Nature of Archaeology
The period of time before written records.
What is prehistory?
The broad expanse of flat land (a plain), much of it covered in prairie, that lies west of the Mississippi River tallgrass prairie in the United States and east of the Rocky Mountains in the U.S. and Canada.
What is the Great Plains?
A device used by some indigenous peoples of North America to propel a spear or dart.
What is an atlatl?
Until recently, this was believed to have been the first archaeological culture in the Americas.
What is the Clovis culture?
A significant archaeologist during the Contemporary Period of SD’s archaeology and the current Director of the W.H. Over Museum.
Who is Prof Larry Bradley?
Handheld devices that use triangulation from radio waves received from satellites to determine your current position.
What is GPS?
The process of chipping away material from high silica stones in a carefully controlled manner with special tools to produce sharp projectile points or tools.
What is flint knapping?
The hypothesis that humans in the Pleistocene and early Holocene were the primary reasons for megafauna depopulation and extinctions during those times.
What is the Overkill hypothesis?
A site, structure, landscape, object or natural feature of significance to a group of people.
What is a cultural resource?
A large open area of grassland, especially in the Mississippi River valley.
What is the prairie?
The area of land, or a passageway, between the ice sheets on the east side of the Rocky Mountains during the end of the last glacial period.
What is the ice free corridor?
An Early Paleoindian point found in South Dakota that appears similar to a Folsom Point, but lacks the characteristic channel scar.
What is a Goshen point?
Cultural heritage management within a framework of federal, state, and local laws, regulations, and guidelines. Most archaeologists work in this industry.
What is cultural resource management?
The part of South Dakota that was last covered by glaciation. Also, the name for the part of the Laurentide Glacier that covered South Dakota.
What is the Des Moines Lobe?
A paleontological and possible archeological site located in San Diego County, California. In 2017, researchers announced that broken mastodon bones at the site had been dated to 130,000 years ago.
What is the Cerutti Mastodon site?
A period of climatic change at the very end of the Pleistocene the involved a return to glacial conditions.
What is the Younger Dryas?
The act or process of returning someone or something to the country or culture of origin.
What is repatriation?
A remote sensing method that uses light in the form of a pulsed laser to measure ranges (variable distances) to the Earth.
What is LIDAR?
This was found in 2019 to be the oldest undisputed archaeological site in the Americas and is located in Idaho. It dates to 16,000 years ago and suggests that humans first arrived in the Americas through watercraft.
What is the Coopers Ferry site?
A deeply stratified Paleoindian site located in the Great Plains of eastern Wyoming that includes stratified examples of many of the diagnostic Paleoindian points and assemblages found in South Dakota.
What is the Hell Gap site?