Archaeology Basics
This field studies the human past through material remains.
What is archaeology?
These early collectors valued ancient objects for their beauty or curiosity, often paying little attention to their context.
Who were antiquarians?
This is a testable explanation for an observation or pattern.
What is a hypothesis?
This term refers to the soil or sediment surrounding an artifact.
What is the matrix?
This term describes the return of ancestral remains or cultural belongings to their communities of origin.
What is repatriation?
These portable objects, such as pottery and stone tools, were made or modified by humans.
What are artifacts?
Archaeologists use this method to systematically search a landscape and record surface evidence of sites.
What is archaeological survey?
Evidence collected through observation or measurement is described by this term.
What is empirical evidence?
An artifact’s location, surrounding sediment, and relationship to nearby materials together make up this.
What is archaeological context?
This acronym stands for the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.
What is NAGPRA?
Animal bones from meals and seeds from food preparation belong to this category of archaeological evidence.
What are ecofacts?
This principle states that, in undisturbed deposits, lower layers are older than the layers above them.
What is the principle of superposition?
Counting pottery fragments or measuring stone tools produces this type of numerical data.
What are quantitative data?
This approach seeks to understand cultural practices within their own cultural setting rather than judging them by one’s own standards.
What is cultural relativism?
This professional field identifies, evaluates, and helps protect archaeological resources affected by development.
What is Cultural Resource Management, or CRM?
A hearth or storage pit belongs to this category of human-made remains that cannot be moved intact without altering it.
What is a feature?
This term identifies an artifact’s exact horizontal and vertical location at a site.
What is provenience?
This type of dating establishes whether something is older or younger than something else without assigning a calendar date.
What is relative dating?
This theoretical approach examines how power, labor, and control over resources shape societies.
What is political economy?
This destructive activity removes archaeological materials without proper authorization or documentation, often for sale or personal collection.
What is looting?
This approach examines human life by considering how biology, culture, language, and history connect.
What is holism?
This principle holds that the same natural processes operating today also operated in the past.
What is uniformitarianism?
Also called tree-ring dating, this method matches annual growth-ring patterns to help date wood.
What is dendrochronology?
An explanation that attributes cultural change to several interacting factors, rather than one cause, is called this.
What is a multivariate explanation?
Archaeologists have an ethical responsibility to collaborate with these living communities whose ancestors and cultural histories are connected to the sites being studied.
Who are descendant communities?