Midterm 1

Question 1

Antiquarianism

Answer 1

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

Question 2

Scientific Antiquarianism

Answer 2

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

Question 3

Culture History

Answer 3

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

Question 4

What are the five characteristics of culture history?

Answer 4

1. Direct historical approach: linked a current population to a past one; assumed slow, minimal change
2. Cultural Relativism: each culture should be viewed within its own historical and cultural context
3. Historical particularism: there is no overriding path of development that all cultures transverse
4. 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
5. 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

Question 5

Processual Archaeology

Answer 5

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

Question 6

Post-Processual Archaeology

Answer 6

1980s to today; led by Ian Hodder; critiqued three aspects of processual archaeology; emphasized subjectivity

Question 7

What were the three aspects of processual archaeology that post-processual archaeology critique?

Answer 7

1. 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
2. Systems theory: people had agency and made choices not based solely on survival
3. 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

Question 8

Archaeological Preservation

Answer 8

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)

Question 9

What are archaeological sites and landscapes?

Answer 9

Sites: spatially discrete complex of associated features, artifacts, and ecofacts
Landscapes: larger regions over which sites are distributed

Question 10

The Emeryville Shellmound

Answer 10

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

Question 11

Palimpsest

Answer 11

process of reusing, adding to, and/or destroying the archaeological record (eg. shell mounds); opposite of the “Pompeii Premise”

Question 12

Contemporary Archaeology

Answer 12

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

Question 13

What are Artifacts, Ecofacts, and Features?

Answer 13

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)

Question 14

What is Archaeological Interpretation? Define context, provenience, matrix, and association.

Answer 14

can be synchronic (narrow time frame) or diachronic (long term); material studied based on context, provenience, matrix, and association

1. Context: when and where a thing is situated in the world’s time and space
2. Provenience (three dimensional location of a thing in a matrix
3. Matrix: substance that surrounds and supports things
4. Association: what stuff is found with what within a matrix

Question 15

Prehistoric Archaeology

Answer 15

aka Medieval Mindset; 500 - 1500 AD; no formal interest in studying the past because it was “already known” through the Bible

Question 16

Alfred Kroeber

Answer 16

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

Question 17

Middle-range theory

Answer 17

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

Question 18

Experimental archaeology

Answer 18

attempts to understand cultural and taphonomic processes through replicative experiments in the present

Question 19

Ethnographic analogy

Answer 19

archaeological method that used ethnographic information to interpret archaeological patterns

Question 20

Cultural Diffusion

Answer 20

spread of ideas through time across a culture area

Question 21

Nels Nelson

Answer 21

surveyed number of Bay Area Shell Mounds and found 425 in 1909; discovered patterns between shell mounds, freshwater, and large populations

Question 22

Lewis Binford

Answer 22

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

Question 23

Unilinear Cultural Evolution

Answer 23

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

Question 24

Four-field anthropology

Answer 24

anthropology is composed of the fields of archaeology, linguistics, cultural anthropology, and biological anthropology

Question 25

Cultural Ecology

Answer 25

idea that humans shape the environment and vice versa; created by Lewis Steward

Question 26

Archaeological Assemblage

Answer 26

group of artifacts from the same site, context, excavation unit, etc.

Question 27

Systems Theory

Answer 27

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

Question 28

Ideology

Answer 28

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)

Question 29

Feminist Archaeology

Answer 29

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

Question 30

Meg Conkey and Janet Spector

Answer 30

founded principles of feminist archaeology with 1984 study “Archaeology and the Study of Gender”

Question 31

Historical Archaeology

Answer 31

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

Question 32

Archaeological Culture

Answer 32

recurring assemblage of artifacts from a specific time and place, which may constitute the material culture remains of a particular past human society

Question 33

Depositional Context

Answer 33

looks at the surrounding dirt/substance in order to determine whether the archaeological has been disturbed

Question 34

Attributes

Answer 34

used to classify artifacts into groups and describes objects in terms of their physical traits

Question 35

Artifact Types

Answer 35

proposed by Binford to classify findings into uses

1. Technomic: artifacts directly formed for survival within a culture
2. Sociotechnic: artifacts to connect people within a culture
3. Ideotechnic: artifacts that signifies the ideology of a culture

Question 36

Hypothetico-Deductive Approach

Answer 36

application of the scientific method to archaeological events; first used in processual archaeology

Question 37

Why Archaeology? 4 reasons

Answer 37

1. documents human history
2. unbiased
3. fills in gaps between, contradicts, or supports historical documents
4. answers anthropological questions

Question 38

Culture through time

Answer 38

culture history defined culture as normative; processual archaeology as adaptive; post processual archaeology as a human experience that is used beyond survival or adaptation