Ch. 6 Flashcards
Back from the Field
Archaeologists love field work vs anything else. You must sort artifacts and classify them. The lab days are often times the longest. It’s more rare to get into the field. Basic sorting to classification to analysis to technological studies to comparing to publication interpretation.
The Issue of Preservation
food remains, structures, artifacts and other findings are the archives used to study the past. it is hard to find where fully intact artifacts lay. site formation process include such as rainfall, aridity, sunlight, and earth movements. Pompeii is a great example as the ash buried the city and it even preserved the body casts of the fleeing victims.
Ethnographic Analogy
early archaeologists collected vast quantities of information on traditional material culture all over the world. the material gave them a change to compare still living to prehistoric people. This caused argument on the african san, australian aborigines, and other hunter gatherers who had no metals were labeled as prehistoric. Or known as stone using gatherers.
The Kung San
Lee took Yellen on his excavation. yellen spent months studying how the san butchered animals. Butchery, cooking, and eating was his focus. He found that san camps developed their layouts through conscious acts such as building a shelter or hearth as well though such casual deeds as discarding animal bones and debris for toolmaking.
Maya Metates
hayden was examining maya stone tools when he discovered that some present day mayan speaking communities still made and used them. he worked with rosario through the manufacturing process, and final smoothing steps of the artifact.
Experimental Archaeology
ball blew a prehistoric horn so hard he produced a sound like a bellowing bull. the act caused him to burst a blood vessel and die though. not all is dangerous. archaeologists have been making stone implements, floating on a raft at sea, recreating the past since the eighteenth century. They use it to replicate the past in a way.
