arbitrary level

The basic vertical subdivision of an excavation square; used only when easily recognizable “natural” strata are lacking and when natural strata are more than 10 centimeters thick.

context

datum point

flotation

flotation (p. 91):  The use of fluid suspension to recover tiny burned plant remains and bone fragments from archaeological sites.

in situ

living floor

(p. 86):  A distinct buried surface on which people lived.

matrix-sorting

(p. 90):  The hand-sorting of processed bulk soil samples for minute artifacts and ecofacts.

natural level

(p. 85):  A vertical subdivision of an excavation square that is based on natural breaks in the sediments (in terms of color, grain size, texture, hardness, or other characteristics).

Pleistocene

(p. 81):  A geologic period from 2 million to 10 thousand years ago, which was characterized by multiple periods of extensive glaciation.

provenience (p. 77):  

strata

(p. 85):  (singular, stratum) More or less homogeneous or gradational material, visually separable from other levels by a discrete change in the character of the material—texture, compactness, color, rock, organic content—and/or by a sharp break in the nature of deposition.

test excavation

(p. 82):  A small initial excavation to determine a site’s potential for answering a research question.

total station (

p. 87):  A device that uses a beam of light bounced off a prism to determine an artifact's provenience; it is accurate to +/- 3 millimeters.

water-screening

(p. 90):  A sieving process in which deposit is placed in a screen and the matrix washed away with hoses; essential where artifacts are expected to be small and/or difficult to find without washing.

Why does context matter?

Context matters because information comes from what artifacts are associated with each other, with features, and with particular strata. It’s not enough to know that an artifact came from a particular site; we need to know how it relates to everything else found at the site.

How is it recorded?

What determines preservation?

What determines preservation?

Diverse excavation strategies respond in part to different preservation conditions, constraints, and objectives in order to record provenience. From test pit to full-scale excavation, archaeologists maintain records of the three-dimensional provenience of the objects being recovered. Archaeological records record an excavation in such a way that another archaeologist can “see” what the original excavator saw.

What is the difference between arbitrary and natural levels? Why do these matter?

Natural levels follow the site’s geologic stratigraphy; arbitrary levels are normally 5 or 10 cm thick and are based on depth below the datum point. Arbitrary levels are normally used only in test pits when the natural stratigraphy is unknown or when natural layers are more than 10 cm thick.

What is the difference between arbitrary and natural levels? Why do these matter?

Arbitrary levels could mix artifacts from different natural levels, of different geologic contexts.

How do archaeologists recover the smallest artifacts and ecofacts?

What is geoarchaeology?

Geoarchaeology applies the concepts and methods of the geosciences to archaeological research to assist in determining a site’s age and its formation, including all the human and natural processes that work together to create an archaeological site.

The law of superposition holds that (all else being equal) older geological strata tend to be buried beneath younger strata.

 What is the law of superposition? How can it be violated?

The law of superposition is only an organizing principle; in some instances, reverse stratigraphy can occur, as for example, when people excavate sediments to create a mound.

What is the difference between systemic and archaeological contexts?

The systemic context refers to artifacts as they are being used or manipulated by people; the archaeological context refers to natural processes that act on artifacts and features once they are deposited in the ground.

What is the difference between systemic and archaeological contexts?

Artifacts leave the systemic context (and enter the archaeological context) through cultural depositional processes, including loss, discard, caching, and ritual interment.

What is the difference between systemic and archaeological contexts?

Once in the archaeological context, artifacts can continue to be moved and altered by a variety of natural site formation processes, including landslides, burrowing animals, earthworms, tree throw, and the actions of water and climate.

Why does this difference matter?

In most sites, stratigraphy results from a complex interplay between natural and cultural processes.

Archaeologists must understand the difference between an artifact’s systemic and archaeological contexts in order to know how an artifact in the ground relates to the human behavior that is their ultimate interest.

(p. 104):  The upper part of a soil where active organic and mechanical decomposition of geological and organic material occurs.

alluvial sediments 

archaeological context 

(p. 109):  Once artifacts enter the ground, they are part of the archaeological context, where they can continue to be affected by human action, but where they also are affected by natural processes.

argilliturbation 

(p. 112):  A natural formation process in which wet/dry cycles in clay-rich soils push artifacts upward as the sediment swells and then moves them down as cracks form during dry cycles.

B horizon (

C horizon 

colluvial sediments

cryoturbation 

cultural depositional processes 

cultural disturbance processes 

(p. 110):  Human behaviors that modify artifacts in their archaeological context, for instance, digging pits and hearths, canals, and houses.

eolian sediments 

(p. 102):  Materials transported and accumulated by wind (for example, dunes).

faunalturbation 

(p. 112):  A natural formation process in which animals, from large game to earthworms, affect the distribution of material within an archaeological site.

floralturbation 

formation processes 

geoarchaeology

geomorphology 

(p. 96):  The geological study of landforms and landscapes, for instance, soils, rivers, hills, sand dunes, deltas, glacial deposits, and marshes.

graviturbation 

hominins 

(p. 97):  Members of the evolutionary line that contains humans and our early bipedal ancestors.

imbrication 

(p. 121):  A fluvial process through which stones in a stream- or riverbed come to rest overlapping like shingles on a roof, with their upstream ends lying slightly lower in elevation than their downstream ends.

law of superposition

 (p. 97):  The geological principle stating that, in any pile of sedimentary rocks that have not been disturbed by folding or overturning, each bed is older than the layers above and younger than the layers below; also known as Steno’s law.

marker bed 

pithouse

reclamation processes 

reuse processes

reverse stratigraphy 

(p. 107):  The result when one sediment is unearthed by human or natural actions and moved elsewhere, whereby the latest material will be deposited on the bottom of the new sediment, and progressively earlier material will be deposited higher and higher in the stratigraphy.

sedimentary rock 

site formation 

soil 

systematic context 

What is the difference between relative and absolute dating?

Relative dating places sites, strata, features, and artifacts in relative order, without saying how much older or younger one site, stratum, feature, or artifact is than another.

Absolute dating provides specific ages or specific age ranges. Absolute dating methods are absolute in the sense that they provide a particular age range at a known level of probabilit

What are the major dating techniques, what materials do they date, and what is their time range?

Tree-ring dating (dendrochronology)

Radiocarbon dating

Trapped charge dating—thermoluminescence (TL),

Argon-argon dates volcanic rock,

dates wood of particular species; it is limited to relatively small regions and usually cannot date samples that are more than 2000 years old.

dates any organic material using the known rate of decay of 14C; it is useful for materials less than 45,000 years old.

optically stimulated luminescence (OSL), and electron spin resonance (ESR)—date ceramicsenamel, respectively. They date an object by calculating the amount of background radiation the object has been subjected to since the object’s electron “clock” was last reset by heat (TL) or sunlight (OSL). These techniques can extend back several hundred thousand years.

 dates volcanic rock, especially ash. This technique can date volcanic layers that are millions of years old.

What are the major dating techniques of historic sites?

Documentary evidence usually provides dates for historical sites.

When such evidence is not available, known ages of particular artifact types are generated to create age range or median ages for historical features or sites using TPQ and mean ceramic age dates.

What do archaeological dates date?

Dating techniques tell us nothing directly about cultural activities. Radiocarbon dating, for example, tells us when a plant or an animal died—it is up to the archaeologist to relate the event being dated to a behavioral (cultural) event of interest.

(p. 118):  A date expressed as a specific unit of scientific measurement, such as days, years, centuries, or millennia; an absolute determination attempting to pinpoint a discrete, known interval in time.

 A method of radiocarbon dating that counts the proportion of carbon isotopes directly (rather than using the indirect Geiger counter method), thereby dramatically reducing the quantity of datable material required.

  A high-precision method for estimating the relative quantities of argon-39 to argon-40 gas; used to date volcanic ashes that are between 500,000 and several million years old.

de Vries effects 

dosimeter 

electron spin resonance 

The time required for half of the carbon-14 available in an organic sample to decay; the standard is 5568 years, although it is known that the half-life is closer to 5730 years.

Homo erectus 

Neanderthals 

(p. 135):  (or Neandertals) A hominin who lived in Europe and the Near East about 300,000 to 30,000 years ago; biological anthropologists debate whether Neanderthals were in the direct evolutionary line leading to Homo sapiens.

old wood problem

 (p. 139):  A potential problem with radiocarbon (or tree-ring) dating in which old wood has been scavenged and re-used in a later archaeological site; the resulting date is not a true age of the associated human activity.

optically stimulated luminescence 

photosynthetic pathways (

relative date 

reservoir effect

 (p. 129):  Samples from organisms that took in carbon from a source that was depleted of or enriched in 14C relative to the atmosphere may return ages that are considerably older or younger than they actually are.

seriation (p. 121): 

terminus post quem (TPQ)

thermoluminescence 

(p. 134):  A trapped charge dating technique used on ceramics and burnt stone artifacts— anything mineral that has been heated to more than 500° C.

time-markers

 (p. 119):  Similar to index fossils in geology; artifact forms that research shows to be diagnostic of a particular period of time.

trapped charge dating 

(p. 133):  Forms of dating that rely upon the fact that electrons become trapped in minerals’ crystal lattices as a function of background radiation. The age of the specimen is the total radiation received divided by the annual dose of radiation.

tree-ring dating (dendrochronology) 

What are the principles of archaeological typology?

We create groups (based on one or more attributes of form) that minimize the differences within each group and maximize the differences between groups. 

We construct these groups through an objective, explicit, and replicable process. We recognize that there is no single “correct” typology. A typology’s usefulness is judged relative to the question it is used to answer. 

What is the strength of archaeology?

Although surrendering some of the detail available to ethnographers, archaeologists can focus on mega-patterns spanning vast reaches of space and time—across continents and millennia.

What role does typology play in archaeology’s strength?

Seeking changes across space and time—so-called space-time systematics—archaeologists can find important patterns in the form of material culture. Because this can’t be done by focusing on artifacts individually, archaeologists address “types” of material culture—projectile points, pottery, architecture, and so on—across spans of space and time.

By testing morphological types against solidly dated contexts, archaeologists define temporal types, the backbone for building cultural chronologies.

What are archaeological cultures, site components, and phases?

Spatial patterning in material culture defines archaeological cultures but these are not the same as ethnographic cultures.

By seeking out clusters of temporal types, we construct site components, which are culturally homogeneous units within a single site that can be synthesized into phases—archaeological units of cultural homogeneity that are limited in both time and space.

Phases are the basic archaeological building blocks for regional synthesis, capturing temporal and spatial similarity in material culture.

archaeological culture

 (p. 161): A regional manifestation within a culture area marked by a particular set of material cultural traits.

assemblage 

attribute

 (p. 154):  An individual characteristic that distinguishes one artifact from another on the basis of its size, surface texture, form, material, method of manufacture, and design pattern.

component 

functional type .

morphological type 

Mousterian 

(p. 156):  A culture from the Middle Paleolithic (“Middle Old Stone Age”) period that appeared throughout Europe after 250,000 and before 30,000 years ago. Mousterian artifacts are frequently associated with Neanderthal human remains.

period

phase (.

space-time systematics 

temporal type 

type (

typology 

(p. 150):  The systematic arrangement of material culture into types.

What is the difference between analogy and middle-level theory?

Analogy and middle-level theory both seek to make inferences about human behavior from archaeological remains.

Analogy 

is one way to reconstruct the past but is limited to societies that have very close geographic and cultural counterparts (preferably ones with a historical connection) or to fairly low-level inferences. The greater the number of similarities, the greater the probability that the analogy is correct.

Middle-level theory 

What is the principle of uniformitarianism?

The “facts” of archaeology are incapable of speaking for themselves; therefore, archaeology follows geology’s principle of uniformitarianism, studying ongoing processes and their material consequences to develop ways of making inferences from archaeological data.

The principle of uniformitarianism does not assume that the past and the present are the same; it does assume that the processes of the past and the present are the same. This is why we can use modern observations, such as the material effect of sunlight on bone, or the relationship between house posts and house permanence, to help us interpret the archaeological record.

What do taphonomy, experimental archaeology, and ethnoarchaeology study?

Taphonomy studies the natural processes that help produce archaeological sites.

Experimental archaeology recreates behaviors that no longer exist today, such as stone tool manufacture, or replicates behaviors, events, or processes that need controlled observation.

Ethnoarchaeology studies living peoples in order to see how human behavior is translated into material remains.

analogy 

(p. 172):  Noting similarities between two entities and inferring from that similarity that an additional attribute of one (the ethnographic case) is also true of the other (the archaeological case).

bonebed 

p. 176):  Archaeological and paleontological sites consisting of the remains of a large number of animals, often of the same species, and often representing a single moment in time—a mass kill or mass death.

channel flake 

(p. 181):  The longitudinal flake removed from the faces of Folsom and Clovis projectile points to create the flute.

core 

(p. 179):  A piece of stone that is worked (“knapped”). Cores sometimes serve merely as sources for raw materials; they also can serve as functional tools.

ethnoarchaeology 

(p. 187):  The study of contemporary peoples to determine how human behavior is translated in the archaeological record.

ethnoarchaeology 

(p. 187):  The study of contemporary peoples to determine how human behavior is translated in the archaeological record.

experimental archaeology

 (p. 179):  Experiments designed to determine the archaeological correlates of ancient behavior; may overlap with both ethnoarchaeology and taphonomy.

faunal 

flake 

(p. 179):  A thin, sharp sliver of stone removed from a core during the knapping process.

flute 

(p. 181):  Distinctive channel on the faces of Folsom and Clovis projectile points formed by removal of one or more flakes from the point’s base.

formal analogies (

heat treatment 

(p. 179):  A process whereby he flintknapping properties of stone tool raw material are improved by subjecting the material to fire.

kiva 

(p. 173):  A Pueblo ceremonial structure that is usually round (but may be square or rectangular) and semi-subterranean. They appear in early Pueblo sites and perhaps even in the earlier (pre-AD 700) pithouse villages.

microwear 

(p. 185):  Minute, often microscopic evidence of use damage on the surface and working edge of a flake or artifact; can include striations, pitting, microflaking, and polish.

principal of uniformitarianism 

relational analogies 

(p. 174):  Analogies justified on the basis of close cultural continuity between the archaeological and ethnographic cases or similarity in general cultural form.

(p. 173):  A Hopi word that loosely translates as “place of emergence.” The original sipapu is the place where the Hopi are said to have emerged into this world from the underworld.Sipapus are also small pits in kivas through which communication with the supernatural world takes place.

slash-and-burn 

(p. 189):  A horticultural method used frequently in the topics wherein a section of forest is cut, dried, and then burned, thus returning nutrients to the ground. This permits a plot of land to be farmed for a limited number of years.

taphonomy 

(p. 175):  The study of how organisms become part of the fossil record; in archaeology, it primarily refers to the study of how natural processes produce patterning in archaeological data.