Archaeology and Heritage
The business of documenting and protecting heritage
What is Cultural Resource Management?
The number of people that a unit of land can support.
What is carrying capacity?
A sequence of activities, including words, gestures, actions, or objects, performed according to a set sequence governed by the social norms of a community.
What is a ritual?
The study of the human biological component evident in the archaeological record.
What is bioarchaeology?
A concentration of material evidence about the human past.
What is an archaeological site?
A U.S. law that prohibits the excavation, sale, or exchange of artifacts without a permit.
What is the Archaeological Resouces Protection Act?
An attitude that one's own culture is superior to anyone else's.
What is ethnocentrism?
This type of status is earned through hard work and not given at birth.
What is achieved status?
The study of bones at archaeological sites.
What is osteology?
A term that refers to an object's original context at an archaeological site
What is in situ?
The Coloradan cliff dwelling site that brought the protection of American antiquities to the attention of the U.S. Government.
What is Mesa Verde?
Groups that subsist mostly on non-domesticated foods.
What are hunter-gatherers?
A unilineal descent system in which ancestry is traced through the male line.
What is patrilineal?
Similar grave goods across many burials, like at the Turkish site of Catalhoyuk, can indicate this social structure.
What is egalitarian?
The method of absolute dating that works well only in dry regions with lots of preserved wooden objects.
What is dendrochronology?
What is the National Historic Preservation Act?
The advantage of animal domestication compared to plant domestication.
What is mobility? Animals can move, plants cannot.
Culturally prescribed behaviors associated with men and women.
What are gender roles?
A child that has a burial rich in grave goods typically indicates this type of status.
What is ascribed?
The geological era of the last Ice Age that ended around 10,000 years ago.
What is the Pleistocene?
The relationship that living communities must establish with archaeological remains under NAGPRA.
What is cultural affiliation?
A theory that proposes states arose based on the need for leadership over water rights and access.
What is the irrigation hypothesis?
A custom in which the husband moves into his wife's community.
What is matrilocality?
The use of genetic or isotopic information in human remains to reconstruct the past.
What is molecular archaeology?
A comparison between present human-animal/plant relations used to make an inference about the past.
What is an analogy?