archaeological culture - Answers -- Subdivision of culture areas are called "traditions" or
archaeological cultures
- archaeological cultures are not ethnographic cultures
- spatial patterning in material cultures defines archaeological cultures
- usually use the same materials
- multiple different groups of people would have lived here
- by seeking out clusters of temporal types, we construct site components
- record change over space
archaic period - Answers -- 8,000 - 1,000 B.C.
- a time when people made heavier use of plant foods, began to develop distinctive
regional traditions in material culture, and experimented with agricultural crops (i.e.
maize)
assemblage - Answers -- a collection of artifacts of one or several classes of materials
(stone tools, ceramic, bones) that comes from a defined context, such as a site, feature
or stratum
- collections of artifacts recovered from some unit of provenience
attribute - Answers -- an individual characteristic that distinguishes one artifact from
another on the basis of its size, surface texture, form, material, method of manufacture,
or design pattern
- there is no rule governing the number of attributes to record but archaeologists try to
use as few as seem necessary to accomplish the purpose of typology
cataloging - Answers -- begins with the classification of artifacts into types, or typology
- essential because provenience is lost without it and without providence an artifact's
value to future researchers is greatly reduced
component - Answers -An archaeological construct consisting of a stratum or set of
strata that are presumed to be culturally homogeneous. A set of components from
various sites in a region will make up a phase.
conservation - Answers -- the first step after excavation is to conserve the recovered
materials
- for every week spent excavating, archaeologists spend 3 to 5 weeks or more cleaning,
conserving, and cataloging the finds
- begins with the classification of artifacts into types, or typology
, culture area - Answers -- subdivision of culture areas are called "traditions" or
archaeological cultures
- twentieth-century concept used when scholars recognized not all Native American
socities were alike
- formalized observations into culture areas, large regions defined primarily in terms of
what people ate
functional type - Answers -- a class of artifacts that performed the same function; these
may or may not be temporal and/or morphological types
- reflect how objects were used in the past
historic period - Answers -- European contact
- in America after 1500
lithics - Answers -the technical name for tools made from stone
Mississippian period - Answers -- A.D. 1,000 - 1,5000
- chiefdoms, population changes, agriculture, pottery shape changes
morphology - Answers -- the first analytical step is to describe the artifacts carefully and
accurately by grouping into morphological types to make sense of the past
- the study of the shape of artifacts
morphological type - Answers -- they are abstract and purely descriptive
- types are not the artifacts, they are composite descriptions of many similar artifacts
meaning that every type must encompass a certain range of variability (several colors
may have been applied, absolute size may fluctuate, etc.)
- help communicate what the archaeologist found without describing every single
specimen
- no set rules exist for creating these types, although basic raw material is normally the
first criterion, followed by shape
paleoindian period - Answers -- 25kya - ~8,000 B.C.
- first occupation to domestication and pottery
period - Answers -- archaeologists divided pre-history into periods based on gross
changes in easily observable archaeological remains
- the concept of periods is still used to organize archaeological thinking about time
- periods record change over time
phase - Answers -- a block of time that is characterized by one or more distinctive
artifact types
- defined by temporal types
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