Custer’s “last stand” was immortalized in several paintings created in the 1890s by both
Native Americans and white American settlers. The images created by the American
whites generally show:
a. Custer and his army being slaughtered by Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho
warriors.
b. Custer and his men fighting bravely and calmly, well-disciplined to the end.
c. The Indian people fleeing in panic and fear, trying to escape Custer’s army that was
clearly controlling the battle.
d. The merciless slaughter of Indian women, children, and the elderly by Custer’s army.
The morphological projectile point types defined at Gatecliff became temporal types
when:
a. Surface projectile point finds corresponded to point types found in stratified deposits.
b. A series of radiocarbon dates determined the geological sequence at Gatecliff, and
time ranges could then be assigned to the projectile point types.
c. Dendrochronological dating assigned exact years to projectile point types.
d. Thermoluminescence dated the stratified deposits in which the different projectile
points were discovered.
A specialist from which of the four subfields of anthropology would be most likely to
study ritual and kinship among people in contemporary societies?
a. Archaeology.
b. Cultural anthropology.
c. Linguistic anthropology.
d. Biological anthropology.
Roughly what percent of professional archaeologists today are women?
a. 2%.
b. 10%.
c. 25%.
d. 50%.
The paradigm that holds that human culture is the expression of unconscious modes of
thought and reasoning, notably binary opposition, is:
a. Processualism.
b. Postprocessualism.
c. Structuralism.
d. Materialism.
An “antiquarian” is someone who is interested in:
a. reconstructing the lifeways of commoners in classical ancient civilizations such as
Greece and Rome.
b. detailed documentation of the context in which prehistoric artifacts are found.
c. ancient objects strictly for their artistic value, rather than for the information they
provide about the people or culture that produced them.
d. everything that artifacts can tell us about the past.
Kathleen A. Deagan provides an example of the “coming of age” of archaeology
because:
a. She is actively involved in bringing archaeology to the public.
b. She is concerned with explaining social and cultural behaviors that she reconstructs
from artifacts.
c. Her research has helped establish historical archaeology as an anthropologically
relevant specialty of archaeology.
d. All of the above.
Giovanni Battista Belzoni stood apart from other antiquarians of his time due to the fact
that:
a. he took notes and made illustrations and observations of the places he visited.
b. he recovered numerous statues, mummies and carvings.
c. he removed another country’s cultural heritage from its homeland.
d. his methods were destructive enough to make archaeologists today cringe.
If the frequencies of morphological types change significantly through time, and can be
demonstrated to be restricted in time, the morphological types can be also be useful as:
a. Evidence of migration and subsequent population replacement.
b. Evidence of a shift in ancient peoples’ “mental templates.”
c. Temporal types.
d. Functional types.
Egalitarian societies are associated with _____________, while chiefdoms and states
are associated with_____________.
a. Foraging and horticulture/intensive agriculture.
b. Foraging/horticulture.
c. Pastoralism/intensive agriculture.
d. Horticulture/pastoralism.
In trapped charge dating methods, the amount of gamma radiation emitted by sediments
is measured by:
a. Optically stimulated luminescence.
b. Thermoluminescence.
c. A dosimeter.
d. Beta decay.
Which of the following is an example of a systemic context?
a. An artifact scatter left on the floor of an abandoned pithouse is covered by
windblown sediment.
b. A projectile point that had been lost while hunting is carried downstream in a flash
flood, becoming part of the archaeological record.
c. A ceramic vessel is manufactured, decorated, and used to cook with.
d. All of the above.
Plants that are of similar ages and that grew in the same soil could produce different
radiocarbon ages due to:
a. Use of different photosynthetic pathways.
b. The reservoir effect.
c. De Vries effect.
d. Problems with calibrating the radiocarbon curve.
Global Positioning Systems operate
a. By picking up continuously broadcast signals from at least four satellites.
b. Inadequately and therefore are not accurate for archaeological work.
c. Too expensively to aid most attempts at archeological inquiry.
d. By relying upon electric monitoring stations.
Soils are developmental sequences, distinctive layers that develop in place. B horizon
refers to
a. the topsoil layer where organic material and rock undergo chemical and mechanical
decomposition.
b. the layer where clays accumulate as rainfall and snowmelt transport them downward.
c. a mineral horizon consisting of parent material.
d. the cultural layer between the topsoil and mineral horizon.
If you have a site dominated by bones from the axial skeleton, you have:
a. A kill site.
b. A camp site.
c. Mostly upper and lower leg bones, scapulae, clavicles, pelves, metapodials, and
phalanges.
d. Mostly cranial bones, mandibles, vertebrae, ribs, sacrum, and tail bones.
Leroi-Gourhan’s interpretation that the symbols used in Upper Paleolithic cave art,
including abstract shapes and animal figures, were ultimately male and female symbols:
a. Was widely accepted by the archaeological community at the time, and is still
considered the most likely interpretation of cave art today.
b. Was based on ethnographic and ethnoarchaeological analogy, made stronger by the
historical ties shared by modern Europeans and the prehistoric populations who created
the cave art.
c. Provides a good example of how archaeologists can escape the paradigm within
which they are working to generate an objective and unbiased interpretation of
archaeological data.
d. Was most likely influenced by Freudian psychology, which was popular at the time.
If you are using a skeletal collection of modern fauna, of both sexes and different ages,
to identify specimens in an archaeofauna, you are using a:
a. Macrobotanical assemblage.
b. Palynological collection.
c. Comparative collection:
d. Phytolith assemblage.
Archaeologists are playing an increasingly important role in the investigation of human
rights abuses; for instance, professional archaeologists have been involved in
recovering MIAs in Vietnam, excavating mass graves in South and Central America,
and investigating massacre sites in places such as Croatia, El Salvador, and Rwanda.
Which of the following items would not be useful to an archaeologist on survey?
a. Graph paper.
b. A compass.
c. A tape measure in centimeters.
d. flashlight
Archaeological research has conclusively proven which of the following about the
earliest occupation of the New World?
a. Clovis was the first and only migration into North America, from which all native
peoples of the New World descended.
b. The earliest occupants of the New World traveled from Asia, across the Bering land
bridge, through the ice-free corridor between the continental ice sheets sometime during
the height of the last glacial between 25,000 and 10,000 years ago.
c. The earliest occupants of the New World traveled along the western coast of North
America, bypassing the interior and making it all the way to Tierra del Fuego; Clovis
was a later migration from Asia adapted to terrestrial hunting and was the first to
occupy the interior of North America.
d. None of the above; the timing and nature of the initial colonization of the New World
is still very much up in the air.
The potlatch:
a. Was a ceremony among 19th century Northwest Coast Native Americans.
b. Involved the giving away or destruction of property in order to acquire prestige.
c. Like many cultural behaviors, is best explained through both ideational and adaptive
perspectives.
d. All of the above.
What do Glassie and Deetz argue that the differences between Georgian material
culture and medieval material culture signal about differences between the cultures
themselves?
a. The differences mark a shift from a culture that focused on the group and saw people
as conforming to nature, to a culture that focused on the individual and control of
nature.
b. The differences mark a shift from a culture that focused on the individual and control
of nature, to a culture that focused on the group and saw people as conforming to
nature.
c. Medieval culture relied on the power of reason to understand the world around them
and gain control of the natural world, while Georgian culture was content to conform to
nature, rather control it.
d. The differences between medieval and Georgian material culture are so slight that
they really cannot indicate anything about the differences between the cultures
themselves.
Stratigraphy is a term that applies to
a. Decades of archaeological research
b. Techniques used by indigenous African peoples to create a structure
c. A site’s physical structure produced by deposition and sediments
d. Manufacture of pottery and implements
The purpose of Binford’s ethnoarchaeological research among the Nunamiut Eskimo of
Alaska was:
a. To document Nunamiut subsistence strategies in order to determine what prehistoric
adaptations in other arctic environments may have entailed.
b. To determine how the kinship system of the Nunamiut differed from the kinship
systems of cultures in non-marginal environments.
c. To observe living people and see what remains their activities left behind in an
attempt to strengthen inferences from archaeological data.
d. To determine the effect of seasonality on Nunamiut hunting practices.
When discussing projectile points, a “flute” refers to:
a. A distinctive characteristic of Clovis and Folsom projectile points.
b. A wide, shallow, longitudinal groove on the face of a projectile point.
c. The feature that is created by the removal of a channel flake.
d. All of the above.
Slave archaeology at Jefferson’s Monticello plantation in Virginia has helped interpret
historical records from the time. For instance, written records document that Jefferson
moved Critta Hemings (part of his house staff) from a large house with a brick floor, a
stone fireplace, and architectural embellishments, to a small simple house with dirt
floors. Yet she remained a part of his house staff, a normally favored status. Slave
quarter excavations showed:
a. That Hemings was demoted; she and her family were forced to move from the large
house where only they lived to much smaller quarters which they had to share with
several other families.
b. That the move actually provided Hemings and her family with access to subfloor pits
in which they could store their possessions, helping them maintain some privacy and
security.
c. That the move actually allowed Hemings and her family to have a house of their own,
rather than sharing a household with other families.
d. Hemings never actually moved; she and her family remained in her large house in
spite of Jefferson’s demands.
Total length, axial length, maximum width, basal width, maximum thickness,
midsection thickness, proximal shoulder angle, notch opening, and neck width are
examples of projectile point:
a. Phases.
b. Components.
c. Attributes.
d. Types.