The 100 countries that have signed the UNESCO Convention of 1970 agree to:
a. Regulate the import and export of cultural objects.
b. Forbid their nations’ museums from acquiring illegally exported cultural objects, and
return or otherwise provide restitution of cultural objects stolen from public institutions.
c. Establish ways to inform other nations when illegally exported objects are found
within a country’s borders, and establish a register of art dealers.
d. All of the above.
If the hypothesis that the wetlands of the Carson desert had been the focus of a
sedentary settlement system was correct, then Thomas and Kelly should have found:
a. Small, sparse settlements in the wetlands, and more intensive resource utilization of
surrounding areas.
b. Dense scatters of waste flakes and broken tools, or other remains of villages occupied
for years at a time, in the wetlands.
c. Mostly projectile points in the wetlands, with little or no accompanying waste flakes.
d. Abundant manos and metates in the pinon-juniper forests.
Analogies justified on the basis of close cultural continuity between the archaeological
and ethnographic cases or similarity in general cultural form are known as:
a. Formal analogies.
b. Relational analogies.
c. Middle-range analogies.
d. Uniformitarian analogies.
Which of the following is not true of a person’s culture?
a. It is learned.
b. It is shared.
c. It is symbolic.
d. It is biologically controlled.
If you were interested in examining trends in pottery style change through time which
of the following methods would you use?
a. Seriation.
b. Reverse stratigraphy.
c. Potassium-argon dating.
d. Argon-argon dating.
What happened to the remains of Ishi, the Yahi Indian who lived at the University of
California’s museum in San Francisco and demonstrated traditional arrow-making and
fire-starting for museum visitors?
a. His body was autopsied by the university’s medical center after his death in spite of
his wishes that no autopsy be performed.
b. His brain was sent to the Smithsonian Institution so that it could be put “to scientific
use”, where it sat for nearly 85 years.
c. His remains were returned to California’s Pit River tribe in 2000, and buried in a
secret location.
d. All of the above.
Studies of some of the skeletal data of Neanderthals have concluded:
a. They are different from modern Europeans.
b. There is continuity between Neanderthals and modern Europeans.
c. Similarities with Native American populations.
d. Modern human capabilities to use symbols
An archaeologist involved in analyzing and interpreting plant remains from
archaeological sites in order to understand past interactions between human populations
and plants would bea:
a. Palynologist.
b. Paleoethnobotanist.
c. Zooarchaeologist.
d. Bioarchaeologist.
Based on the level of public support,
a. more archaeology will be needed in the future.
b. less archaeology will be needed in the future.
c. archaeology has no future
d. archaeology will increasingly be a pastime of wealthy.
The index fossil concept was introduced to archaeology by:
a. Oscar Montelius.
b. A. E. Douglas.
c. Willard Libby.
d. Jeffrey Dean.
An example of a formation process is:
a. Artifact discard, loss, or purposeful burial.
b. Artifact reuse or recycling.
c. Natural disturbance processes, such as floral- and faunalturbation.
d. All of the above.
Newcomer designed blind experiments to test the accuracy of Keeley’s high-power
microscopy method of identifying stone tool microwear. These experiments:
a. Established the validity of Keeley’s high-power microscopic method; Keeley was
able to correctly identify the microwear on many of the experimental stone tools.
b. Determined that while high-power microscopic identifications could always be
correctly made on the type of material worked, identifying the area of the tool actually
used was much more difficult.
c. Showed that while high-power microscopic analysis can be useful, it is not as
effective as low-power analysis in determining microwear.
d. Showed that high-power microscopic analysis is useless in determining microwear.
Archaeologists know that the pottery wheel is associated with
a. The horse drawn cart
b. Craft specialization
c. Marketing of pottery
d. Craft specializations and marketing of pottery.
Realizing the significance of tzi, the “Ice Man”, archaeologists scoured the site and
recovered
a. clothing, tools and preserved food.
b. clothing, tools and stomach contents.
c. clothing, tools and a cedar canoe.
d. tools, stomach contents, and animal bones.
Important sites exist in poor countries that cannot afford the luxuries of protecting their
properties. A question brought out by the destruction of the 175-foot-tall, 1500-year-old
Bamiyan Buddas by the Taliban was
a. Does the world’s interest in global heritage override national sovereignty?
b. Should the world tell the Taliban what it can do to statues that are present in (what
was) their country?
c. Who pays for the cleanup of such destruction?
d. A and B
Ethnocentrism means
a. The study of ethnic ideology.
b. The attitude or belief that one ethnicity is shared by all.
c. The attitude or belief that one’s own cultural ways are superior to another.
d. A force that ethnicity’s apply to increase social complexity.
The socially recognized network of relationships through which individuals are related
to one another by ties of descent (real or imagined) and marriage is called:
a. A moiety.
b. A lineage.
c. Kinship.
d. Bilateral descent.
The year AD 1859 was an important year in the history of human thought because it
was the year that:
a. Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species.
b. The scientific community declared support for the remote antiquity of humankind.
c. Both A and B.
d. None of the above.
Trees have alternating dark and light rings. The dark rings are:
a. A year’s late summer/fall growth.
b. A year’s spring/summer growth.
c. A result of fire scarring.
d. A result of quick cell growth in climatically favorable conditions.
Christy Turner observed in human bones from Chacoan sites in the Four Corners region
of the Southwest
a. Evidence of bear stone tool cut marks in places that suggest flesh was stripped from
them.
b. Abraded surfaces similar to that produced by stirring boiling bones in a ceramic pot.
c. Evidence that people were killed and eaten by bears.
d. Both A and B
The discovery of Gatecliff Shelter in Nevada was in part a result of:
a. Old-fashioned “gumshoe survey”.
b. The detailed knowledge of the landscape that many of the crew members possessed.
c. The fact that the shelter was a local attraction, well-known by the people of Austin.
d. Oral traditions that had passed down through the generations.
A(n) ____________ perspective demonstrates that the first plants to be domesticated
and eventually turned into today’s agricultural staples began as wild plants with low
return rates, plants that were used when other, better resources were depleted.
a. Optimal foraging.
b. Historical particularist.
c. Post-processual.
d. Unilineal evolutionary.
Egalitarian societies are associated with _________and ____________.
a. Intensive farming/ domestication of animals
b. Hunting and gathering/agriculture
c. Hunting and gathering/horticulture
d. Horticulture/agriculture
Low level theory begins with archaeological objects and
a. Generates irrelevant facts or data about those objects and that will not be important to
later analyses.
b. Generates relevant facts or data about those objects that will not be important to later
analyses.
c. Generates relevant facts or data bout those objects that will be important to later
analyses.
d. Does not generate facts or data.
Analysis of the archaeofauna from the site of Chavn de Huntar, Peru, indicates:
a. A change in diet through time, with increasing reliance on domesticated llamas.
b. A change in diet through time, with increasing reliance on deer and large cats.
c. A decrease in leg bones and an increase in cranial and foot bones through time.
d. Extreme carnivore damage to the faunal assemblage, making it impossible to infer
any human behavior from the archaeofauna.
The first national park created explicitly for its archaeological rather than
environmental significance was:
a. Devil’s Tower.
b. Yellowstone.
c. Mesa Verde.
d. Montezuma’s Castle.
TIMS (Thermal Infrared Multispectral Scanner) can locate subsurface structures by:
a. Using radar beams; hard buried surfaces reflect more energy than softer surfaces.
b. Tracking how subsurface structures affect surface thermal radiation.
c. Measuring magnetic anomalies caused by burned subsurface structures.
d. Monitoring the electrical resistance of soils near buried structures.
Broken bison and antelope metapodials and phalanges within the Folsom component at
the Agate Basin site have been interpreted as evidence of:
a. Folsom hunters taking advantage of the abundant meat associated with these skeletal
elements.
b. Folsom hunters taking advantage of the abundant marrow associated with these
skeletal elements.
c. Game abundance in the late winter/early spring season, as Folsom hunters had access
to two different animal species.
d. Folsom hunters facing hard times with sparse food supplies in a harsh late
winter/early spring season.
If you live in a city with a high population density, with different types of specialized
subsistence strategies and non-food producing specialists, where elites control access to
strategic resources and where social organization is based on class membership (elite or
commoner), you live in a:
a. Tribe.
b. Band.
c. State.
d. Chiefdom.
Phytoliths are most useful for identifying:
a. Regional, rather than local patterns of vegetation.
b. Plants that were domesticated prehistorically since their phytoliths differ significantly
from those of wild plants.
c. The abundance of different kinds of grasses; not all plants produce phytoliths.
d. The abundance of all plants present at a site; all plants produce phytoliths.
Stone tools found in Neanderthal cave sites, divided into 63 types, including a variety
of points, scrapers, knives, handaxes, and denticulates are termed
a. Bordes, after the French archaeologist
b. Mousterian
c. Dibble, after the University of Pennsylvania investigator
d. Proximal
Phytolith analysis is most useful for reconstructing arboreal (tree) vegetation.
Although unilineal cultural evolution collapsed under the assault by Boas and his
students and is still rejected by anthropology today, archaeological data do show strong
regularities in human cultural evolution.
Mousterian artifacts are frequently associated with the remains of Homo erectus.
Although the analysis of plant remains from archaeological sites can provide important
information about the economies of prehistoric populations, a drawback of plant
remains is that they cannot be used to infer ritual significance or ideology.
Temporal types help define the phases that then become the basic slices of time that
archaeologists use to reconstruct the past.
Upper Paleolithic cave art in France and Spain reached its height during the
Magdalenian, the last major culture of the European Upper Paleolithic period, dating to
between 16,000 and 10,000 BC.
Archaeological phases are the same across large geographic regions and large spans of
time.
Bone breakage patterns would be good indicators of interpersonal violence and perhaps
even warfare. Unfortunately, healed bone breaks are virtually indistinguishable from
unbroken bone in prehistoric populations.
NAGPRA is fairly straightforward to implement because all Native American tribes
want culturally affiliated skeletal material and grave goods to be repatriated to them so
that they can rebury them.
One way to make relevant bridging arguments is to observe the workings of a culture in
its systemic context.
In general, bilateral descent is associated with industrialized nations; patrilineal descent
is associated with a wide range of conditions such as hunting and gathering, agriculture,
and pastoralism, as well as internal warfare; and matrilineal descent is associated with
horticulture, long distance hunting, and warfare with distant enemies.
In an archaeological excavation, the point from which all horizontal and vertical
measurements are made is termed the datum point.
Archaeologists have an obligation to consider views that differ from their own equally
valid; this includes frivolous claims made by individuals such as Erick von Dniken’s
claims that the Egyptian pyramids were built by aliens.
Ethnoarchaeological research suggests that the longer a site was occupied in the past,
the farther the distance between habitation structures and trash dumps.
The majority of field archaeologists are currently employed in educational institutions.