During the course of hominin evolution, which of the following traits came first:
a) the controlled use of fire
b) the development of stone tools
c) the intentional burial of the dead
d) bipedal walking
e) symbolic behavior
Communities whose members live in permanent farmsteads or villages that are
occupied year-round are said to be:
a) civilized
b) mobile
c) hunter-gatherers
d) sedentary
e) domesticated
_______, first discovered at the site of Jericho but later found at several Pre-Pottery
Neolithic sites in the Levant, were often cached in small shallow pits or formed
foundation deposits for buildings.
a) Gold bangles
b) Wooden “Venus” figurines
c) Plastered and modeled human skulls
d) Arrowheads
e) Carved long bones of large animals
When Europeans arrived in the southern peripheries of Amazonia in central Brazil and
eastern Bolivia they found:
a) nothing: the area was uninhabited
b) only small hunter-gatherer groups
c) the capital of the Inca Empire
d) large, complex, sedentary chiefdoms
e) the lost city of El Dorado
Runa Simi:
a) was the “lingua franca” of the Inca Empire
b) was the mythological founder of the Lambayeque culture
c) was the capital of the Inca Empire
d) was the first Inca king
e) is the term used to describe the system of knotted rope accounting used by the Inca
Darwin’s concept of “the survival of the fittest” or “natural selection” is based on the
idea that organisms with inherited traits that enable them survive:
a) tend to reproduce at a lower rate than other members of their species and only pass
few of their unique traits on to their offspring
b) tend to reproduce at a greater rate than other members of their species and pass on
the favorable traits to their offspring
c) are more aggressive than other organism and kill off the competition
d) are less aggressive than other organisms and are usually killed by the pack
e) form an entirely new species that cannot reproduce with other organisms
The colonization of Eastern Polynesia (such as New Zealand, Hawai”i, and Easter
Island) took place before the colonization of the Lapita zone of Western Polynesia.
Based on evidence including the presence of large numbers of animal limb and
marrowbones at Oldowan sites, some researchers have postulated that the makers of the
Oldowan toolkit were:
a) top-tier predators
b) scavengers
c) vegetarians
d) agriculturalists
e) pastoralists
Cyrus and Darius I were Persian kings who ruled the __________ Empirem which, at
one point, included almost all of Southwest Asia and Egypt until it was conquered by
Alexander the Great.
a) Akkadian
b) Achaemenid
c) Assyrian
d) Roman
e) Greek
The complex hunter-gatherer group that inhabited Scandinavia in the Late Mesolithic
was the:
a) Erteblle-Ellerbek Culture
b) Bandkeramik Culture
c) Celts
d) Druids
e) Menhir Culture
The state of __________, under the command of their leader Qin Shi Huangdi, brought
the Eastern Zhou dynasty to an end in 221 bc.
a) Western Zhou
b) Shang
c) Qin
d) Ba
e) Luoyang
In Medieval Europe, enquiry about the past was focused on:
a) scientific experimentation
b) debate and speculation
c) the finds from archaeological digging
d) the results of direct observation
e) all of the above
Much of what we know about pre-European Polynesian social organization comes
from:
a) 19th-century oral history
b) genealogies recorded and remembered by Polynesian groups
c) the accounts of 18th-century explorers
d) all of the above
e) none of the above: this information is entirely unknown.
During the Pueblo II Period, communal “great houses” were built in the San Juan Basin,
some of which contained hundreds of rooms and were up to four stories high. The
building of these great houses and the society that surround them have been termed:
a) the Chaco Phenomenon
b) the Anasazi Phenomenon
c) the Hohokam Phenomenon
d) the Navajo Phenomenon
e) the Mesa Verde Phenomenon
Social complexity
a) is not exclusive to farming societies
b) is only seen in farming societies
c) is not detectable in the archaeological record
d) is exclusive to state-level civilizations
e) none of the above
After the collapse of Mittani, the dominance of the city of Ashur rose to a point where it
became the first capital of:
a) the Persian Empire
b) the Akkadian Empire
c) the Hittite Empire
d) the Assyrian Empire
e) the Egyptian Empire
Our understanding of the development and spread of dairying in Europe has been
greatly expanded upon through studies of the human gene for:
a) language
b) lactose tolerance in adults
c) red hair
d) resistance to small pox
e) green eyes
The site of Cuzco is associated with:
a) the Wari Empire
b) the Chimor Empire
c) the Lambayeque culture
d) the Inca Empire
e) the Chavn state
Alexander the Great was from the kingdom of:
a) Athens
b) Macedon
c) Sparta
d) Etruria
e) Persia
Because the early languages that spread from the Philippines through Indonesia and
into the western Pacific share 80″90 percent of their common, everyday vocabulary, this
hints at:
a) a slow dispersal of various different Polynesian peoples who had been isolated for
some time
b) a rapid dispersal of a largely homogeneous Polynesian diaspora
c) only one single attempt at the colonization in the Pacific on the part of Polynesians
d) a significant amount of linguistic influence from Australian Aboriginal groups
e) increased warfare and famine on the Asian mainland
Which of the following uses has been proposed as a possible function of the Acheulean
hand axe?
a) The attraction of females by males with well-made hand axes.
b) A weapon to throw at animals during hunting.
c) For chopping wood.
d) a, b, and c
e) None of the above
During the Mesolithic period, the subsistence strategies of communities living in
Western India, the Ganges Plain, Central India, and Sri Lanka can all be described as:
a) limited
b) ocean-focused
c) broad-spectrum
d) agriculturally intense
e) pastoral
Which of the following statements correctly sums up current understanding of whether
the hominins that made the Oldowan tools constructed structures?
a) Yes: there are several Oldowan sites that display clusters of circular living huts
b) No: because no Oldowan structures have been found we know that they did not make
them
c) Perhaps: temporary structures made out of perishable material such as tree nests are
not preserved in the archaeological record
d) Yes: a “Pompeii-like” burial of an Oldowan site under volcanic ash has produced a
whole preserved “village”
e) No: scientific analyses on preserved hominin skulls have shown that they did not
have the mental capacity to construct structures
The belief that individuals in the past are knowledgeable actors and thus have been able
to effect changes within their society has given rise to the development of:
a) cultural ecology
b) cognitive archaeology
c) agency theory
d) experimental archaeology
e) ethnoarchaeology
The variability of living human mtDNA:
a) is surprisingly low
b) suggests that the set of specifically modern genes came together very recently
c) suggests that a population bottleneck occurred
d) is one-tenth that of chimpanzees
e) all of the above
The Archaic Period in the Americas, which started around 9500 bc, coincides with
environmental changes related to:
a) el Nio
b) the eruption of Mt. St. Helens
c) a reversal of the magnetic poles
d) the retreat of the glaciers
e) the beginning of the last Ice Age
A flat stone that has been flaked on both sides to produce a sharp edge around the entire
periphery is called a:
a) scraper
b) knife
c) biface
d) cobble
e) blade
The city of __________ became the administrative center of an Achaemenid satrapy, or
province during the so-called “dark age” after the collapse of the Indus cities, and was
then conquered by Alexander the Great.
a) Taxila
b) Pratisthana
c) Anuradhapura
d) Pataliputra
e) Kot Diji
The earliest plants to be domesticated in Mexico and perhaps in all of the Americas
were:
a) maize and beans
b) barley and wheat
c) squash and the bottle gourd
d) cotton and chili peppers
e) chickpeas and lentils
Demographic studies indicate that when Polynesians colonized previously unsettled
resource-rich islands:
a) population numbers rapidly decreased as people fought over rights to the new land
b) population numbers stayed steady over long periods of time
c) population numbers were directly proportionate to the number of canoes people
arrived in
d) population numbers rapidly increased, at least for the first 500 years or so
e) population numbers first decreased sharply then increased slowly
The Homo floresiensis skeleton found on the island of Flores in Indonesia is of
particular interest to scholars because:
a) it has been shown to be the first human species that used fire
b) there is evidence of early surgery having been performed on this individual
c) cave paintings associated with the skeleton point to early symbolic behavior
d) it proves conclusively that within the past 1,000 years species of Homo other than
Homo sapiens still existed
e) it may represent the dwarfing of a Homo species in response to the pressures of an
island environment
While there is some genetic evidence for mating between Neanderthals and humans,
modern Africans do not share this genetic component meaning that this mixing would
have happened somewhere in Eurasia.