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Definition
| a politically independent or autonomous social unit, regardless of scale (might be a city-state or a band of foragers…) |
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| the ways in which people distribute themselves across the landscape can be very revealing about that culture’s structure and relationships with others. |
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| Elman Service’s four-fold classification of societies: |
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Definition
| Bands, Tribes (or Segmentary Societies), Chiefdoms, Early States. |
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Definition
| small-scale societies of egalitarian foragers, generally of fewer than 100 people, who move seasonally to exploit undomesticated food resources. |
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| societies that operate on the principle of ranking – differences in social status between people. Chiefdoms vary in size between about 5,000 and 20,000 persons. |
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| preserve many of the features of chiefdoms, but the ruler has explicit authority to establish laws and enforce them through the use of a standing army. Structure of the society no longer depends entirely on kin relationships: it is now stratified into different classes. LOTS of people living in close face-to-face association, often more than 5000 individuals. |
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| urban complex societies or civilizations |
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Definition
generally beginning in the Bronze Age.
This rather simple social typology must be used with caution. You must not infer that all societies naturally or inevitably “evolve” through each of these stages on their way to becoming “civilized”! They do not! |
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| Basic tenet: In a uniform landscape, the spatial patterning of settlements would be perfectly regular, forming interconnecting hexagons. |
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| How do we bridge the gap between archaeological remains and the societies those remains represent? |
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Definition
| middle range theory (e.g., ethnoarchaeology, experimental archaeology)and analogy |
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| Many archaeologists say the most reliable source of information about the structure of past societies is the pattern associated with their physical distribution across the land’s surface |
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| links the ethnographic present (the systemic context) with the behavioral past (the archaeological context). |
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| how do people use the territory between sites? Sampling strategy to determine density of stone tools over large area. Space and density are the two critical factors examined. |
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| Techniques of study for chiefdoms and early states: |
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Definition
First task: identify primary centers or “central places”
Second task: identify the functions of those centers. |
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| is biologically determined and can be understood by archaeologists through the analysis of human skeletons. |
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| is more broadly based and seeks to understand gender as part of a social process that includes many other parameters (age, wealth, inherited versus ascribed status and so forth). |
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| is a social construct that doesn’t necessarily map conveniently or perfectly with sex; therefore the roles associated with gender can vary from place to place and through time, even within a single society. |
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Definition
| you’ve heard it before – the archaeologist’s ability to interpret the material remains of the past is limited more by our theoretical naïveté and a lack of methodological sophistication than by the information itself in the ground. |
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| Environmental archaeology |
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Definition
| views humans as an integral part of the natural world, interacting with other species in an ecological system. |
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| Culture aids humans in adapting to two kinds of environments |
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| contractions of “ecological artifacts” and “biological artifacts,” respectively |
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| variable, not a constant, through both space and time and, therefore, it must be thought of in terms of its potential impact on human societies. |
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| (sediment cores as a measure of water temperature; changes in planktonic Foraminifera [single-celled protozoa] species in deep-sea ooze indicate changes in sea water temperatures and salinity) |
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Definition
| rom both deep-sea cores and ice cores in glaciated regions); variations in the 18O/16O ratio at one place can indicate variation in precipitation |
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| (changes due to water locked up in polar ice; eustasy or changes in sea-levels) |
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| depictions of plants and animals unknown in the region today |
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Definition
| depression of the Earth’s surface, rebound effects, erosion |
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Definition
| annual layers of sediments deposited in lakes during spring thaw) |
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Definition
| “plant opals,” silica bodies that form in the cellular systems of many plants, especially grasses, including rice and bamboo |
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Definition
| small mammals are especially sensitive to environmental changes). Includes terrestrial and marine mollusks, worms, insects, etc. |
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Definition
| (larger animals, mostly vertebrates, both mammals and birds). This category often constitutes the bulk of the zooarchaeological record (see diagram below). |
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| isotopic analyses of bone |
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Definition
| to determine diet of animals; amino acids in bone collagen to reconstruct temperature and humidity patterns |
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Term
| non-empirical environment |
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Definition
| Archaeologists must always consider the “non-empirical environment”…but, it’s very hard to deal with quantitatively! |
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| Geographic Information Systems can be used to generate exploitation territories from which carrying capacity can be calculated, yielding artificial and highly problematical population estimates. |
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| environmental determinism |
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Definition
| The goal of environmental archaeology is not to prove the validity of environmental determinism (the proposition that natural environmental change alone causes culture change), but rather to understand the complex web of articulations that describe human-environmental interactions over time (i.e., diachronically). |
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Definition
| direct evidence of what people were eating at a particular time |
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| the pattern of people’s consumption over a long period of time |
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Definition
| larger fragments of preserved vegetal material |
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Definition
| phytoliths and pollen grains |
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Definition
| providing an object’s thermal history |
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| (Sr, a stable mineral component of bone) against calcium (Ca) ratios can also yield dietary information: vegetarian has high Sr:Ca ratio, carnivore has low Sr:Ca ratio. |
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| formation processes and the variety of the evidence |
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| spatial concerns dealt with through survey and excavation |
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| “absolute” and relative time; chronology and dating methods |
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| How were societies organized? |
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Definition
| social archaeology; chiefdoms, states, tribes, bands |
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| What was the environment? |
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Definition
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| reconstructions of subsistence and diet |
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| natural objects that mimic the products of human technology. |
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| (determined by provenience) is often more important than individual artifacts in establishing the agency (human or natural) responsible for the objects under analysis. |
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| if used with care, evidence drawn from observation of the technological adaptations of living peoples can be extrapolated to interpret the past. |
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| classification of artifacts into discrete categories |
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| What is the purpose of typology? |
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Definition
| The same as taxonomy: to impose meaningful order on an otherwise hopelessly confusing and often random-appearing collection of objects. |
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| #One of the most important reasons for studying ancient exchange systems |
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Definition
| is because of their fundamental economic role in many societies and their consequent influence on the acquisition and maintenance of POWER. |
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Definition
| “the pattern of repeated contacts between people,” therefore social organization and exchange are simply different aspects of the same process. |
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| referring to all interpersonal contacts, so that most social behavior is viewed by anthropologists as an exchange of goods, non-material as well as material. |
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| exchanges between individuals who are more-or-less social equals |
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| implies the operation of some central controlling organization |
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| implies both a specific central location for exchange to occur and the sort of social relationship where bargaining can occur |
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| judging your own success against that of your neighbors. “Keeping up with the Joneses.” |
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| trying to out-do your neighbors in conspicuous consumption. “Keeping ahead of the Joneses,” |
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| is the study of past ways of thought from material remains. It is, essentially, the archaeology of the human mind. |
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| #First systematic approach to the study of cave art: |
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Definition
| André Leroi-Gourhan 1960s- reading symbolism into upper paleolithic cave art |
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| #Methods of working in cognitive archaeology need to be rigorous, objective, and explicit. |
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Definition
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| #Cognitive archaeology does not depend on literary sources for its validity |
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| #biological archaeology (bioarchaeology): |
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Definition
| developed as a formal interface between biological anthropology (including human osteology) and archaeology. |
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| the study of ancient disease, deformity, and death. |
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| #Demographic archaeology: |
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Definition
| concerned with estimates from archaeological data of various aspects of populations such as size, density, and rates of growth. It is also concerned with the role of population in culture change. Seeks to understand links among population, resources, technology, and society, mostly by developing simulation models. |
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| Paleodemography (not synonymous with demographic archaeology |
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Definition
| mostly concerned with the study of human skeletal remains to estimate population parameters such as fertility and mortality rates, life expectancy, and population structure, including migration. |
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| # How can one estimate population size and density from archaeological evidence? |
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Definition
1.Derive figures from settlement data based on relationship between group size and total site area, roofed area, number of dwellings, number of hearths, etc.
2.Try to assess the richness of a particular environment in terms of resources available for each season (“carrying capacity”) and derive the number of people that environment might have supported at a certain technological level. |
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| #Ultimately, the problem for archaeologists is to use complementary evidence from human biology and the record of material culture to yield a reconstruction of past life-ways that takes into account |
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Definition
| both the cultural and biological aspects of the human experience. |
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| Much of archaeological inference is necessarily based on |
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Definition
| uniformitarian assumptions. |
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Definition
| “the study of contemporary peoples to understand the behavior that underlies the production of material culture to aid in unraveling the archaeological record.” |
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| experimental archaeology: |
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Definition
| “the study of past behavioral processes through experimental reconstruction under controlled scientific conditions.” |
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