Archaeology & The Rise Of Human Culture Test 1

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Jean-Francois Champollion

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French scholar and linguist that deciphered the Rosetta Stone in 1822. Account of the Recent Discoveries in Hieroglyphic Literature and Egyptian Antiquities 1823.

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Henry Maine

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English jurist and historian. Pioneer in the historical and comparative study of institutions, he viewed the history of laws as the best way of studying the history of civilization. Believed that society progressed from custom to law, with Roman law demonstrating the intermediate stage between ancient usage and modern British law. Huge influence on the study of the history of jurisprudence. Ancient Law 1861.

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Herbert Spencer

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English philosopher. Developed an all-embracing conception of evolution as the progressive development of the physical world, biological organisms, the human mind, and human culture and societies. Main interests: evolution, positivism, laissez-faire, utilitarianism
Notable ideas: Social Darwinism, Survival of the fittest.

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Lewis Henry Morgan

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American anthropologist and social theorist. Known for his work on kinship and social structure, his theories of social evolution, and his ethnography of the Iroquois. Due to his study of kinship, Morgan was an early proponent of the theory that the indigenous peoples of the Americas had migrated from Asia in ancient times. Morgan is the only American social theorist to be cited by Charles Darwin, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud.

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Edward B. Tyler

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English anthropologist. Considered a representative of cultural evolutionism. In his works Primitive culture and Anthropology, he defined the context of scientific study of anthropology, based on the evolutionary theories of Charles Lyell. He believed that there was a functional basis for the development of society and religion, which he determined was universal. He reintroduced the term animism into common use.

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Franz Boas

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German American anthropologist and a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the "Father of American Anthropology." He is famed for applying the scientific method to the study of human cultures and societies, a field which was previously based on the formulation of grand theories around anecdotal knowledge.

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Leslie White

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American anthropologist known for his advocacy of theories of cultural evolution, sociocultural evolution, and especially neoevolutionism, and for his role in creating the department of anthropology at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. He was president of the American Anthropological Association (1964).

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Julian Steward

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American anthropologist best known for his role in developing "the concept and method" of cultural ecology, as well as a scientific theory of culture change.

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Karl Wittfogel

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German-American historian and sinologist. Best known for his "hydraulic hypothesis;" he thought that the development of Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, China and Pre-columbian societies had been blocked because of the need to irrigate vast surfaces for agriculture. Water control and distribution had spawned authoritarian centralized empires and sprawling bureaucracies, both deeply hostile to change. Western Europe was free of such limitations and thus could rise, alone.

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Charles Darwin

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English naturalist who realized that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestors, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection. On the Origin of the Species 1859.

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Elman Service

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American cultural anthropologist. Researched Latin American Indian ethnology, cultural evolution, and theory and method in ethnology. Defined four classifications of the stages of social evolution which are also the four levels of political organizations: hunter-gatherer, tribe, chiefdom, and state.

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Marshall Sahlins

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American anthropologist. Work focused on demonstrating the power that culture has to shape people's perceptions and actions. He has been particularly concerned to demonstrate that culture has a unique power to motivate people that is not derived from biology. Evolution and Culture (1960) he touched the areas of cultural evolution and neoevolutionism. He divided the evolution of societies into 'general' and 'specific'. General evolution is the tendency of cultural and social systems to increase in complexity, organization and adaptiveness to environment. However, as the various cultures are not isolated, there is interaction and a diffusion of their qualities (like technological inventions). This leads cultures to develop in different ways (specific evolution), as various elements are introduced to them in different combination and on different stages of evolution.

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Morgan H. Fried

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American anthropologist Argued that civilization must be gained through a series of steps, beginning with egalitarian societies, and then ranked societies, then social stratification and finally the state.

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Richerson, Boyd, and Bettinger

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Proponents of cultural evolution; research: Holocene/Pleistocene. "If we assume that useful inventions are rare, then small isolated societies will have low rates of invention. In small populations, complex technology will tend to be lost as a result of random loss or incomplete transmission (the Tasmanian effect). Large populations have more inventors and are more resistant to loss by chance. If human populations can grow freely, then a population-technology-population positive feedback should occur such that human societies reach a stable growth path on which the rate of growth of technology is limited by the rate of invention." Cultural Innovation and Demographic Change 2007.

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V. Gordon Childe

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Australian philologist, later specialized in archaeology. Perhaps best known for his excavation of the unique Neolithic site of Skara Brae in Orkney and for his Marxist views which influenced his thinking about prehistory. He is also credited with coining the terms "Neolithic Revolution" and "Urban Revolution". He was one of the great archaeological synthesizers attempting to place his discoveries inside a theory of prehistoric development on a wider European and world scale.

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Holocene

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Holocene started approximately 12,000 years BP, ca.10,000 BCE. The period follows the Wisconsin glaciation (also known as the Baltic-Scandinavian Ice Age or the Weichsel glacial). The Holocene can be subdivided into five time intervals, or chronozones, based on climatic fluctuations:
* Preboreal (10 ka – 9 ka),
* Boreal (9 ka – 8 ka),
* Atlantic (8 ka – 5 ka),
* Subboreal (5 ka – 2.5 ka) and
* Subatlantic (2.5 ka – present).

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Pleistocene

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Epoch from 2.5 mya to 12,000 years BP covering the world's recent period of repeated glaciations. Pleistocene's overall climate could be characterized as a continuous El Niño. Pleistocene climate was marked by repeated glacial cycles where continental glaciers pushed to the 40th parallel in some places. It is estimated that, at maximum glacial extent, 30% of the Earth's surface was covered by ice.

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Natufian Period

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Mesolithic culture of the Southern Levant, beginning approximately 12,000 BCE (14,000 BP), marks the phase of cultural development in which local humans started to live in dwellings built on stone foundations -- for at least a portion of each year -- and began systematically to process "hard-work" vegetal resources such as cereals and legumes as foodstuffs.

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Ubaid Period

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(ca. 5300 to 4000 BC) is a prehistoric period of Mesopotamia. Culture duration beginning before 5300 BC and lasting until the beginning of the Uruk period, c. 4000 BC. The invention of the wheel and the beginning of the Chalcolithic period fall into the Ubaid period. Characterized by large village settlements, characterized by multi-roomed rectangular mud-brick houses and the appearance of the first temples of public architecture in Mesopotamia, with a growth of a two tier settlement hierarchy of centralized large sites of more than 10 hectares surrounded by smaller village sites of less than 1 hectare.

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Samarran

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The culture is primarily known by its finely-made pottery decorated against dark-fired backgrounds with stylized figures of animals and birds and geometric designs. This widely-exported type of pottery, one of the first widespread, relatively uniform pottery styles in the Ancient Near East, was first recognized at Samarra. The Samarran Culture was the precursor to the Mesopotamian culture of the Ubaid period.

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Halafian

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The first find of a Neolithic culture, subsequently dubbed the Halaf culture, characterized by glazed pottery painted with geometric and animal designs. Located to the NE of the Hassuna-Samarra Culture. Flourished from about 6100 to 5400 BCE. The Halaf culture was succeeded in northern Mesopotamia by the Ubaid culture.

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Uruk Period

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The Uruk period (ca. 4000 to 3100 BC) existed from the protohistoric Chalcolithic to Early Bronze Age period in the history of Mesopotamia, following the Ubaid period and succeeded by the Jemdet Nasr period. Named after the Sumerian city of Uruk, this period saw the emergence of urban life in Mesopotamia. It was followed by the Sumerian civilization. The late Uruk period (34th to 32nd centuries) saw the gradual emergence of the cuneiform script and corresponds to the Early Bronze Age.

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Agriculture

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The production of food and goods through farming. Agriculture was the key development that led to the rise of human civilization, with the husbandry of domesticated animals and plants (i.e. crops) creating food surpluses that enabled the development of more densely populated and stratified societies.

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Archaeological "data"

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Material: skeletal remains, artifacts, ecofacts, features. Space: site, culture area. Time: relative date, absolute date. Space and time: stratigraphy, LOS, LOA. Context: 3D location, vs. provenience.

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Authority

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Power imposed by superiors upon inferiors either by force of arms (structural authority) or by force of argument (sapiential authority). Usually authority has components of both compulsion and persuasion. For this reason, as used in Roman law authority is differentiated potestas (legal or military power) and imperium (persuasive political rank or standing).

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Autonomy

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The capacity of a rational individual to make an informed, un-coerced decision. Politically, it is the concept of self-governance.

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Carrying Capacity

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Of an environment is the population size of the species that the environment can sustain indefinitely, given the food, habitat, water and other necessities available in the environment. For the human population, more complex variables such as sanitation and medical care are sometimes considered.

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Climate Change Hypotheses

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Suggests that major climatic changes occurring during the terminal part of the Pleistocene were the primary factor in the extinction of the large herbivores.

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Civitas

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A sovereign and independent political unit. Also used to express the condition of Roman citizenship.

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Context

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What space and time mean to an object. An event in time which has been preserved in the archaeological record.

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Domestication

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The process whereby a population of animals or plants, through a process of selection, becomes accustomed to human provision and control. A defining characteristic of domestication is artificial selection by humans. Earliest attempts 11000 BC, by 10000 bottle gourds, by 9000 cereal plants.

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Environmental Circumscription

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Occurs when an area of productive agricultural land is surrounded by a less productive area such as the mountains, desert, or sea. More extensive cultivation would bring severely diminishing returns. If there is no environmental circumscription, then losers in a war can migrate out from the region and settle somewhere else. If there is environmental circumscription, then losers in warfare are forced to submit to their conquerors, because migration is not an option and the populations of the conquered and conqueror are united. The new state organization strives to alleviate the population pressure by increasing the productive capacity of agricultural land through, for instance, more intensive cultivation using irrigation.

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History

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The study of the human past which uses a narrative to examine and analyze the sequence of events, and it often attempts to investigate objectively the patterns of cause and effect that determine events.

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Economic Power

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Can refer to purchasing or bargaining power in a society or economy. In general, those with more power also have more freedom than others and may be able to exploit others in society and/or cause some sort of market failure.

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Egalitarian

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A non-stratified society that has little or no concept of social hierarchy, political or economic status, class, or even permanent leadership. Anthropologists identify egalitarian cultures as "kinship-oriented," because they appear to value social harmony more than wealth or status.

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Generalist

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The opposite of a specialist, a species that can survive in many different places and off of many type of food. Small societies in which all members help with all tasks are generalist societies.

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Environmental Determinism

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The view that the physical environment, rather than social conditions, determines culture. Those who believe this view say that humans are strictly defined by stimulus-response (environment-behavior) and cannot deviate.

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Heterogeneity

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An adjective used to describe an object or system consisting of multiple items having a large number of structural variations. It is the opposite of homogeneous.

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Hierarchical

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An arrangement of items (objects, names, values, categories, etc.) in which classifications are made with regard to rank, importance, seniority, power status or authority. A hierarchy of power is called a power structure.

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Hydraulic Civilization

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A civilization that maintains control over its population by means of controlling the supply of water. The term was coined by the German American historian Karl August Wittfogel.

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Hydroagriculture

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The term used by Karl A. Wittfogel in Oriental Despotism to describe small scale irrigated agriculture. This is contrasted to "hydraulic agriculture", "large scale and government-direct farming" which requires large scale cooperation, and according to him, an opportunity for oppression,

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Inequality

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Any disparity in access to resources or wealth in a society.

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Infrastructure

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the basic physical and organizational structures needed for the operation of a society or enterprise, or the services and facilities necessary for an economy to function.

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Kinship

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A relationship between any entities that share a genealogical origin, through either biological, cultural, or historical descent. In anthropology the kinship system includes people related both by descent and marriage.

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Law of Association

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Items in the same stratigraphic layer are the same age relative to each other.

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Law of Superposition

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Sedimentary layers are deposited in a time sequence, with the oldest on the bottom and the youngest on the top.

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Marxist Explanations

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An explanation that sites the control or ownership of the means of production as the main source of power over others.

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Mobility

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The act of being in motion. Types of mobility include: economic, social, population. *H/G had more mobility than farmers.

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Modernism

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An overall socially progressive trend of thought, that affirms the power of human beings to create, improve, and reshape their environment, with the aid of practical experimentation, scientific knowledge or technology.
Encouraged the re-examination of every aspect of existence, from commerce to philosophy, with the goal of finding that which was 'holding back' progress, and replacing it with new ways of reaching the same end. (Post-Enlightenment)

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Neo-Evolutionism

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Social theory that tries to explain the evolution of societies by drawing on Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and discarding some dogmas of the previous social evolutionism. Concerned with long-term, directional, evolutionary social change and with the regular patterns of development that may be seen in unrelated, widely separated cultures. Theories are based on empirical evidence from fields such as archeology, paleontology, and historiography. It is objective and simply descriptive, eliminating any references to a moral or cultural system of values.

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Oasis Hypothesis

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V. Gordon Childe's theory that portrayed the drying of the climate at the end of the Pleistocene in the Near East as an external factor in early domestication. Both humans and animals and plants would have gathered around the few oases or water sources, and humans would gradually come to control many other species.

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Oriental Despotism

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Despotism based not on force, but on consent. Hence fear cannot be said to be its motive force, instead the power of the despot master feeds upon the servile nature of those enslaved.

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Overpopulation

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A condition where an organism's numbers exceed the carrying capacity of its habitat.

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Political Power

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A type of power held by a group in a society which allows administration of some or all of public resources, including labor and wealth.

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Cultural Evolution

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Early sociocultural evolution theories—the theories of Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer and Lewis Henry Morgan—developed simultaneously but independently of Charles Darwin's works and were popular from the late 19th century to the end of World War I. These 19th-century unilineal evolution theories claimed that societies start out in a primitive state and gradually become more civilized over time, and equated the culture and technology of Western civilization with progress.

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Power/Power Over/Power To

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Power is a measure of an entity's ability to control the environment around itself, including the behavior of other entities.

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Radio Carbon Dating

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Uses the decay of carbon 14 to determine the time of death of an organism.
Range: 50,000 ya - present
Material: Organic remains; charcoal, bone, wood, and shell.
*Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) allows for dating of small samples.

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Redistribution

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In cultural anthropology and sociology, redistribution implies the existence of a strong political center such as kinship-based leadership, which receives and then redistributes subsistence goods according to culturally-specific principles.

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Religion

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A religion is a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, especially when considered as the creation of a supernatural agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs.

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Social Power

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The ability of an actor to change the incentive structures of other actors in order to bring about outcomes.

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Specialists

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Those assigned specific tasks in a community. Ex. potters, hunters, flintknappers, weavers, bakers, etc.

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Stratigraphy

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A branch of geology, studies rock layers and layering (stratification). It is primarily used in the study of sedimentary and layered volcanic rocks; Geological or cultural layering.

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Surplus

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Production that exceeds the needs of the society for which it is being produced, and may be exported or stored for future times.

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Technology

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Deals with human as well as other animal species' usage and knowledge of tools and crafts, and how it affects a species' ability to control and adapt to its natural environment.

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Temple

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A structure reserved for religious or spiritual activities, such as prayer and sacrifice, or analogous rites.

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Trade

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The voluntary exchange of goods, services, or both.

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Urbanism

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A focus on cities and urban areas, their geography, economies, politics, social characteristics, as well as the effects on, and caused by, the built environment.

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Writing

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Writing is all that gives rise to an inscription in general. Considered the representation of language in a textual medium through the use of a set of signs or symbols (known as a writing system). Writing may use abstract characters that represent phonetic elements of speech, as in Indo-European languages, or it may use simplified representations of objects or concepts, as in east-Asian and ancient Egyptian pictographic writing forms. The writing process evolved from economic necessity in the ancient near east. Clay "tokens" contained the first known writing, cuneiform. (4th millennium bc)

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Absolute Date

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The process of determining a specific date for an archaeological or palaeontological site or artifact. A date that assigns a range of calendar years to an artifact.

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Alluvial

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Loose, unconsolidated, soil or sediments, eroded, deposited, and reshaped by water in some form in a non-marine setting. Most sedimentary material that fills a basin that is not lithified is typically lumped together in the term alluvial.

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Archaeomagnetic Dating

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Determines whether sediments were deposited in periods of normal or reversed polarity. Can be used to situate a stratigraphic context in the paleomagnetic timescale (epochs or events).
Range: all periods of hominin evolution
Material: sediments (iron, commonly)

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Artifacts

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Portable objects modified or created by humans (stone, pottery).

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Bands

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Generally consists of a small kin group, no larger than an extended family or clan; it has been defined as consisting of no more than 30 to 50 individuals. Bands have a loose organization. Their power structure is often egalitarian and has informal leadership; the older members of the band generally are looked to for guidance and advice and decisions are often made on a consensus basis.

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Cheifdoms

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A type of complex society of varying degrees of centralization that is led by an individual known as a chief. Cultural Evolution sees it as an organization more complex than a tribe or a band society, and less complex than a state or a civilization. The most succinct definition of a chiefdom in anthropology belongs to Robert L. Carneiro: "An autonomous political unit comprising a number of villages or communities under the permanent control of a paramount chief."

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Cross-dating

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A technique used to take advantage of consistencies in stratigraphy between parts of a site or different sites, and objects or strata with a known relative chronology. A specialized form of cross-dating, using animal and plant fossils, is known as biostratigraphy.

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Direct Date

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A date for an object of archaeological interest is derived from the object itself

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Ecofacts

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Natural materials that have cultural relevance (corn, pollen).

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Epigraphy

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The study of inscriptions or epigraphs as writing; that is, the science of identifying the graphemes and of classifying their use as to cultural context and date, elucidating their meaning and assessing what conclusions can be deduced concerning the writing and the writers.

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Features

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A combination of artifacts and/or ecofacts representing a site of human activity; stuff that when moved, ceases to be what it was (i.e. a burial).

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Hunter-Gatherers

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A society whose primary subsistence method involves the direct procurement of edible plants and animals from the wild, foraging and hunting without significant recourse to the domestication of either. Up to 80% of the food is obtained by gathering.

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Indirect Date

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Those in which the date of an object is derived from materials found in association with the object.

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Maya Hieroglyphs

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Maya writing that used logograms complemented by a set of syllabic glyphs, somewhat similar in function to modern Japanese writing.

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Pottery

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The ceramic ware made by potters. Major types of pottery include earthenware, stoneware, and porcelain. Pottery is one of the oldest human technologies and art-forms, and remains a major industry today.

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Provenience

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The exact location in a site where an artifact was excavated, in contrast to provenance which includes the artifact's complete documented history.

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Relative Date

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A date that places two or more objects in a sequence relative to each other. (This is older than that.) Ex: flourine, stratigraphic dating, cross-dating, seriation (pottery).

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Sedentary

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A lifestyle contrary to hunting-gathering. Usually is seen with agriculture and animal domestication.

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Seriation

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A relative dating method in which assemblages or artifacts from numerous sites, in the same culture, are placed in chronological order.

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Settlement Patterns

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Settlement pattern studies involve investigations which examine regions or areas, rather than focusing on individual sites. Settlement patterns are probably most associated with the understanding of how a particular society used the available resources in its region.

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States

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A set of institutions that possess the authority to make the rules that govern the people in one or more societies, having internal and external sovereignty over a definite territory.

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Stratum

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A stratum (plural: strata) is a layer of rock or soil with internally consistent characteristics that distinguishes it from contiguous layers. Each layer is generally one of a number of parallel layers that lie one upon another, laid down by natural forces.

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Swidden Agriculture

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Slash and burn consists of cutting and burning of forests or woodlands to create fields for agriculture or pasture for livestock, or for a variety of other purposes.

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Taxonomy

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The practice and science of classification. (Most commonly used for classifying organisms.)

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Tribe

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Consists of a social group existing before the development of, or outside of, states. Many anthropologists use the term to refer to societies organized largely on the basis of kinship, especially corporate descent groups. Tribes can represent a stage in social evolution intermediate between bands and states.

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Çatalhöyük

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A very large Neolithic and Chalcolithic settlement in southern Anatolia, (Turkey) which existed from approximately 7500 BCE to 5700 BCE. It is the largest and best preserved Neolithic site found to date.

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Euphrates and Tigris Rivers

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Historically, the area is known as Mesopotamia. As part of the larger Fertile Crescent, it saw the earliest emergence of literate urban civilization in the Uruk period, for which reason it is often dubbed the "Cradle of Civilization".

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Choga Mami

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Irrigation agriculture developed here (4700–4600 BC) and rapidly spread elsewhere, from the first required collective effort and centralized coordination of labor. (Ubaid Period)

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Levant

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Term for the Eastern Mediterranean at large, typically used by archaeologists and historians with reference to the prehistory and the ancient and medieval history of the region, as when discussing the Crusades.

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Mesopotamia

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Name for the area of the Tigris-Euphrates river system, along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, largely corresponding to modern Iraq, as well as some parts of northeastern Syria, some parts of southeastern Turkey, and some parts of the Khūzestān Province of southwestern Iran. Widely considered as the cradle of civilization.

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Nippur

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One of the most ancient of all the Sumerian cities. It was the special seat of the worship of the Sumerian god, Enlil.

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Samarra

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On the east bank of the Tigris. The culture is primarily known by its finely-made pottery decorated against dark-fired backgrounds with stylized figures of animals and birds and geometric designs. The Samarran Culture was the precursor to the Mesopotamian culture of the Ubaid period.

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Tell Brak

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An ancient late Neolithic, Sumerian, Akkadian and Middle-Late Bronze Age city on the Upper Khabur River. It forms the remains of one of the largest urban sites in northern Mesopotamia. A small settlement existed at the site as early as 6000 BCE, occupation continued into the succeeding Ubaid and Uruk Periods. 3rd millennium cuneiform texts identify Nagar as the major point of contact between the cities of the Levant and those of northern Mesopotamia.

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Tell as-Sawwan

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A city in the ancient Near East 110 kilometers north of Baghdad. The site is a primarily Ubaid, Hassuna, and Samarran culture occupation with some later Babylonian graves. It is considered the site type for the Samarran culture.

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Uruk

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Ancient city of Sumer and later Babylonia, situated east of the present bed of the Euphrates river. Uruk is eponymous of the Uruk period, the protohistoric Chalcolithic to Early Bronze Age period in the history of Mesopotamia spanning ca. 4000 to 3100 BC. Uruk played a leading role in the early urbanization of Sumer in the mid 4th millennium BC. At its height c 2900 BC, Uruk probably had 50,000–80,000 residents living in 6 km sq. of walled area, the largest city of its time.

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Yangtze (Yellow) River Valley

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The longest river in China and Asia, and the third-longest in the world, dividing line between North and South China. Human activity was found in the Three Gorges area as far back as 27 thousand years ago. The establishment of irrigation systems made agriculture very stable and productive.

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Rosetta Stone

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An Ancient Egyptian artifact which was instrumental in advancing modern understanding of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing. The stone is a Ptolemaic era stele with carved text made up of three translations of a single passage: two in Egyptian language scripts (hieroglyphic and Demotic) and one in classical Greek. It was created in 196 BC, discovered by the French in 1799 at Rosetta and contributed greatly to the deciphering of the principles of hieroglyph writing in 1822 by the British scientist Thomas Young and the French scholar Jean-François Champollion.

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Uruk Alabaster Vase

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A carved alabaster stone vessel found in the temple complex of the Sumerian goddess Inanna in the ruins of the ancient city of Uruk. It is one of the earliest surviving works of narrative relief sculpture, dated to ca. 3,200–3,000 BC.

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Cylinder Seals

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A cylinder engraved with a 'picture story', used in ancient times to roll an impression onto a two dimensional surface, generally wet clay. First appearing in the Near East during the Uruk period, later versions would employ notations with Mesopotamian hieroglyphs.

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Clovis point. Characteristically-fluted projectile points associated with the North American Clovis culture.

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Folsom point. Bifacially worked and have a symmetrical, leaf-like shape with a concave base and wide, shallow grooves running almost the entire length of the point.

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Stratigraphy. Follows law of superposition, most of the time.

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Seriation, shows the statistics related to occurrence of certain types of objects at a site. Commonly used with pottery.

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Uruk/Warka vase

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Yangtze River Valley

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Tigris & Euphrates Rivers, Nippur, Uruk, Ur.