Midterm #2 chapter 7&8 Flashcards
1) Describe the three categories of remains that we can find through archaeological research.
Artifacts objects from human manufacture, shaped by humans, portable.
Features from human manufacture, but non-portable (house walls, ditches…).
Ecofacts remains as by-product of human activity (animal bones, plant seeds…).
1) How do we call the changes into the formation of an archaeological site? What are the different causes of these changes?
Changes in the formation of the archeological sites = taphonomy.
Ex hyena bones
Causes of taphonomy can be natural, human or animal.
Ex modern industrial agriculture in North America
1) Why do we perform surveys, and what are the different kinds of survey (with which means)? Give at least two.
How to know where to dig?
Talking with local people
using aerial surveys.
Aerial surveys use infrared, digital photography, drones, LIDAR systems.
LIDAR laser technology allow to see the ground through dense forest.
Surveys without digging
Metal detector, magnetic methods
or, Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR)
+ computer software
3-D modelized map of buried archaeological remains
But, for more details on cultures, excavations are still necessary.
1) What are the different elements that allow us to say that archaeology is between paleoanthropology, and, cultural anthropology?
Archaeology is “the past tense of cultural anthropology”.
Between paleoanthropology and cultural anthropology.
Shows the past of human cultures and how it evolved, changed and adapted.
On a long time period as paleoanthropologist, but in a different perspective.
1) What is Ethnoarchaeology for?
study of present-day activities in societies that could be using artifacts or structures close to the ones used and found in the archeological record.
Ex hunter/gatherer people.
Describe the two main categories of subsistence strategies
Food collectors
Influence of the relative richness of the environment
2 types of food collectors
1) Small scale foragers (frequent change of residence)
2) Complex foragers (can settle with permanent architecture)
Food producers
Herders, pastoralist Farmers: Extensive agriculture Intensive agriculture Mechanized industrial agriculture
1) What is unilinear cultural evolutionism?
Lewis Morgan
argues that all societies pass through the same stages of progress until achieving civilization:
savagery, barbary and civilization
unilinear cultural evolutionism
- early condition of the human race are tending to the conclusion that man-kind commenced their career at the bottom of the scale and worked their way up from savagery to civilization through the slow accumulations of experimental knowledge
Criticized for not considering the interplays between societies
+ danger to classify societies into a hierarchy below Western standard…
1) What are the 5 categories of social organizations used since World War 2?
After WW2, archaeologists and anthropologists proposed a classification avoiding racism and unilinear progress.
5 categories band, tribe, chiefdom, State and Empire
Band= smallest social organization, less than 50. Common for foragers. Very egalitarian societies. Division of labor based on sex and age.
Tribe= food producers, herders or farmers. Relatively egalitarian societies, with a chief: spokesman + decides activities.No true power or wealth inequalities: chief has symbolic prestige. Forms of sodalities (guild, brotherhood) between tribes related to sex, age: army, medical, initiation, religion…Create enduring solidarities
Chiefdom permanent inequalities of wealth, power and status.Chief and its relative = separate from other members with a similar status.High degree of craft production, and hierarchical power mostly based on the deeds of the chief.
State stratified society with a specific territory and the use of force to protect itself from outside or inside disorder (army, police).
Separate governmental institutions in charge to enforce law, collect taxes with an elite.
Government has complete monopole of violence.
1) What is characteristic of a band and a tribe if we compare them with chiefdom?
Bands and tribes are both egalitarian societies where as chiefdoms exhibit a greater degree of hierarchical political power
1) Why the concept of evolutionary niche makes perfect sense for humans when we look at the last 200 000 years?
Evolutionary niche considers interactions with other animal species + the impact of the niche on evolution of living organism.
Makes perfect sense for human beings.
Why?
Absence of niche construction
adaptations to environment and selective pressures = morphological, phenotypical.
Presence of niche construction
control of natural pressures => adaptations do not result in morphological changes.
Human history, for the last 200 000 years = minor changes in human morphology but huge changes in culture
Evidence of presence of niche constructions
Evolution mostly cultural.
Ex population living in extreme cold. Adaptation = cultural (clothes, shelters, heating…)
1) Why can we say that plant cultivation was intentional?
Critics of the accidental approach arguing humans were completely aware because:
They knew the environment and deliberately selected the plants easier to harvest
2) domesticating plants involves also modifications of the environment (fields).
=Conscious deliberate human intervention
1) Compare domestication with cultivation.
Domestication human interference with reproduction of species to make plants or animals more useful.
Ex horse or dog.
Modifies the genotype and phenotype
+ dependent upon humans
Cultivation process of all activities linked to domestication: preparing field, sowing, weeding, harvesting, storing products.
Planification about subsistence + technology
1) Does domestication result from sedentism, or the contrary? Explain.
Broad spectrum foraging is an explanation for domestication. The explanation is based on the reconstruction of the environmental conditions 12,000 year ago when the land glaciers in Europe, Asia and North America melted the very large ice animals and they began to die out and were replaced by smaller animals. scholars argue that people had to change their diets to a broader spectrum of food including foraged plants. This broadening of the economy is said to have led to a more secure subsistence base, the emergence of sedentary communities and population growth
1) What factor varies when we pass from one food-yielding system to another?
Must consider the combination of different factors : climate, environment, population, technology, social organization, diet
1) Explain the outlines of the broad-spectrum theory.
Evolution of environmental conditions 12 000 ya.
Land glaciers melted in Europe, Asia, North America => extinction of species + sea-level rise.
Ex extinction of mammoth or giant sloth
Replacement by smaller animals as deer + marine species also evolved
Effects on the forests: woodland expanded in new areas, then plants
Adaptation of the diet base on a…
Broader spectrum of foods: foraged plants, fish and smaller animals.
More secure basis of subsistence + sedentism + growth of population
