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83 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
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Compare and contrast the use of history and archeology to understand the past.
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History gives more details, the thought of the individuals, and precise dates. Archeology gives a more objective view, and is less limited by time and place. It is better suited for studying long term change.
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What is pseudoarcheology?
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looting and illegal collecting. fantastic claims. cultural violence.
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Case study of Atlantis. Where was one of the locations that Plato might have had in mind for the setting of Atlantis.
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In the mediteranean there were the Minoans. Santorini had the Thera volcano.
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Who excavated the Sphinx and why?
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Thutmose IV studied the old kingdom, from the new kingdom. he excavated portions of the Sphinx and left a dig record.
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Who's Nabonidus?
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Another early archeologist. Excavated at Ur, which was 2000 years before him.
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Herudotos?
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Anotherguy who showed early interest in past cultures. He gave an explanation for the pyramid construction way back in greece times.
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Did the Aztecs show any interest in their past.
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Fo sho, just like the guys above, they investigated past cultures. They claimed Ancestry from the toltecs and excavated for religious and political purposes.
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Who is Bishop James Ussher, and why is he significant?
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He wrote the Antiquity of humankind. He used genesis to place the start of the world at 4004 BC.
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What is an antiquarian?
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Laura Crofts dad. Person interested in past artifacts and collects them.
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Who are naturalists?
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the were around in the 1800's. They studied nature and culture. the printing press made it easy to circulate their ideas on the antiquity of humanity and cultural evolution.
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When and what was the descriptive period?
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this was the period when modern archeology began to emerge. There were 3 important advances . one was the view towards human antiquity changed. the concept of evolution emerged. and the three system age emerged.
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William Smith?
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Was a professional ditch digger. he looked at the strata of britain, and used it to relatively date fossils in chalk layers.
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What is the core concept behind stratigraphy?
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The law of superposition, which says older layers are lower.
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Charles Lyell?
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Know as the father of modern geology. He described the principle of uniformitarianism, and wrote the Antiquity of Man.
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Uniformitarianism?
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Natural processes observed today can account for how the earth was shaped in the past.
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Who was jacque Boucher de Perthes?
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He associated human tools with extinct animals, to show that humans have been around for a long ass time.
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Who is CJ Thomsen?
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In 1839 he wrote a guide to artifacts in copenhagen museum. he classified things in bronze, stone and iron ages.
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Who was General Augustus Pitt-Rivers?
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An archeologists that excavated liek a general. Used grids and precise mapping.
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Who was Sir william flinders petrie?
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he collected all artifacts. not just the shiny things. he also established seriation.
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What is an artifact.
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A potable object whose form is modified or created by human activity.
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What is an ecofact?
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A nonartifactual remain. Such as nutshells, soil, bones, seeds. anything that provides information on the environment and subsistence of people.
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What is a feature?
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A non portable human remain. Hearth's, ditch post. They cannot be removed without destroying it. They must be studied in the field.
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What is a site?
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A place with an ass ton of traces of human activity. they are accumulations of artifacts or features.
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What is a region?
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This is the largest cluster of data. They are seperated by geographical boundaries. Or cultural similarities in material culture.
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What is the lifecycle of an artifact that becomes part of the archeological record.
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the materials are acquired, manufactured, then discarded.
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How can artifacts be changed after they become part of the archeological record.?
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Naturally they can decay, become buried, etc.
Human induced is caused by plowing, looting, etc. |
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What are some circumstances that would to very good preservation of artifacts?
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Frozen, waterlogged and very dry environments are good at preserving. Tropical, humid, acidic soiled places with insects and plants, and places with variable temperature and humidity are terrible at preserving stuff.
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Case study of the iceman. Tell me about him.
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He was cold preserved. lived around 3300 bc. near austria i think.
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Another case study of the ozette site in washington. tell me about it.
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was a whaling village in 1700 ad. buried in a mudlside, and preserved.
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Now tell me about pompei.
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Roman prot city, destroyed by vesuvius and preserved in ash. one of the earliest sites to be excavated.
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What is remote sensing and what forms of it are there?
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It is a nondestructive way to look at stuff without excavation. You must consider the construction materials you are looking at, sediment changes, and other factors. It can be done from the sky, from space, and from the ground.
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What is LiDAR?
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It uses Laser mapping with ultraviolet or infrared light to look at the range and material being observed. It stands for Light detection and ranging. It produces a colored map where the different colors represent different materials. For example stone versus forest.
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How can multispectral analysis help archeologists?
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The shoot light at shit. they look at the reflected response and materials
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How can Archeologists use Electrical Resistivity to reveal stuff?
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Damper Soil is more conductive. ditches and pits attract more moisture. Stone walls do not.
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How can mangetometry be used?
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They look at differences in magnetic intensities. Ston and burnt areas leave behind more iron. The sho w up differently.
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How bout Ground Penetrating Radar?
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you get a slice map that reveals stratigraphic information. You emit radio pulses into the soil and look at the effect.
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How do you decide which of these remote sensing methods to use?
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consider the budget, time, and the specific questions you need to answer.
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What is GIS and why is it useful?
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It is Geographical Information Systems. It consist of a large database with calculators for understnading spatial relations. (sites to resources, sites to sites, etc)
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What is the Digital terrain Model and why is it useful?
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It is derived from satellite or radar. it shows elevation and slope. along with bodies of water and vegetation. Can be used to look at why people lived where they did. You can look at the least cost path (cost of travel due to slope, distance, political factors and trade opportunities).
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What is the viewshed analysis?
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It's looking at the relationships between sites. This could reveal ritual and defense reasons for being in a place.
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What are the goals of survey.
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to locate sites, identify site properties (size, date, function). and look at cultural and environmental trends (population, access to resources, trade and politics)
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How can surveying be accomplished?
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On the surface, where people walk out and identify sites on foot. You can also do it aerially, and categorize based on time, size and function.
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What are different ways to sample a site?
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You can do it systematically, randomly, or stratified, which is random, but natural or cultural zones get proportionately more samples.
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What are some things to look at during regional analysis?
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the nearest neighbor (clustering), catchment analysis (resources nearby), central place theory (center periphery), and rank size analysis (the scale)
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Why might groups of people choose to cluster or distance each other?
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Maybe for resources, defense, market, transportation, or ritual.
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What is central place theory?
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It is the idea that economy, politics and religion might originate from one place and spread to others.
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Explain the rank size rule and its relation to archeological analysis.
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Archeologists can graph population versus rank, and it tells us useful info. when graphed on a log scale, a linear relationship reveals systematic integration. Tiers reveal administration. A concave line reflects a strong central government, and convex reveals independent people.
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how are site hierarchies classified, based on the number of tiers?
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2-3 is a chiefdom, 4+is a state
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What can we learn from the case study of Tiwanaku near Lake titicaca?
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Population centers because of ritual spaces and polity formation. Trade corridors and state expansion then helped idctate population spread.
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What can we learn from the central Mexico region?
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Dynamics in rural zones are important to understanding early urbanism. central ritual spaces and trade corridors also effected population spread. Also the cost and benefits of areas reveals why the state expanded where it did.
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What is regional analysis?
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the largest scale of analysis. It involves understanding relationships between cultures, people and the enviroinment, and evolutionary sequences. For a more complet picture you need to analyze sites.
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What is accomplished through pit testing?
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You can determine site size, occupation, stratigraphy, preservation. or you can do it to get a sense of the area. Usually it precedes full scale excavation.
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How is non-probabilistic sampling done?
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It is done based on intuition, documentation and experience.
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How is probabilistic sampling accomplished?
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you make many small samples. They can be done randomly, stratified-random, systematicly, and stratified systematically.
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What are the two types of excavation?
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Horizontal and vertical. Vertical involves exposing strata and forming a site chronology. Horizontal involves digging in one layer and is good at showing the spacial association between artifacts and features.
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What is the Grid Square Method?
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A form of excavating, where you dig squares in the ground. this preserves a record of the stratigraphy and you still get to find shit.
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What is screening?
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You shove dirt through strainers to get artifacts. There is wet and dry screening. One you blast it with a hose through a strainer. the other you shake it through.
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What is flotation?
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you seperate materials based on whether or not they will float.
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What are the phases of a dig?
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1-shovel testing to reveal the surface
2-Dig small test Pits 3- Do some remote sensing 4-Do block excavations in domestic acticity areas. |
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Why is it inmportant to document everything on a dig?
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It's a destructive science. you can't undig something. only excavate what you need and what faces destruction.
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What is direct dating?
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Dating the material itself. Indirect is using the layer its found, or other context stuff to date it.
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What is seriation?
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Creating a sequence of artifacts, sorted by age
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How are things classified?
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based on formal attributes, and stylistic attributes. Different regions share similarities and differences.
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Why is Sir William Flinders Petrie significant?
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He established phyetic seriation in 1890's. He did it with pots in egypt.
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How bout James Deetz?
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He seriated and classified tombstones from colonial new england.
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What is frequency seriation?
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Using the occurences to look at when a style emerged and declined. Fits a bell curve.
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What is a Harris Matrix?
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you compare the strata within a site to date things.
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How does pollen dating work?
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You compare pollen from sites to established sequences. For it to work you need good preservation, and well documented, local sequences.
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How does Biostratigraphy, or faunal succession work?
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You associate something with the fossils nearby. For this to work you need a good index of fossils. It will you tell you the interval the thing was from.
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How does fluorine/uranium dating work?
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As bones get older, more fluorine and uranium are created, and nitrogen levels decrease.
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How was the piltdown fraud exposed?
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The used Fluorine/uranium dating to show that a skull was part orangutan, part dude from 600 years ago.
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What is Linguistic dating?
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You use the change of languages and vocabularies to date something. glottochronology is an attempy to formulate an approximate date based on assumption that the core vocabulary changes at a constant rate.
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How can calendars be used to absolutely date something?
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Calendars can be used to date important events from a society. happened with romans and emperors. With greeks and their olympic games. with maya and their creation cycle starting in 3114 bc.
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What are the 2 systems of calendars in mesoamerica?
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the calendar round matches the solar year with the ritual calendar. There is also the long count, which is used during 1000 years, and there are more linear units of time.
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What is dendrochronology?
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the study of growth rings on trees. The dates are very precise. For it to work the wood must be very well preserved.
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What are rradiometric methods of dating?
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you measure the amount of radioactive decay of an unstable isotope. The meathod you choose depends on the material, the age and all methods have a rnage of error.
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What is AMS and why is it useful?
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It is accelerator mass spectrometry. It is used for small samples and is a radiometric way of dating that can date the range between 50/100 kya
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What are some issues with radiocarbon dating?
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amount of radiocarbon has not been constant , and calibration is required. Organic matter can contaminate the sample. You myst also consider the context of the material. There is also a range or error.
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Who is the Kennewick man?
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They dated him to 11KYA, in the americas, but he looks super european, or NE asian.
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Explain radiopotassium dating
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K40 is common in earth's crust and is unstable. decay begins when molten rock cools. it can be used to date rocks up to 100 kya ago.
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Where were the Laetoli footprints found?
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Tanzania.
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What is luminescence?
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You shoot materials with light, and look at the freed electrons. It can reveal the date of sand layers, and pottery. older things give off more light. Dates between 300 kya
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What is obsidian hydration?
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When fractured, obsidian starts to absorb water. this hydration layer gets thicker, and can be used to date from now to 500 kya. it is limited because rate of hydration varies, and you must establish local sequences.
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