them?

people try to distinguish advantageous and disadvantageous properties of a material, such as stone or clay, when making or using something only some of the potential properties of a material will be actualized

Which of the following is NOT a pyrotechnology?

percussion for stone tools

Which of the following is NOT used to help interpret artifact manufacture and use?

radiocarbon dating

According to the reading, what is one of the more useful, but often overlooked, applications for experimental archaeology?

recreating agricultural technologies from the past that might be more productive than modern farming methods

Early farmers of China domesticated which of the following species?

rice, millet, chickens, pigs

According to the video, what is the advantage of soft-hammer percussion to make stone tools?

soft hammers remove smaller flakes around the edges of tools, to shape or sharpen them

What is the principal reason why excavation is less frequent in archaeology today?

strong ethical considerations weigh benefits of excavation against the disadvantage of site destruction

Which of the following is an important secondary source of information on livelihoods?

technologies of cultivation and culinary practices

According to the reading, which of the following is NOT a potential beginning of the Anthropocene?

the evolution of the first bipedal human ancestors

Why was the Ozette site in Washington state so significant?

the habitat was so rich in wild resources that the foragers could settle there year-round

According to the video, which natural phenomenon does a potassium-argon date depend on?

the natural decay of radioactive potassium to argon gas

According to the video, how do archaeologists, use the various subsurface or geophysical techniques to locate sites?

the operator take continuous measurements over the ground surface, looking for anomalies in the instrument readout

What is the time limit for "the past" as investigated by archaeologists?

the span of human, including hominin (pre-modern human) existance

Which of the following is NOT among the independent lines of evidence that need to be correlated to interpret the evolutionary development of modern humans in Africa:

the study of language families over time, as languages spread and changed

What evidence from early stone artifacts indicates cognitive abilities to plan activities ahead of time?

the tools were often made of non-local stone, carried away from its source location to be used later

According to the reading that reviewed evidence for early peopling in North America, the growing consensus is that

there is well accepted archaeological and genetic evidence for humans in North America by about 15,500 BP

When early humans first left Africa, about 2 million years ago,...

they gradually moved into Europe and Asia, following available plant and animal resources

What has been an unexpected result of archaeologists experimentally replicating tools?

they pay more attention to the advantageous and disadvantageous properties of materials themselves

Why were the Acheulean tool-makers - before Homo sapiens- called the first flintknappers?

they were able to create a core tool in a specific shape over and over again

According to the video on ceramic composition, to what other occupation were potters (pottery makers) compared?

to bakers (and engineers), because they know how to mix the correct ingredients in the right amount and bake them in the proper way

According to the video, why might archaeologists want to carefully analyze the inner surfaces of pottery vessels?

to identify ant food residues that might still be present

What was important about the Levallois tool industry?

tools were made from flakes struck off from specially prepared cores, showing more planning

According to the reading, which of the following is NOT an absolute dating technique?

typology (type series)

According to the reading, which of the following are part of the "Grand Challenges for Archaeology"?

understanding how cultural processes over time affect and are affected by environmental processes

According to the video, the Mary Rose, the flagship of King Henry VIII that sank in the English Channel in 1545...

was fairly well preserved by being under water, and was eventually lifted out and put on display

We refer to the "first archaeologists" as individuals who

were inspired by the Age of Reason and the Scientific Revolution to record their observations, classify their findings, and reach conclusions based on their data

What are the earliest known species of domesticated plant and domesticated animal in all of the world?

wheat and dogs

Why is "scale" an important concern in archaeological (and other scientific) investigations?

whether an empirical phenomenon can even be observed depends on its spatial or temporal scale

Who finally determined which people had erected the earthen mounds in the eastern US?

Cyrus Thomas, hired by the Smithsonian as mandated by the US congress to solve the problem

In what major area are the period names Paleolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic most used?

Europe

Why is Thomas Jefferson sometimes called the "Father of American Archaeology"?

He systematically excavated an earthen mound on his estate and recorded his observations

German businessman Heinrich Schliemann funded excavations at what ancient site in Turkey?

Hissarlik

Why are humans uniquely referred to as a "self-made species"?

Humans use their brains and appendages to make the things needed to adapt to natural environments, changing themselves culturally and biologically to fit different habitats

Professional archaeology in the United States and Europe developed in many similar ways at about the same time, but what is a key difference between them?

In the US archaeologists were studying the past of another people, not their own past

Why did most 19th century scholars reject the notion that American Indians had built the mounds and earthworks they encountered in the Eastern US?

Indians were considered too primitive to have made the mounds and the fine objects they contained