Intro To Archaeology Midterm 2

Front 1

Agency in archaeology

Back 1

past people used to be viewed as robots, passive writers, not just a model, they were actually people; faceless blobs; etic/outsider's perspective (behavior, observer) vs. emic perspective (actions, cultural relativism/meanings)

Front 2

Arbitrary vs. Natural Levels

Back 2

Arbitrary: set by us
Natural: stratigraphic lines (cultural or natural)

Front 3

Assemblages vs. Sub-assemblages

Back 3

Assemblages: gros grouping of all sub-assemblages assumed to represent the sum of human activities carried out within an ancient community
sub-assemblages: grouping of artifact classes based on form and function that is assumed to represent a single occupational group within an ancient community

Front 4

Bioturbation

Back 4

displacement and mixing of sediment particles (i.e. sediment reworking) and solutes (i.e. bio-irrigation) by fauna or flora or flooding

Front 5

Folsom/Clovis Points (fluted points)

Back 5

New Mexico; Folsom site: point found coming from Bison antiquus; 1st accepted evidence for iceage people in Americas; lower strata larger spear points (Clovis site); mammoth hunters

Front 6

Contour lines/Topographic maps

Back 6

Physical map of area; contour lines show changes in altitude

Front 7

Critical Theory

Back 7

Mark Leone; everything is going to be biased, always some subjectivity, biases of the present, critical viewof processual archaeology; multiple ways to interpret the past, must be aware of own biases/perceptions

Front 8

Cultural history approach and critiques of it

Back 8

Archaeological interpretation based on temporal and spatial synthesis of data and the application of general descriptive models usually derived from a normative view of culture; emphasizes chronology and cultural change (most diacrhonic)
Critiques: too much emphasis on artifact classification, and culture historians weren't very explicit/too descriptive
1920-1960:
chronology building; stratigraphic excavation; law of superposition and seriation; paleo-indian sites; historical particularism; normative model of culture (modal artifact types); cultural relativism

Front 9

Cultural Resource Management

Back 9

conservation and selective investigation of prehistoric and historic remains; specifically the development of ways and means, including legislation, to safeguard the past

Front 10

Diffusion

Back 10

transmission of ideas from one culture to another (Egypt or Mesopotamia)

Front 11

Duncan Village Project

Back 11

SE AZ, modern town with floods, pithouse village roofs caved in and filled with sand; field strategies: davis wilcox (formation processes, how houses were constructed, what did they look like, transformational processes) vs. Lightfoot (rise of sedentary life, spatial organization of villages) (staf of convicts; pithouses; excavated buried features

Front 12

Excavation: penetrating vs. clearing

Back 12

data gathering by removal of matrix to reveal 3D structure of data and matrix, both vertically (penetrating) and horizontally (clearing)

Front 13

Positivism/Logical positivism

Back 13

The philosophical position that there is an objectively knowable past that can be discovered through rigid adherence to scientific methods.

Front 14

Geophysical Survey Methods

Back 14

Measure physical properties of near-surface composites, search for anomalies; passive (magnetic surveys, magnetometer) vs. active (soil resistivity, electric current, ground penetrating radar, echo sound device, sampling nature of subsurface); not practical for large areas yet, but low impact

Front 15

Gray Literature

Back 15

unpublished literature; CRM; unpublished site reports; stored in SHPO

Front 16

James Hill

Back 16

published papers on Broken K Pueblo; classic example of how social organization may be reflected in the architectural segregation of pottery styles, informing culture from archaeological data (Broken K T1 and T2 rooms)

Front 17

Hypothetico-deductive

Back 17

scientific inquiry proceeds by formulating a hypothesis form that could be falsified by a test on observable data

Front 18

Mark Leone

Back 18

Critical theory; subjectivity; bias; reflexivity; emic

Front 19

Magnetic Declination vs. True North

Back 19

declination is 14.5 degrees for bay area

Front 20

Metinni Village Site, Fort Ross

Back 20

implemented experimental "contextual" approach that employs practice theory to investigate magnitude, direction, and meaning of culture change; non-intrusive by maximizing info about spatial organization, multi-phase; public outreach = teacher workshops, classroom visits, daily updates, schol visits Metini: highlighted importance of using archaeology and oral traditions to study the past

Front 21

Normative Model of Culture

Back 21

culture defined by norms of society

Front 22

National Historica Preservation Act

Back 22

archaeologists look at place before project takes place so things aren't disturbed, bust submit research design first and address scope of the work; survey then excavation

Front 23

New or Processual Archaeology and associated definition of culture

Back 23

Emphasis on the science, environment; 1940s conjunctive approach, think about how types relate to each other; settlement patterns and adaptations; movement away from collaborative; looking at systems

Front 24

Pithouse Villages

Back 24

research design; convicts and friend who wanted to look at something different; prof took broad sweep; Dave Wilcox would've looked at one (Duncan Village Project)

Front 25

Primary Context

Back 25

in same place as deposited
Use-related: in same place as activities
Transposed: materials cleaned up from place of activity; middens

Front 26

Secondary Context

Back 26

Archaeological materials no longer in same context as deposited by people (transformational processes, rodent burrows, looting, etc)

Front 27

Problem of equifinality

Back 27

any particular archaeological pattern; may be multiple interpretations; only seeing end point; various activities may produce that pattern

Front 28

Radiocarbon Dating/Willard Libby

Back 28

used to determine age of an artifact, ecofact, or feature (developed by Libby)

Front 29

Remote Sensing

Back 29

archaeological survey methods involving aerial or subsurface detection of archaeological data (low impact)

Front 30

Research Design and its seven stages

Back 30

1. formulation (background research, gray literature, site records)
2. implementation (research team, budget, funding sources)
3. data gathering (involves survey and excavation)
4. data processing (manipulation of raw data)
5. analysis (extracts info about each data category
6. interpretation (synthesizes the results of data collection, processing, and analysis to meet the original goals of the investigation)
7. publication (makes findings accessible to fellow archaeologists)

Front 31

Sample Size/Sample Fraction

Back 31

Sample size = number of sample units
Sample Fraction = number of sample units as percent of area

Front 32

Michael Schiffer

Back 32

Broken K Pueblo; critiqued everybody; FORMATION PROCESSES/DEPOSITIONAL PROCESSES

Front 33

Scientific Method

Back 33

Hypothesis testing, testing hypothesis, test implications, multiple working hypotheses

Front 34

Settlement Pattern Survey

Back 34

PROCESSUAL; macro of looking at broad regions; can also be intra-site, so micro; impacts sampling strategy and field methods

Front 35

Stratigraphy/Stratigraphic excavation

Back 35

archaeological evaluation of the significance of stratification (multiple layers of matrix/features whose order reflcts law of superposition) to determine the temporal sequence of data within stratified deposits; relative dating technique

Front 36

Surface Pedestrian Survey (methods employed)

Back 36

Mark sample units on study area map, spacing between crew members (high/low intensity), walk transects, record archaeological sites, tape and compasses

Front 37

Techno-environmental models

Back 37

PROCESSUAL; technology/environment: tools, food producing mehtods, organization of labor = technology; 3 premises: infrastructure affects other cultural components (prime movers in cultural evolution, primary catalysts driving culture change), relatively few options for cultural adaptations (cultural evolutionists, new environmental conditions or development of new technologies; similar pathways); Systems approach (feedback cycles, set of systems, changes in one affects the other)

Front 38

Theresa Molino

Back 38

Head GSI; Japanese natives (through URAP); CA indians vs. Japanese archipelago; basketry; Paleoethnobotany; Coquel Indians; FISHING WEIRS

Front 39

Cyrus Thomas

Back 39

Mound Builders Debate; holistic approach; 3 types of mounds (burial, platform, geometric); initially thought moudns built by lost civilizations, then changed mind; built by local native Americans; recovered ceramics and lithics from mounds; compared artifacts to modern day natives; taught in first anthro dept (smithsonian)

Front 40

Holistic Historical Anthropology

Back 40

Ethnography, ethnohistory, biological anthropology, archaeology

Front 41

Francis Bright

Back 41

May and Warren House (Berkeley); Berkeley Conservatory; Central America (Honduras) (San Fernando de Omoa Fort); British Virgin Islands; Berkeley

Front 42

Gordon Willey

Back 42

studied regional settlement patterns in peru; spatial distributions of archaeological sites across a landscape, define broad patterns, integrating areas

Front 43

Antiquarians

Back 43

nonprofessional who studies the past for its artistic or cultural value (in contrast to archaeologist or looter)

Front 44

Archaeological "Cultures"

Back 44

maximum grouping of all assemblages assumed to represent the sum of human activities carried out within a single ancient culture

Front 45

Behavioral Processes

Back 45

human activities including acquisition, manufacture, use, and deposition behavior; produce tangible archaeological remains (in contrast to formational processes)

Front 46

Broken K Pueblo

Back 46

Michael Schiffer critiqued James Hill (T1 T2 rooms vs. animal remains dumped) shift to agriculture from hunting (Hill) vs. no shift (Schiffer)

Front 47

Classification

Back 47

The ordering f phenomena into groups (classes) based on the sharing of attributes (stylistic, form, technological)

Front 48

Conjunctive Approach/Walter Taylor

Back 48

Putting fragments back together, think about how types relate to each other; trained as historian, study spatial relationships of artifacts, activity areas, context/provenience, behavioral approach

Front 49

Meg Conkey

Back 49

co-published a critique of archaeology as perpetuating male-centered stereotypes of past lives, portraying men as active and powerful while women were cast as passive, powerless, or absent FEMINIST

Front 50

Culture Areas/Time-space Grids

Back 50

synthesis of temporal an spatial distributions of data used in the culture history approach based on period sequences within culture areas; How culture distributed across landscape, individual artifacts of one particular culture model types (cultures made up of x y and z artifacts)

Front 51

Cultural Materialism/Cultural Ecology

Back 51

Holds that there are biological and psychological needs common to all humans, provides a means for evaluating each society's adaptive efficiency by measuring input, output, costs, and benefits; environment has a lot to do with how we behave, not necessarily value/spiritually driven; study of ecological and culture systems (PROCESSUAL)

Front 52

James Deetz

Back 52

Historical archaeologists; changes in architecture and artifacts represent change in world views and values (moving from communal to individual)

Front 53

Direct Historical Approach

Back 53

Holistic (Ethnographic research, understand both past and present, use knowledge of present to help reconstruct the life-ways of past) Use 4 fields of Anthropology together (Ethnography, Biological, Linguistics, Archaeology)

Front 54

Emic

Back 54

Insider's Perspective; Actions of past people; cognitive model of culture; cultural meanings; cultural relativism; active agents; cultural values

Front 55

Etic

Back 55

description of a behavior or belief by an observer, in terms that can be applied to other cultures

Front 56

Formation Processes

Back 56

refers to the events that created and affected an archaeological site after its creation

Front 57

Gender in Archaeology

Back 57

Cultural construction of people that takes into account biological sex and what it takes to be a social person; varies from culture to culture; some feminists?

Front 58

Global Positioning Systems (GPS)

Back 58

is used for mapping

Front 59

High/Low Visibility

Back 59

high= easy to see remains rightr on surface, associated with arid environments
low=difficult to spot, vegetation and soil, soil deposition, flooding cycles

Front 60

Historical Particularism

Back 60

All humans are uique and must be understood in its own terms and have its own unique history that helps to shape it

Front 61

Cultural Relativism

Back 61

Each culture is unique and different in its own right, therefore, no two cultures would have the sme set of cultural norms; each one is unique and can't be generalized. Ethnocentrism is the opposite of this

Front 62

Ian Hodder

Back 62

Different processes can produce similar archaeological traits; equifinality = all things are equal in the end, different circumstances can lead to the same thing; critiques processual because can't find these laws

Front 63

Law of Superposition

Back 63

Older things lower down

Front 64

Low-impact Field Methodologies

Back 64

pedestrian survey; surface collection; aerial survey; remote sensing (not digging into ground, covers all low impact methods); magnetometry; electrical resistivity, EPR

Front 65

High-impact Field Methodologies

Back 65

Penetrating excavation (deep probes of subsurface deposits) vs. clearing excavations (horizontal investigation of deposits)

Front 66

Matrix/association/provenience/context

Back 66

matrix= determines primary/secondary context (alluvial (down by water) aeolian (by wind)
provenience = datum (vert/horiz placement of archaeological materials)

Front 67

Multi-Phase Field Strategi (Multi-Stage)

Back 67

each phase of field work incorporated into next

Front 68

NSF

Back 68

National Science Foundation

Front 69

NEH

Back 69

National endowment for the humanities

Front 70

Paleolithic/Neolithic

Back 70

old stone/new stone; nomadic/domestication of plants and animals; cave/wall paintings

Front 71

Post-Processual Archaeologies (and its definition of culture)

Back 71

1. shift away from cultural evolution (unhappy with emphasis on cross cultural generalizations), now cultural relativism
2. problem with cultural materialism (techno-environmental models)
3. agency in archaeology
4. micro-scales of analysis (context = key, get more and more specific practice oriented approaches)
5. symbols in action (organization of space, james deetz, sometimes materials, looking at space and relationships)
6. critical theory (mark leone)
7. feminist approaches in archaeology (bias correction, discrimination, research focused on men, defining gender) need culture history to build upon (uses all tyupes of archaeology)

Front 72

Provenience systems (lot vs. point)

Back 72

lot = quick (best in secondary/transposed contexts
point = carefully plot position of each artifact (best in primary context)

Front 73

Charles Redman

Back 73

spatial scales of project; regional scale to smaller area of investigation; each phase of field work incorporated into next; collecting baseline information

Front 74

Representative Fractions/Map Scale

Back 74

ex. 1cm=240m (1 to 24000)

Front 75

Sample Units/Data Universe

Back 75

basic unit of archaeological investigation; subdivision of data universe; defined by either arbitrary or non-arbitrary criteria

Front 76

Sampling Strategies (random, systematic, stratified and probabilistic vs. non-probabilistic)

Back 76

Sample Units; select randomly (random), every nth (systematic),broad coverage divide data universe into distinct zones and sample each strata as separate zones (stratified), probabilistic vs. non-probabilistic

Front 77

Seriation

Back 77

Techniques used to order materials in a relative dating sequence in such a way that adjacent items in the series are more similar to each other than to items farther apart in the series

Front 78

SHPO

Back 78

State Historic Preservation Office; storage of archaeological information

Front 79

Subsurface Survey (methods employed)

Back 79

remote sensing techniques of area below ground carried out at ground level; includes auguring, coring, shovel testing, and use of magnetometer or resistivity detector

Front 80

Systems Theory

Back 80

PROCESSUAL; culture is like an organism, it has different parts (political, spiritual, etc); why do cultures change and what causes things to change?

Front 81

Total Data Acquisition

Back 81

Full coverage survey

Front 82

Sample Data Acquisition

Back 82

Sample Survey

Front 83

Ruth Tringham

Back 83

Feminist; past people are more than faceless blobs

Front 84

Unilinear Cultural Evolution

Back 84

All human societies change according to a single fixed evolutionary course, passing through the same stages (savagery, barbarism, civilization)

Front 85

Multi-linear Cultural Evolution

Back 85

sees each society pursuing an individual evolutionary career shaped by accumulated specific cultural adaptations

Front 86

UTMs

Back 86

Universal Transverse Mercator; breaks globe up into zones

Front 87

Latitude and Longitude

Back 87

Latitude and Longitude centered at Royal Observatory at Greenwich, broken up into Minutes and Seconds (initially based on time)