Exam 1

• William Stukeley (1687–1765):

  • Studied the monuments at Stonehenge during the speculative phase of archaeology
  • Made accurate plans of Stonehenge that are still used today
• Uniformitarianism:

  • Principle stating that geologically ancient conditions were similar to those of our own time
• Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826):

  • Conducted the first scientific excavation in Virginia in 1784 at a burial mound on his property
• Three Age System:

  • Proposed by C.J. Thomsen
  • Divided prehistoric artifacts into a Stone Age, a Bronze Age, and an Iron Age
• Charles Darwin:

  • Publication on the mechanism of natural selection in the mid-1800s allowed the search for human origins in the material record to begin
• The classificatory-historical period:

  • Characterized by the work of scholars like Flinders Petrie, Mortimer Wheeler, and Alfred Kidder
  • Ended around 1960
• The Rosetta Stone:

  • Enabled Jean-Francois Champollion to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphic writing in 1822 after 14 years of work
• John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood:

  • Produced illustrated books on the Maya civilization in the 1840s after traveling in Yucatan, Mexico
• Cultural ecology:

  • Study of how adaption to the environment can cause cultural change
• Augustus Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers (1827–1900):

  • Pioneered the technique of total recording and printed descriptions of excavations at Cranborne Chase in southern England
• Dorothy Garrod (1892–1968):

  • First woman prehistorian to achieve professional status by becoming the first female professor at Cambridge University in 1937
• Sir Mortimer Wheeler (1890–1976):

  • Brought precise techniques like the grid-square method to excavations
  • Well known for work at Maiden Castle, England
• Alfred Kidder (1885–1963):

  • Excavations at the Pecos Ruin in northern New Mexico from 1915 to 1929 established a chronological framework for the region
• Kathleen Kenyon (1906–1978):

  • Uncovered a Neolithic farming village at a site in Jericho, Palestine, commonly referred to as the earliest town in the world
• Gordon Childe (1892–1957):

  • Inspired by Marxist ideas
  • Argued that civilization arose in the Near East due to a Neolithic Revolution and later an Urban Revolution
• Grahame Clark (1907–1995):

  • Combined environmental analysis with the collection and identification of organic remains to understand prehistoric environments and diets
• Gertrude Caton-Thompson (1888–1985):

  • Excavations at Greater Zimbabwe confirmed the site was of African origin
• Indigenous archaeology:

  • Involves marginalized groups seeking more influence and control over the management of their heritage
• The New Archaeology or processual archaeology:

  • Approach adopted by young archaeologists in the 1960s
  • Sought to explain archaeological discoveries through valid generalizations and analyze cultures as systems
• Postprocessual archaeology:

  • An approach questioning the objectivity of archaeological explanations in response to processual theory
• Public archaeology:

  • Stems from the belief that material remains of the past should be protected and preserved
  • Includes preventative archaeology, rescue archaeology, and Cultural Resource Management
• Artifacts: Objects that have been used, modified or made by people
• Ecofacts: Organic and environmental remains that reveal information about past human activity
• Features: Non-portable artifacts like hearths, architectural elements, or soil stains
• Sites: A distinct spatial clustering of artifacts, ecofacts, features, structures, and organic and environmental remains; the residue of human activity
• Context: Consists of an artifact's immediate matrix, its provenience, and its association with other artifacts, usually in the same matrix
• Provenience: An artifact's horizontal and vertical placement within a matrix
• Matrix: The physical material within which artifacts are embedded or supported
• Taphonomy: The study of formation processes
• Cultural Formation Processes: The deliberate or accidental activities of human beings as they make or use artifacts, build structures, etc
• Natural Formation Processes: Natural events that govern both the burial and survival of the archaeological record
• Electrolysis: Cleans metal artifacts through placing them in a chemical solution and passing a weak current through it
• Association: The co-occurrence of an artifact with other archaeological remains, usually in the same matrix
• Experimental archaeology: The study of past behavioral processes through experimental reconstruction under carefully controlled scientific conditions
• Inorganic material: Material such as stone, clay, and metal that is not derived from living things
• Organic material: Material derived from living things, preserved in the archaeological record only under certain circumstances usually involving extremes of moisture
• Waterlogged preservation: An object completely immersed in water, known to preserve organic materials at times
• Bog bodies: Preserved human remains that have survived due to being immersed in a marshy, waterlogged environment in the peat of Northern Europe
• Ground survey:

  • A collective name for a wide variety of methods for identifying individual archaeological sites
  • Includes consultation of documentary sources, place-name evidence, local folklore, and legend, but primarily actual fieldwork
• Simple random sampling:

  • A type of probabilistic sampling where areas are chosen using a table of random numbers
  • Drawbacks include defining the site's boundaries initially and the nature of random number tables resulting in some areas being allotted clusters of sample squares, while others remain untouched