Argon-argon dates volcanic rock, especially ash, in layers that are
_______________years old.
a. thousands.
b. tens of thousands.
c. hundreds of thousands.
d. millions.
Which of the following was not created by the National Historic Preservation Act?
a. The National Register of Historic Places.
b. Steep monetary penalties and mandatory jail time for the looting of archaeological
sites on federal or tribal lands.
c. State Historic Preservation Offices.
d. The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation.
Clea Koff earned her degree in anthropology and joined a team of experts brought
together by
a. Society for Physicians and Archaeologists (SPA)
b. Criminal Tribunals, International
c. Physicians for Human Rights
d. Society for American Archaeology (SAA)
How does Leone explain the appearance and popularity of formal Georgian gardens in
wealthy Annapolis homes during the mid 18th century?
a. The wildness and lack of order in the gardens represented the Georgian idea that
humans could ultimately never triumph over nature, and that natural beauty would
always surpass cultural attempts to beautify the natural world.
b. The gardens expressed the Enlightenment idea of the power of reason over nature,
and that nature controlled by culture was more desirable and attractive than nature
alone.
c. Georgian gardens, like any other stylistic choice, came into favor and went out of
favor randomly; the gardens had nothing to do with the rest of Georgian culture.
d. The gardens expressed the ideal of social and economic equality among all people
which was popular at the time.
Using palynological data, Haynes and Mehringer concluded that the climate at the
Lehner Clovis site in southeastern Arizona 11,000 years ago was:
a. Only slightly wetter and cooler than today, followed by a rapid shift toward drier
conditions.
b. Only slightly drier and warmer than today, followed by a rapid shift toward wetter
conditions.
c. Much drier and warmer than today; only a large shift in temperature and precipitation
would have caused such a different environment at the site.
d. Much wetter and cooler than today; only a large shift in temperature and precipitation
would have caused such a different environment at the site.
Which of the following is true of the space-time systematics of North American
archaeology?
a. Space-time systematics is still the main focus of archaeological research, as basic
spatial and temporal changes in material culture remain undocumented for much of
North America.
b. Space-time systematics has been largely worked out, and no longer preoccupies
archaeology as it did in the first half of the 20th century.
c. Space-time systematics is not very useful for North American archaeology, because
material culture remained unchanged for long periods of time in many places.
d. While space-time systematics has dominated European archaeology for the past
century, its utility for North American archaeology is just now being recognized.
Coprolites from the New World that are 12,000 or more calendar years old:
a. Are some of the earliest evidence of a presence in North America.
b. Are extremely rare.
c. Suggest that the peopling of the Americas can be explained by only one migration of
people from northeastern Asia.
d. Are too poorly preserved to provide bioarchaeologists with any meaningful data.
When archeologists refer to the place where an artifact, ecofact, or feature was found
during survey or excavation, they use the term
a. provenience.
b. in situ.
c. strata.
d. position.
Natural levels are preferable to arbitrary levels because:
a. arbitrary levels can potentially jumble together artifacts that come from different
natural strata and thus different periods of time.
b. the depth of natural levels is determined by statistical sampling strategies, while
arbitrary levels are chosen subjectively.
c. arbitrary levels follow the natural stratigraphy, which may not be able to distinguish
between occupational surfaces.
d. natural levels are much simpler and faster to excavate than arbitrary levels.
Which of the following is not true of science?
a. It is empirical.
b. It is systematic and explicit.
c. It always provides the right answer to a question.
d. It is self-critical, always trying to prove itself wrong.
Which of the following dating techniques helps to bridge the dating gap between
radiocarbon and potassium argon dating?
a. Thermoluminescence
b. AMS dating
c. Argon-argon.
d. None of the abovethere is no gap as radiocarbon and potassium-argon date the same
age range of materials.
In reconstructing ancient environments, pollen is useful because:
a. It preserves well over a long period of time.
b. Large amounts of pollen are trapped in sediment over time.
c. Pollen is distinctive of the species of plant that produced it.
d. All of the above.
Microwear traces on stone tools can be difficult to identify due to which of the
following?
a. Prehistoric resharpening of stone tools.
b. Multiple uses of stone tools prehistorically.
c. Brief tool use that did not permit formation of distinctive wear traces.
d. All of the above.
The field that conducts activities related to compliance with legislation that protects
cultural resources is:
a. Academic archaeology.
b. Historic archaeology.
c. Cultural resource management.
d. Natural resource management.
Archaeology differs from ethnology in that archaeology
a. studies cultural evolution and culture change over a century or two.
b. can address the entire history of humanity.
c. deals with the space of continents or hemispheres.
d. can address the entire history of humanity and deals with the space of continents or
hemispheres.
Bioarchaeological analysis of the skeletal remains from the African Burial Ground site
determined that unlike the slaves’ lives in New York, their lives in Africa were:
a. Plagued by malnutrition and severe disease, with abundant evidence of hypoplasias
and other pathologies
b. Relatively free of malnutrition and severe disease, with little evidence of hypoplasias
or other pathologies.
c. Characterized by extremely hard physical labor, as indicated by enlarged muscle
attachments and lesions from torn muscles.
d. Characterized by extreme violence and warfare, as indicated by the presence of
abundant healed and unhealed skeletal fractures.
Larsen was interested in how well the people of Stillwater Marsh lived because
a. He wanted to show how “brutish” hunters-gatherers were.
b. He wanted to show that hunter-gatherers worked very hard.
c. He wanted to show that the hunter-gatherers had barely enough food to eat.
d. He wanted to use the skeletal data to provide a more objective assessment of foraging
lifeways.
NAGPRA:
a. Allows scientists to study Native American skeletal material and associated grave
goods for a specific amount of time before repatriating the material to a culturally
affiliated tribe.
b. Allows tribes to decide what happens to all pre-Columbian human remains and
artifacts, regardless of whether or not cultural affiliation can be demonstrated.
c. Requires the repatriation of Native American human skeletal remains, associated
grave goods, or sacred objects to culturally affiliated tribes, who can then decide what
to do with the remains or objects (study them, rebury them, etc).
d. Requires Native Americans to return all previously repatriated Native American
skeletal material and associated grave goods to scientists for further study.
The following statement is true about Postprocessual archaeology:
a. Explanations are explicitly scientific and objective.
b. Attempts to remain ethically neutral; claims to be explicitly nonpolitical.
c. Less enthusiastic about scientific methods and denies possibility of objectivity.
d. Views culture from a systemic perspective and defines culture as adaptation.
When documentary evidence is not available, known ages of artifact types are
generated to create age-range or median ages for historical features or sites using
a. TPQ.
b. mean ceramic age dates.
c. radiocarbon dates.
d. TPQ and mean ceramic age dates.
As a result of Kantner’s work at Chaco Canyon, it was determined that
a. Small stone shrines do not occur.
b. People did not use predicted footpaths on a regular basis.
c. Large circular stone shires were almost always found with the roads, not the
predicted pathways.
d. Roads did not serve simply as part of the Chacoan economy.
The first thing a bioarchaeologist would do when analyzing a human skeletal
assemblage would be to:
a. Confirm that all the bones in the assemblage were human.
b. Calculate MNI and NISP.
c. Determine the sex and age at death of the individuals represented.
d. Determine any paleopathology present in the individuals represented.
If an archaeologist excavates one archaeological site, and makes generalizations about
the prehistoric society as a whole from what he or she finds at that one site, then the
generalizations will most likely be:
a. Applicable to the society as a whole as long as the excavated site was a “typical” site.
b. Applicable to the society as a whole as long as the society consisted of
hunter-gatherers rather than agriculturalists.
c. Applicable to the society as a whole as long as the society consisted of
agriculturalists rather than hunter-gatherers.
d. Biased, representing only part of the range of activities that the society was involved
in.
Archaeology is about the
a. living and dead
b. past and future
c. data necessary to prove science is infallible
d. A & B
Midden is a term that refers to
a. Charcoal, bones of animals and stone implements in an archaeological context
b. Trash heaps created by people
c. Fragments of pottery
d. A site’s physical structure
Lipids can provide information about the types of foods people consumed
prehistorically. In order to identify food residues, lipids can be extracted from:
a. Cooking vessels.
b. Faunal remains.
c. Stone tools.
d. Phytoliths.
Coprolites provide evidence for the earliest human presence in North America.
Formal analogies are strengthened if:
a. Many ethnographic cases demonstrate the same pattern, and the archaeological and
ethnographic cases have many attributes in common.
b. They can be drawn between cultures with drastically different settlement systems,
subsistence practices, or economies.
c. Close cultural continuity cannot be demonstrated between archaeological and
ethnographic cases.
d. All of the above.
Which of the following is an example of reasoning through uniformitarian principles,
rather then simple analogy?
a. Ethnographic data on the hunting and gathering Shoshone in Nevada suggest that in
the 19th century the Shoshone lived in groups of about 25 people; therefore prehistoric
people who lived in the same area with the same economy also lived in groups of about
25.
b. Ethnographic data from all over the world show that hunter-gatherers live in groups
of about 25 people; therefore prehistoric hunter-gatherers in the deserts of Nevada also
lived in groups of about 25 people.
c. It has been demonstrated using ethnographic data that in a variety of different kinds
of environments a group of hunter-gatherers of about 25 people contains about 7 active
hunters and this number is sufficient to ensure that someone comes home with game
each day; increasing the number of hunters beyond 7 increases the amount of food
needed for the group but does not appreciably increase the chance that some hunter will
come home with game; thus we argue that prehistoric hunter-gatherers also lived in
groups of about 25 people.
d. Ethnographic data on highly nomadic hunter-gatherers in desert environments who
depend heavily on plants for food rather than on animals show that they live in groups
of about 25 people; since prehistoric foragers in the Great Basin deserts were highly
nomadic and heavily dependent on plant foods we argue that prehistoric peoples there
lived in groups of 25 people.
Multiple working hypotheses result when:
a. Several hypotheses potentially explain the same data.
b. Scientists have no sound hypothesis to test, but end up testing several equally
unlikely explanations in order to keep their research moving forward.
c. The simplest hypothesis cannot be falsified.
d. Scientists cannot produce replicable results with the most likely hypothesis.
Projectile point types are usually named after the archaeologist who discovered them.
Scientific and humanistic approaches within archaeology can be compatible, each
emphasizing different goals of archaeological research.
TIMS (Thermal Infrared Multispectral Scanning) is only useful when conducted at
extremely high altitudes on cloudless days.
The National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 establishes an on-going “National
Register of Historic Places” of “significant” archaeological and historic sites.
Soil resistivity works by measuring the amount of resistance radar waves encounter as
they move below the ground.
NAGPRA does not say what happens to remains or objects that cannot be affiliated;
they remain “unaffiliated.”
Biological anthropologists today agree that Neanderthals did not interbreed with
modern humans and were instead an evolutionary dead end.
You have excavated a site, but have recovered no organic remains. The only material
recovered from the site is pottery. Using the Argon-Argon technique would be the best
way to date the site.
The archaeological record is almost always a direct reflection of the human behavior
that produced it.
The cost of cultural resource management projects is always paid by the federal
government.