Methods
A principle of examining change through time using the layers of the excavated archaeological record
What is stratigraphy?
Wrote “On the origin of Species” which championed evolutionary change through natural selection.
A stone circle famously studied for its relationship with celestial movements.
What is Stonehenge?
The identification with one's nation and its interests, especially to the exclusion or detriment of the interests of other nations.
What is nationalism?
A whip-cracking University lecturer with dubious archaeological ethics, most well-known for rescuing the Ark of the Covenant from the Nazis
Who is Indiana Jones?
An early archaeologist famous for both systematic excavations inspired by architectural and geological methods AND the systematic collection of artefacts.
Who is Pitt Rivers?
An intellectual period that saw the questioning of the universe, our understanding of time and change and the beginnings of archaeology.
What is the Enlightenment?
A former temple on the Athenian Acropolis targeted by British antiquarians in the early 19th century.
What is the Parthenon?
The imposition of inequalities by a dominant, invading people over the indigenous or local peoples of a place.
What is colonialism?
Most famous for something else, the archaeologist credited for undertaking the first scientific archaeological excavation in 1784
Who was Thomas Jefferson?
A group of artefact types, thought to represent ancient groups, repeatedly found together in archaeological contexts
What is an archaeological culture?
The idea that innovations occur only once and spread from their source to dominate other regions.
What is Diffusionism?
A 12th-century walled settlement in southern Africa known for its misinterpretation to help legitimise white rule.
What is Great Zimbabwe?
The law that requires groups that receive federal funding in the US to return Native American "cultural items" to descendants.
What is NAGPRA?
What is Three Age System?
A geological principle that contributed to the development of archaeology and the wider understanding of time.
What is uniformitarianism?
The tripartite division of prehistory pioneered by the state antiquary of Denmark, C.J. Thomsen.
What is the three-age System?
The name for collection of sites where Howard Carter’s discovery of King Tutt’s tomb in 1922 made him a household name.
What is The Valley of the Kings?
A practice criticised today, but that featured in the early history of archaeology, and which helped built the status of archaeologists
What is treasure hunting? What is tomb raiding? What is looting?
The theory that all human societies went through three major stages of change, savagery, barbarism and civilization
What is unilineal theory?
A generalisable method of ordering time by tracking changing technological styles in artefacts
What is a battleship curve? Or What is seriation?
A collection of approaches, developed in the 1980s and 1990s, that questioned the notion that archaeological interpretation can be objective.
What is post-processualism?
A site on the coast of Turkey once mistakenly thought to be the home of “European Man”.
What is Troy?
An intellectual position that recognizes indigenous people’s rights, and that unequal power relations characterized much of archaeology’s past.
What is postcolonialism?
The first female professor at Cambridge University (in any subject), well known for work on archaeological sites and material across Europe and beyond.
Who was Dorothy Garrod?