Key Terms Flashcards
Attribute
The smallest logically irreducible component part of an artifact. Ex: color, length, decoration, thickness.
Archaeological type
A class of artifacts that share a significant number of attributes.
Functional type
An artifact class based and named on a hypothesized function. Function is most often assigned on ethnographic analogies.
Descriptive type
An artifact class based on what the artifact looks like, not function.
Phase
A temporal period during witch artifacts of the same type exhibit similar attributes, distinguishing their time period from others.
Assemblage
All of the artifacts and features recovered from an archaeological site.
Julian Steward
Developed the theory of cultural ecology which is widely employed by American archaeologists to explain cultural evolution. Cultures evolve as a result of an external environmental change that is adapted primarily by altering a cultures technology or economic system.
Cultural Core
Those beliefs and behaviors operating within a culture that are essential for he survival of that culture. Also developed by Julian Steward.
Lewis Binford
The father of “New Archaeology” and developed the methodology of utilizing predictive hypotheses in the study of long term cultural change.
Technomic Artifacts
Artifacts that functioned in past cultures technological or economic activities.
Sociotechnic Artifacts
Those artifacts that are thought to have functioned to aid in the organization of individuals within a past culture to accomplish technological and economic activities.
Culture History
The goal of archaeology that seeks to define the sequence of change in the material remains found within a geographic area. Uses diffusion to explain change.
New Archaeology
Emphasizes the use of the scientific method to interpret the past. Associated with binford and his students
Culture Process
The goal of archaeology that attempts to explain episodes of change in past cultures. The first major goal of new archaeology it now seeks to provide laws of causality in the study of cultural evolution.
Social Archaeology
Second goal of new archaeology and focuses on providing a description of a past culture at a specific point in time or era, could be a period of time of decades, centuries, or millennia.
Walter W. Taylor
Developed an approach to archaeology that attempted to combine the determination of artifact function, features, and their function in order to produce a description of the lives of the people that produced the site. Qualify data rather than merely describe it.
Relative Dating Technique
Dating methods that place artifacts, features, and or sites into a chronological sequence without a determination of actual age. Derivation and stratigraphy are two relative dating techniques commonly used.
Absolute dating technique
Dating methods that provide an actual age range in years for archaeological artifacts, features, and sites. These techniques provide an actual year the artifact, feature, or site was made/occupied with a margin of error. Carbon 14, dendrochronology, and obsidian hydration are commonly used techniques.
Contract archaeology
Archaeological investigations undertaken on a piece of publicly owned property as a result of federal, state, and or legislation mandating the preservation of historically significant sites.
Direct historic approach
A form of ethnographic analogy that is drawn from the presumed modern descendants of the people who occupied the site and helped to create it.
Archaeological context
The three dimensional relationship of artifacts within an archaeological site. Generally artifacts within close proximity of one another are conceived as being deposited together as a result of their being linked within the behavioral context of the past humans who produced the site.
