While ancient insects can tell us about climate and vegetation, they cannot tell us about
living conditions at archaeological sites.
Although taking different amounts of time according to region, environmental
conditions, and technological innovations, all societies eventually progress from bands
to state societies.
The pace of archaeological discovery is slowing down. There isn’t very much more left
to learn.
Although many scholars resent it, French has become the so-calledlingua franca, or
standard working language of archaeological discourse.
Iron was extensively used in the New World before the contact with Europeans.
Although ancient stories, legends, and writings are interesting, they are simply too
inaccurate to ever be useful for archaeological research.
Most ancient societies conformed to Rousseau’s idea of the “Noble Savage”: they
existed peacefully with each other without warfare or conflict.
Pollens are best preserved in arid zones, particularly loess or sandy sedimentary
deposits.
In a few caves with Upper Paleolithic art, such as Lascaux, the height and
inaccessibility of the art indicates the use of a ladder or scaffolding.
It is usually quite easy to answer the question “Who Owns the Past?”
Ethnographic evidence indicates that cultural groups prefer designs that belong to
specific symmetry classes, often as few as one or two classes.
Sadly, none of the objects stolen from the Iraqi National Museum have been returned.
Another term for the New Archaeology is Processual Archaeology.
Stone tools typically survive very poorly in the archaeological record, and rarely date
beyond approximately 5000 years ago.
The world’s oldest known cremation burial, dating to around 26,000 BP and found at
Lake Mungo Australia, has been returned to local Aboriginal groups and will probably
be reburied.
In the UK, even archaeological sites that are listed on the national Schedule of Ancient
Monuments face destruction due to agriculture.
Reflecting many other aspects of modern life in the 1960s, the New Archaeology was
more pessimistic than earlier, traditional approaches to archaeology.
Bones survive more successfully than teeth.
One of the most useful techniques for dating early human (hominin) sites in Africa
(which can be up to 5 million years old) is thermoluminescence (TL) dating.
If analysis of an ancient animal bone assemblage indicates the presence of very few
adult males but many adult females, this argues strongly for a managed dairy herd.
The abbreviation BP, when talking about the past, means Before Present, however
“Before Present” in this sense is taken to mean “before the year 1950.”
Much evidence for malnutrition in the past can be found in art and literature.
A formidable amount of ancient Aboriginal clothing was preserved at Upper Mangrove
Creek, much of which was over 3000 years old.
So-called preservation laws in the US guarantee that archaeological remains will always
be preserved.
When provided with a radiocarbon figure such as 3700 + 100 BP, the first number
(3700) is the number of years before the year 1950.
Excavations at York can be considered “urban archaeology”.
A “bottom-up” perspective in archaeology often means studying the role of the
individual in a society.
Flannery and Marcus concluded that Guil Naquitz was inhabited by a small microband
of perhaps only 4″5 people.
Style, although difficult to define, cannot exist except as an aspect of an activity.
Most Paleolithic cave art depicts humans or objects.
Provenience is the horizontal and vertical position of an artifact within the matrix.
Even if the British Museum were to return the so-called Elgin Marbles to Greece, the
Greeks would have no where to put them: the Acropolis museum is antiquated and in
poor condition.
Because lead is so very hard, it was used for a wide range of purposes in ancient times
despite how difficult it was to hammer and shape.
The early Europeans who met the Calusa were surprised by their advanced and
powerful society because they lived in permanent towns, had temples and earthworks,
and practiced a complex religion.
One of the remarkable aspects of tzi, the Iceman found in the Alps, is that he was a
prehistoric human accidentally preserved with his everyday clothing and equipment,
rather than carefully buried or sacrificed.
Thankfully, there are some signs that it is becoming more difficult to sell recently
looted antiquities on the open market.
It is harder to determine the sex of a child’s skeleton than an adult’s skeleton.
If one digs up a cemetery and assesses the age and sex of its occupants, an accurate
guide to the life expectancy and mortality pattern of a particular culture is likely.
Metals such as gold, silver, and lead do not survive well in the archaeological record.
The footprints discovered at Laetoli, Tanzania, by Mary Leakey and dated to about
3.6″3.75 million years ago suggest that the early hominins who made them could walk
upright, but only in extreme situations and in a very different way than we do today.
Julio Tello, considered by many to be the first “indigenous archaeologist” in the
Americas, was originally a medical doctor who is famous for work in his home country
of
a) Mexico
b) The United States
c) Cuba
d) Peru
e) Brazil
Who formed the first cabinets of curiosities?
a) Sigmund Freud
b) Renaissance princes
c) Sir John Soane
d) the Aztecs
e) none of the above
When artifacts or features are described as in situ, archaeologists mean that they are left
a) derived from the local environment
b) in the same square where discovered
c) where originally used or discarded
d) originally from the same city under excavation
e) none of the above
Xeroradiography has confirmed that the bog body known as Lindow Man died as a
result of:
a) being garroted
b) being hit in the back of the head twice with a weapon
c) having his throat slit with a knife
d) sustaining a blow to his back that broke a rib
e) all of the above
One form of geochemical analysis allows detection of the _________ content of soil,
which has been demonstrated to correlate with ancient settlements not visible from the
surface or even those with no apparent architectural features
a) copper
b) zinc
c) silicates
d) carbonates
e) phosphate
A good example of a symbol is
a) money
b) a soldier’s badge
c) a scale weight
d) a depiction of an animal painted on a cave wall
e) all of the above
A fundamental cognitive step was the
a) development of symbols for measurement (such as units of time, length, or weight)
b) deliberate burial of humans
c) development of mobiliary art
d) development of parietal art
e) all of the above were important cognitive steps
Exchanges of all types (imitation, emulation, competition, etc) between autonomous
socio-political units is known as
a) systematic exchange
b) market exchange
c) reciprocity
d) bartering
e) peer-polity interaction
Microbotanical analytical techniques include the study of
a) pollen
b) fossil cuticles
c) diatoms
d) rock varnishes
e) all of the above
The most coherent record of climate change on a global scale is obtained through
a) deep-sea cores
b) pollen sequences
c) faunal profiles
d) lexicostatistics
e) varves
Similar to traditional methods of historical investigation and the culture-historical
approach, this form of explanation is based primarily on descriptive historical
frameworks
a) Structuralist approach
b) Ecological determinism
c) Marxist archaeological approach
d) Processualist approach
e) Historiographic approach
Who is considered to be the first person to have conducted a scientific excavation of an
ancient site?
a) Thomas Jefferson
b) General Pitt-Rivers
c) Sir William Flinders Petrie
d) Willard Libby
e) Charles Darwin
Peer-polity interaction takes a variety of forms, such as
a) language and ethnicity
b) flow of commodities
c) ceremonial exchange of valuables
d) competition
e) all of the above
_____________ were a significant development in pyrotechnology during the early
Neolithic in the Near East around 8000 bc
a) Furnaces for iron smelting
b) Furnaces for home heating
c) Ovens for bread baking
d) Ovens for making faience
e) Coal stoves
Although impressions of textiles or flexible basketry on fired clay are attested as early
as 25,000″27,000 years ago, the earliest known trace of actual cloth is a white linen
fragment found clinging to an antler tool from Turkey, dating to approximately
a) AD 1
b) 12th century AD
c) 1000 BC
d) 7000 BC
e) 15,000 BC
James Hutton, author of Theory of the Earth (1785), studied the stratification of rocks
and concluded that
a) the same processes were continuing in the formation of the earth as in the past
b) multiple catastrophes were responsible for the formation of the earth
c) pressures of weight and gravity were solely responsible for earth’s formation
d) human activity (fires, forest depletion, dams, etc.) were responsible for the earth’s
formation
e) none of the above
Marks on Ice Age objects are sometimes incised in groups or lines. Alexander
Marshack, who has studied these artifacts, suggests that these markings may represent
notations of some type. He further links these notations to
a) local family record keeping, possibly of births
b) record keeping of animal herds
c) recordings of injuries or deaths in battle
d) phases of the moon and other astronomical events
e) early phonetic writing
The presence or absence of various elements in an artifact may be established by
examining the appropriate spectral line of their characteristic wavelengths. Although
used in the analysis artifact composition, __________________ has an accuracy level
of only about 25%, and has been superseded by ICPS
a) electron probe microanalysis
b) optical emission spectrometry
c) neutron activation analysis
d) electron spin resonance
e) none of the above
Monte Albn was founded around 500 BC on a previously unoccupied mountain. By 200
bc”ad 100, evidence for the Zapotec state is evident in the form of
a) rulers living in palaces
b) temples staffed by priests
c) ceremonial inscriptions on buildings, possibly listing more than 40 places subjugated
by Monte Alban
d) all of the above
e) a and c only
In order to assess the abundance of a species in a faunal assemblage, a calculation of the
smallest number of animals necessary to account for all the identified bones is generally
known as the
a) number of identified specimens (NISP)
b) minimum number of individuals (MNI)
c) taphonomy
d) Midwestern Taxonomic System (MTS)
e) none of the above
An approach that seeks to find universal laws in the structure and transformation of
human institutions, and which states that explanations must be empirically verifiable,
might be called
a) positivistic
b) a culture-historical approach
c) functional-processual approach
d) postprocessual approach
e) voodoo
____________ is a linguistic term used to refer to a group of language families with
enough similarities to suggest a genetic relationship
a) Lexicostatistics
b) Macrolingua
c) Proto Indo-European
d) Macrofamily
e) Phylofamily
Karl Butzer has distinguished three groups of cultural deposits: primary, secondary, and
tertiary. Primary cultural deposits are those which accumulate on the surface from
human activity, while secondary cultural deposits are best described as
a) primary deposits which have been completely removed from their original context,
and possibly reused
b) primary deposits which have undergone modification, either through physical
displacement or a change in the use of an activity area
c) primary deposits sealed immediately in a post-depositional episode
d) primary deposits with much less analytical usefulness
e) tertiary deposits that have suffered bioturbation
The process by which certain human bones fuse together, a process indicative of age, is
known as
a) fusion
b) osteoporosis
c) synapsis
d) synostosis
e) osteoconosis
Results of surveys conducted over longer periods of time, covering the area repeatedly,
tend to be more reliable because
a) the visibility of sites and artifacts can vary widely from year to year
b) the visibility of sites and artifacts may vary according to seasonal variation
c) the accuracy of field crew observations may change through time
d) all of the above
e) none of the above
Phylogenetic methods are increasingly being used by historical linguists to investigate
relationships between languages with the aid of
a) DNA testing of remote and isolated populations
b) new communication tools such as the internet and mobile phones
c) historical documentation and bi-lingual texts
d) computer programs that can process large quantities of data
e) all of the above
The recognition of a depression running across the top of the cranium, associated with
signs of markedly increased attachment of neck muscles to the back of the skull, has
been interpreted as resulting from
a) carrying heavy loads using straps across the forehead
b) intentional cranial deformation
c) ritual torture
d) injuries sustained while kneeling and grinding grain
e) injuries attributed to horse riding
Archaeologist Bjornar Olsen has called this “scientific colonialism”
a) The discouragement of females in science and archaeology
b) The ban on foreign archaeological research in China
c) The dominance of the English language in archaeology
d) The exclusion of Indigenous people from Western universities
e) The stocking of Western museums with foreign archaeological treasures
After the process of survey, excavation, recording, mapping, and post-excavation
analysis, all these efforts are largely wasted unless
a) the results are published
b) the site is completely excavated
c) a video or film is made
d) a museum is founded
e) a large party is held
The remains of large animals, such as sheep or cows, found on archaeological sites help
us build a picture of past human diet. These remains are known as:
a) Microfauna
b) Macrobotanical
c) Macrofauna
d) Geomorphs
e) Phytoliths