Much of the portable art from the Ice Age is of animals, but the most famous pieces are
the so-called _____________, such as the example from Willendorf, Austria
a) fertility figurines
b) Venus figurines
c) birthing figurines
d) grotesque figurines
e) action figurines
Considered a useful starting point for archaeologists who wish to understand the
lifestyles of people who lived in the past, the study of living human cultures and
communities is called
a) post-processualism
b) evolution
c) ethnography
d) environmental archaeology
e) Marxist archaeology
At Ozette, the extraordinary preservation of such organic materials as wooden
containers, baskets, weaving equipment, and fishing and hunting equipment, was the
result of
a) a glacier covering the settlement
b) a mudslide covering the settlement
c) a volcano burying the settlement in ash
d) an earthquake causing the settlement to sink
The study of the diet of larger civilizations
a) is too complex for modern archaeologists to study
b) is based entirely on scientific analysis and tests
c) is aided by the presence of written records and/or art depicting agriculture
d) can not be aided by ethnographic information
e) none of the above
Some Processualists have accused Critical Theorists of believing that one person’s idea
is as good as any other person’s idea: basically that fringe and alternative beliefs are as
good as those produced by experts and trained professionals. Such a belief is also called
a) relativism
b) positive feedback
c) the multiplier effect
d) superiorism
e) Marxism
Anthropologist __________ did groundbreaking work that demonstrated the vast
majority of claims for cannibalism in the ethnographic or ethnohistorical records were
untrustworthy
a) William Arens
b) Ian Hodder
c) Marcel Mauss
d) Eric Wolf
Forensic archaeology helps in the recovery and interpretation of
a) murder victims
b) individuals within mass burials
c) neither
d) both a and b
Around the 12th century BC, the Phoenicians developed a simplified phonetic script to
write their Semitic language. By the early 1st millennium BC, the script was adapted by
the Greeks to write their language, and the Greek alphabet was later modified in Italy to
write Etruscan and Latin. It was through Latin that our own alphabet (known as the
Roman alphabet) came to much of Europe, and later the rest of the world. This is a
positive example of ____________
a) Marxism
b) diffusion
c) praxis
d) postmodernism
e) environmentalism
The technique of stone tool manufacture that involved knapping a core in such a way
that large flakes could be removed and shaped into tools is called
a) the Oldowan industry
b) refitting
c) cold hammering
d) the Champollion technique
e) the Levallois technique
The presence of foreign pottery in a well-dated Egyptian context shows that this type of
pottery cannot be more recent than those Egyptian objects. This type of cross-dating
establishes a__________ for the manufacture of the foreign pottery
a) a terminus ante quem
b) an a maiore ad minus
c) an a minore ad maius
d) aterminum ad minore
e) a terminus post quem
Classification of artifacts is usually based on
a) similar surface attributes
b) similar shape attributes
c) similar technological attributes
d) all of the above
e) none of the above
One thing that cognitive-processual archaeologists and functional-processual
archaeologists agree upon is that
a) there is no objective truth
b) ideology is an active force within society
c) individual societies construct their own social reality
d) theories must be tested against facts
e) cognitive and symbolic aspects of society are very important
A leading thinker on Old World history who was heavily influenced by Marxist ideal,
Gordon Childe moved beyond simply describing cultural sequences by seeking to
understand
a) the origins of civilization
b) the origins of the Neolithic Revolution
c) the origins of the Urban Revolution
d) all of the above
e) none of the above
Marija Gimbutas is considered a pioneer in the field of ______________ because of her
emphasis on the importance of women in prehistory
a) androcentrism
b) feminist archaeology
c) cultural relativism
d) the New archaeology
e) cultural-historic archaeology
Emphasizing the scientific methodology of problem statement, hypothesis formulation,
and subsequent testing, ______________ is an approach that stresses the dynamic
relationship between the social and economic aspects of culture and the environment in
understanding culture change
a) Marxist archaeology
b) structuralist archaeology
c) culture-historical archaeology
d) postprocessual archaeology
e) processual archaeology
Before any archaeological fieldwork begins, archaeologists try to make their objectives
explicit in the form of a/an
a) academic publication
b) research design
c) doctoral dissertation
d) typology
e) assemblage
The most favorable sediments for the preservation of pollen are
a) arid loess sediments
b) frozen tundra
c) acidic and well-watered tropical sediments
d) sandy sediments
e) acidic and poorly aerated peat bogs and lake beds
Assumptions about genetic mutation rates stemming from the study of samples taken
from living people is the basis of
a) archaeomagnetic dating
b) DNA dating
c) optical dating
d) natural selection dating
e) tooth enamel dating
The travel writing of American lawyer and diplomat John Lloyd Stephens, published in
the 1840s, revealed the ruined cities of what civilization for the first time
a) the Ancient Egyptians
b) the Romans
c) the Druids
d) the Maya
e) the Barbarians
This absolute dating method was developed by A.E. Douglass, an American
astronomer, chiefly from work he conducted at the Pueblos of the American Southwest
a) varve dating
b) carbon dating
c) tree-ring dating
d) seriation
e) potassium-argon dating
Archaeological fraud perpetrated by __________, who was found to have planted
artifacts at all of the 168 sites he excavated, may have had a serious impact on how we
understand the Early Paleolithic in _________
a) Ignatius Donnelly; Greece
b) Heinrich Schliemann; Turkey
c) Thomas Jefferson; The United States
d) Shinichi Fujimura; Japan
e) Piltdown Man; China
The term for dating techniques based on the decay of radioactive isotopes which have
half-lives that are known and measurable is
a) relative
b) absolute
c) enumerative
d) radiometric
e) nucleic
CRM stands for
a) Critical Research Mandate
b) Cultural Research Material
c) Critical Resource Mitigation
d) Cultural Resource Management
e) Cultural Resource Mitigation
There are various indicators useful for the identification of domesticated animals in
archaeological contexts, such as
a) the presence of such tools as plows and yokes
b) the presence of certain deformities and diseases among the animal remains
c) changes in animal DNA
d) all of the above
e) a and b only
All of the following are examples of synthetic materials except
a) pottery
b) glass bottles
c) iron weapons
d) bronze shields
e) stone hand-axes
The study of artistic representations, often with an overt religious or ceremonial
significance, is known as
a) art history
b) semiotics
c) iconography
d) cognitive studies
e) cultural mapping
Temperate climates are not usually conducive to organic preservation at archaeological
sites because of
a) variable temperatures and fluctuating precipitation
b) steady humidity
c) hyper-aridity
d) water saturation
According to NAGPRA, museums must return specific skeletons, sacred objects, and
funerary goods to Native American groups if
a) they ask for them
b) they can no longer afford to store the objects
c) if the Native American group promises to preserve and conserve the remains
d) if cultural affiliation linking the goods to the modern group can be shown
e) if the objects were found to have been removed from native land before 1900 without
a permit
The long-term study of an earthwork constructed at Overton Down, England, as
experimental archaeology indicates that
a) preservation was better in the chalk bank, and preservation of leather and pottery was
unchanged after 4 years
b) preservation was superior in the turf core, and preservation of textiles and other
organic material had changed little after 4 years
c) preservation was quite poor regardless of whether artifacts were in chalk or turf,
primarily because of rodent and earthworm activity
d) archaeologists have been underestimating the effects of earthworm activity on
preservation and site formation processes
The primary goal of characterization is to
a) reveal information about the character of the person who made it
b) mimic how objects were used in the past
c) assign objects to standard categories so they can be stored properly
d) discover the source of the material an object is made out of
e) all of the above