Midterm 1 Flashcards
Antiquarianism
1500s - 1800s; interest in collecting but not studying objects of the past; led to looting of historical sites and brought up inconsistencies with biblical interpretation of the Earth but people continued to believe that the Earth was only 6000 years old
Scientific Antiquarianism
1700s- 1800s; first attempts to understand archaeological remains in an interpretative way; resulted in convergence of research from different fields, new methodological understanding of human history and the natural mechanisms to explain long term change in geology and biology
Culture History
founded by Frank Boaz; critiqued unilinear evolution; improved lab and field techniques, which led to a higher understanding in chronology and more descriptive site reports, but still lacked in-depth analysis; had the characteristics of direct historical approach, cultural relativism, historical particularism, normative definition of culture, and culture areas
What are the five characteristics of culture history?
- Direct historical approach: linked a current population to a past one; assumed slow, minimal change
- Cultural Relativism: each culture should be viewed within its own historical and cultural context
- Historical particularism: there is no overriding path of development that all cultures transverse
- Normative Definition of Culture: culture is a set of learned norms; have material consequences where things should conform to the same idea as others within that culture
- Culture Area: assumed that if culture is normative, then the same stuff means the same people and if the distribution of the stuff was plotted, then a culture area where that culture lived would be found
Processual Archaeology
aka “New Archaeology”; founded by Lewis Binford; 1960s - 1980s; placed emphasis on general and techno-environmental explanation for cultures and culture change; believed that culture was adaptive and meant to help humans survive via multilinear evolution; hypothesized universal laws of human behavior via conjunctive approach; emphasized objectivity
Post-Processual Archaeology
1980s to today; led by Ian Hodder; critiqued three aspects of processual archaeology; emphasized subjectivity
What were the three aspects of processual archaeology that post-processual archaeology critique?
- Presumed objectivity of the scientific method: people aren’t just trying to survive; promoted equifinality, where there could be more than one hypothesis for any given phenomenon, but not hyper-relativism, where any theory was valid
- Systems theory: people had agency and made choices not based solely on survival
- Culture is only adaptive: inaccurate because people apply different contexts to material culture and experience love, religion, music, etc. as things that were not directly related to survival
Archaeological Preservation
dependent on materials and conditions; ideal conditions (organic matters preserve best in an anaerobic, stable environment that is quickly sealed and not disturbed) versus reality (mostly inorganic matter and some organics because conditions are not ideal)
What are archaeological sites and landscapes?
Sites: spatially discrete complex of associated features, artifacts, and ecofacts
Landscapes: larger regions over which sites are distributed
The Emeryville Shellmound
surveys conducted by Nels Nelson; evidence of human occupation in CA as far back as 13000 years ago; used as mounded space, burials, architectural features, artifacts, etc.; example of material culture
Palimpsest
process of reusing, adding to, and/or destroying the archaeological record (eg. shell mounds); opposite of the “Pompeii Premise”
Contemporary Archaeology
seeks to use archaeological methods to approach modern problems; brings together the field of forensics with archaeological methods and techniques to understand crime or disaster scenes
What are Artifacts, Ecofacts, and Features?
Artifacts: created by people and are portable (eg. water jugs)
Ecofacts: naturally occurring but repurposed by humans (eg. whale bones)
Features: human made but not portable (eg. fences)
What is Archaeological Interpretation? Define context, provenience, matrix, and association.
can be synchronic (narrow time frame) or diachronic (long term); material studied based on context, provenience, matrix, and association
- Context: when and where a thing is situated in the world’s time and space
- Provenience (three dimensional location of a thing in a matrix
- Matrix: substance that surrounds and supports things
- Association: what stuff is found with what within a matrix
Prehistoric Archaeology
aka Medieval Mindset; 500 - 1500 AD; no formal interest in studying the past because it was “already known” through the Bible
Alfred Kroeber
focused on memory culture, which referred to the pre-contact period of indigenous people that was free of contamination; led to issues for missionized natives, who he thought lacked culture and were not “native enough” for protection rights
Middle-range theory
defined by Lewis Binford as actualistic studies designed to control relationship between dynamic properties of the past and present; includes ethnographic analogy, experimental archaeology, ethnoarchaeology, and the optimal foraging models
Experimental archaeology
attempts to understand cultural and taphonomic processes through replicative experiments in the present
Ethnographic analogy
archaeological method that used ethnographic information to interpret archaeological patterns
Cultural Diffusion
spread of ideas through time across a culture area
Nels Nelson
surveyed number of Bay Area Shell Mounds and found 425 in 1909; discovered patterns between shell mounds, freshwater, and large populations
Lewis Binford
aka father of processual archaeology; 1931 - 2011; said “Archaeology is anthropology or it’s nothing.”; believed that archaeology should be looking for laws of universal change and that the reconstruction of a culture’s subsistence economy will also reconstruct that culture’s social and religious lives
Unilinear Cultural Evolution
assumed human development went from simple to complex with culturally advanced societies surviving due to natural selection; national characteristics seen as biological traits that were impervious to change
Four-field anthropology
anthropology is composed of the fields of archaeology, linguistics, cultural anthropology, and biological anthropology
Cultural Ecology
idea that humans shape the environment and vice versa; created by Lewis Steward
Archaeological Assemblage
group of artifacts from the same site, context, excavation unit, etc.
Systems Theory
organic analogy where humans and the environment are perpetually balancing and shifting our culture to a homeostasis that allows as many humans as possible to survive; heavily weighted towards events out of human control and ignores human initiative
Ideology
aspect of Critical or Marxist Archaeology; has three effects (naturalizes inequalities by making them seem inherently timeless and without alternative, amplifies interests that appeal to a small subsection to a universal scale, “masks” reality by denying that social inequalities exist)
Feminist Archaeology
includes Conkey, Wilkie, and Joyce; aimed to deconstruct assumptions that the past was like the future, end discrimination in archaeological practice, and understand gender in the context of the past
Meg Conkey and Janet Spector
founded principles of feminist archaeology with 1984 study “Archaeology and the Study of Gender”
Historical Archaeology
form of archaeology dealing with places, things, and issues from the past or present when written records and oral traditions can inform and contextualize cultural material; can complement or conflict with archaeological evidence found at the site
Archaeological Culture
recurring assemblage of artifacts from a specific time and place, which may constitute the material culture remains of a particular past human society
Depositional Context
looks at the surrounding dirt/substance in order to determine whether the archaeological has been disturbed
Attributes
used to classify artifacts into groups and describes objects in terms of their physical traits
Artifact Types
proposed by Binford to classify findings into uses
- Technomic: artifacts directly formed for survival within a culture
- Sociotechnic: artifacts to connect people within a culture
- Ideotechnic: artifacts that signifies the ideology of a culture
Hypothetico-Deductive Approach
application of the scientific method to archaeological events; first used in processual archaeology
Why Archaeology? 4 reasons
- documents human history
- unbiased
- fills in gaps between, contradicts, or supports historical documents
- answers anthropological questions
Culture through time
culture history defined culture as normative; processual archaeology as adaptive; post processual archaeology as a human experience that is used beyond survival or adaptation
