Week 7

Question 1

Characteristics of civilizations

Answer 1

1. At least one city
2. monumental architec-ture,
3. agriculture
4. a state-level of political organization,
5. a system of writing.

A city is usually defined as a settlement having at least 5,000 residents.

Question 2

Pseudoarchaeology

Answer 2

The use of selective archaeological evidence to put forward nonscientific, fictional accounts of the past

the study of the human past, but not within the framework of science or scholarly archaeology

Question 3

Examples of Pseudoarchaeology

Answer 3

Statues of Rapa Nui (Easter Island)
Moai statues (left) and archaeological evidence of how they were made (right)
* Pseudoarchaeological claim: These large statues couldn’t have been made by the native Polynesian population

Question 4

Historical archeology

Answer 4

Historital archaeology is the archaeology of times and places for which written records are available but is more narrowly defined in North America (or elsewhere ) as the archeological of the modern world in the post Columbia era of the past five centuries.

Question 5

How to evaluate Pseudoarchaeology

Answer 5

Is the hypothesis testable?
Is the hypothesis compatible with our general understanding of the archaeological record?
Which hypothesis provides the simplest explanation? (i.e., Occam’s razor)
Have all competing explanations been considered equally?