1/22 - what types of things are we looking for? Flashcards
Diagnostic Artifacts
Artifacts that are indicative of a particular time/group.
Lithics
Stone tools made through chipping or abrading
Flakes
A thin, sharp sliver of stone removed from a core during the knapping process.
Projectile Point
Arrowheads, dart points, or spear points.
Ceramics
Pieces made out of fired clay.
Bone
Porous, lighter, fragile, sticks to tongue.
Ground Stone
made through grinding and abrading - Mano & Metate, ground stone knives, abraders
Fiber
Pieces of plant or animal hair
Organic Artifacts
Objects made from plant or animal remains that are found at archaeological sites. Also known as ecofacts.
Typology
The systematic arrangement of material culture into types.
Morphological Types
Similar shape/physical appearance, purely descriptive and thus abstract.
Functional Types
perform a similar function/purpose which relies on morphological variation
Temporal Types
morphological types with temporal significance.
Archaeological culture
Artifact types across geographic regions (culture denotes variability in artifacts across regions).
Assemblages
A collection of artifacts of one or several classes of materials (stone tools, ceramics, bones) that comes from a defined context, such as a site, feature, or stratum.
Components
An archaeological contract consisting of a stratum or a set of components from various sites in a region will make up a phase
Phases
An archaeological construct possessing traits sufficiently characteristic to distinguish it from other units similarly conceived; spatially limited to roughly a locality or region and chronologically limited to the briefest interval of time possible. (collections of components, building blocks for regional analysis).
Strata (singular stratum)
More or less homogeneous or gradational material, visually separated 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.
