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32 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
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Artifacts
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Anything made or modified by humans - stone tools (lithics) - ceramics |
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Ecofacts |
natural objects used or affected by humans - bone from animals people have eaten - pollen from plants people brought to a site - remains of insects and mice that were there because of conditions humans created |
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Fossils |
hardened remains or impressions of plants and animals - rare - 3% have been found |
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Features |
artifacts of human manufacture that cannot be removed from an archaeological site - hearths - storage pits - buildings |
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Sites |
known or suspected areas of human activity in the past that still contain a record of that activity |
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Stratified |
archaeological deposit that contains successive layers or strata |
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Taphonomy |
study of processes of site destruction and disturbance |
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Pedestrian Survey |
walking around in an organized group looking for sites - sampling and systematic surveying can reduce the area |
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Two types of Remote Sensing |
1. Geomagnetics - measure magnetic field of an area. High or low readings may indicate buried evidence 2. Soil interference radar (SIR) / Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) - sends a pulse into the ground and records how it is affected by whatever may be buried |
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Goals of Excavation |
1. Find all evidence a site holds 2. record the horizontal and vertical location of the evidence with precision |
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Why can't all sites be fully excavated? |
- expensive - need to leave something undisturbed for future archaeologists with better techniques because the site is always destroyed with the excavation |
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Typology |
Set of types evidence is grouped into Tell age, species, or affiliated culture and sometimes how it was used, made or exchanged in the past |
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Metric Analysis |
Measure artifacts and record size in various, strictly defined, dimensions |
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Use-Wear Analysis |
Determine how a tool was used through examination of the type of wear on its edges |
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What can we learn from ecofacts and fossils? |
- comparative anatomy - time period - ancient climate and habitat - dentition - relationships in evolutionary history - posture and locomotion - proportions of the brain |
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Detailed Mapping |
extensive records about each feature describe what the feature is and what materials were found associated with it - this information is combined using a geographic information system (GIS) |
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Context |
how and why artifacts are related |
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Relative Dating |
used to determine the age of a specimen or deposit relative to another specimen or deposit |
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Indicator Artifacts or Ecofacts |
items that spread widely over short periods of time, disappeared or changed rapidly. Used to establish a stratigraphic sequence for dating new finds |
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Absolute Dating / Chronometric Dating |
used to measure how old a specimen or deposit is in years |
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Radiocarbon Dating / carbon-14 (14c) Dating |
- measures the amount of radioactive carbon present in organic matter - can only be used on organic matter - relatively precise up to 40 kya and not useful after 70 kya - half-life = 5730 years - future use of c-14 will not be useful for our time period because of changing c-14 ratios - Absolute dating method |
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Thermoluminescence Dating |
- used for pottery - measures how much light is emitted by electrons within when heated - absolute dating method |
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Electron Spin Resonance Dating |
- dates organic materials (ex. bone or shell) - measures trapped electrons from surrounding radioactive material - obtains a spectrum of microwaves absorbed by the material - absolute dating method |
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Paleomagnetic dating |
- dates archaeological and fossil deposits - compares magnetic characteristics of the deposit to those known from the earth's past - absolute dating method |
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Potassium Argon Dating |
- dates minerals and rocks in a deposit - uses decay rate of potassium into argon - dates objects from 5,000 to 3 billion years old - absolute dating method |
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40Ar - 39Ar Dating |
- date minerals and rocks in a deposit - used with Potassium-Argon dating - nuclear reactor changes 39Ar to 39K and then they estimate the amount of 40Ar present - potassium and argon can be measured from the same sample - absolute dating method |
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Uranium Series Dating |
- dates fossil sites (especially caves) - measures the decay of two types of Uranium (235U and 238U) into other isotopes (such as 230Th - thorium) - absolute dating method |
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Stylistic Seriation |
ordered by styles of objects - relative dating method |
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Stratigraphy |
Dating something based on how deeply it is buried Deeper generally = Older |
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How to Find Sites or Localities |
1. Pedestrian Survey 2. Aerial Photographs and Satellites 3. Soil Marks and Crop Marks 4. Non-Intrusive methods (Ground Penetrating Radar) 5. Ethnohistorical data (maps, folklore) 6. Natural Erosion 7. Human activity (excavation for construction) |
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Soil Marks |
Changes in soil pH or colour because of shallowly buried evidence |
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Crop Marks |
Vegetation Growth - shallowly buried evidence sometimes doesn't allow plants to grow or it changes the colour of vegetation |
