CRM survey projects differ from research survey projects in that:
a. More volunteers and students are usually present on CRM survey projects, and so
these projects tend to move more slowly than research survey projects.
b. In CRM, the research question determines the survey area.
c. In CRM, the size and nature of the development project largely determines the survey
area.
d. If sites are located on CRM survey projects, investigators do not need to determine
their significance.
Archaeologists prefer to dig in arbitrary rather than natural levels whenever possible to
reduce the risk of mixing artifacts from different strata.
Tree ring dating is possible because:
a. Variable tree ring widths preserve information about past climatic change and can be
fit into a long-term chronological sequence.
b. Tree rings can simply be counted and subtracted from the present to determine the
calendar date of the tree’s death.
c. All trees respond to climatic variability in the same way.
d. All of the above.
When an archaeologists refers to a datum point he or she means
a. the zero point that is not fixed so that it can be used as a moveable reference point.
b. the zero point that is fixed, but cannot be used as a reference point.
c. the zero point that is fixed and can be used as a reference point.
d. that the archaeologist is using an outdated system to record a site.
Most historians ascribe the label of “first archaeologist” to:
a. Petrarch.
b. Ciriaco de” Pizzicolli.
c. Nabonidus.
d. Boucher de Perthes.
In order to understand the past, we need to examine the range of places where ancient
peoples lived. Hunter-gathers’ pattern of movement on the landscape is referred to as
a. Ecological adaptation
b. Seasonal round
c. Map triangles
d. Archeological round
Bioarchaeological analysis of the burials from the African Burial Ground site in New
York City showed that:
a. Nearly all of the burials were individuals > 55 years old; the earliest slaves were
therefore treated better than archaeologists had assumed based on the known treatment
of later slaves.
b. Half of the population died before reaching the age of 12, with another peak in
mortality between the ages of 15 and 20.
c. The population had suffered from extreme malnutrition and rampant disease, but they
were not forced to work very hard.
d. The skeletal remains were too poorly reserved to determine anything about
demographic structure or pathology of the burial population.
A total station, or EDM, is a device that:
a. allows the boundaries of archaeological sites to be objectively determined.
b. efficiently and accurately analyzes artifacts found during survey.
c. uses a beam of infrared light bounced off a prism to determine an artifact’s
provenience.
d. uses triangulation from radio waves received from satellites to determine your
position, either in terms of latitude and longitude or the UTM grid.
The Upper Paleolithic, the last major division of the Old World Paleolithic, dates to:
a. 10,000 BC to present.
b. 40,000-10,000 BC.
c. 90,000-10,000 BC.
d. None of the above; the temporal divisions of the Old World Upper Paleolithic vary
dramatically in different regions of the Old World.
According to Leone, which of the following aspects of Annapolis reflect an upper-class
Anglo-American show of power?
a. The layout of the city itself.
b. The formal gardens of wealthy households.
c. Use of optical illusions in landscape architecture to manipulate view and control
perspective.
d. All of the above.
A geologist observes glacial moraines and striations in an area that is today not
glaciated. The geologist interprets those features as evidence of past glacial activity. He
or she is utilizing:
a. Middle level theory.
b. The principle of uniformitarianism.
c. A relational analogy.
d. All of the above
The difference between a symbol and a sign is:
a. A symbol has connection to what it signifies, while a sign does not.
b. A sign has a connection to what it signifies, while a symbol does not.
c. Symbol is an archaeological term that refers to prehistoric behavior, while sign is an
ethnographic term that refers to the behavior of living people.
d. There is no difference between them; symbol and sign are terms that are use
interchangeably.
Political organization can be defined as:
a. The culturally prescribed behavior associated with men and women which can vary
from society to society.
b. The rules and structures that govern relations within a group of interacting people.
c. A society’s formal and informal institutions that regulate a population’s collective
acts.
d. A network of relationships through which individuals are related to one another by
ties of descent.
When archaeologists dig excavation units, they are concerned with:
a. horizontal provenience.
b. vertical provenience.
c. keeping the walls of the unit straight and perpendicular.
d. All of the above.
Which of the following is the final stage that Hill and Behrensmeyer found to be the
process of how large animal skeletons fall apart?
a. A decomposing animal carcass will collapse into a flat pile of bones.
b. The scapula detaches from the vertebral column, allowing the entire front limb to
drop away.
c. The vertebrae disarticulate.
d. The sun causes the exposed skull to flake away.
The difference between sufficient and necessary conditions in an explanation is that
sufficient conditions
a. Are those that must exist for a change to happen.
b. Are those that are the maximum ones needed for a change to occur.
c. Are those that are the minimum ones needed for a change to occur.
d. Are easier to ascertain than are necessary conditions.
Lewis Binford is responsible for establishing a concern for methods in reconstructing
the past. This became known as
a. Culture history
b. Stratification
c. New Archaeology
d. Archaeology
If an artifact is said to be in situ, it is:
a. missing.
b. in place.
c. in the process of being analyzed.
d. embedded in an animal bone.
The key to maintaining information about an artifact’s context is to record
a. archaeologist’s name.
b. artifact’s material.
c. provenience.
d. date of discovery.
Ice core records tell us all of the following except:
a. that the last 10,000 years have been cooler than the past 100,000 years.
b. that the last 100,000 years have warm.
c. that the last 10,000 years have been the warmest time of the past 100,000 years.
d. that the last 10,000 years have not been stable.
The “Out of Africa” hypothesis of modern human origins suggests that the earliest
modern humans fanned out of Africa to replace other hominids in other parts of the Old
World roughly:
a. 50,000 years ago.
b. 100,000 years ago.
c. 200,000 years ago.
d. 300,000 years ago.
The Chaco experiment, conducted by Judge, Hitchcock, and Ebert, showed that survey
samples:
a. Are very good at recording the general character of a region.
b. Are not very good at finding the unique or rare sites of a region.
c. Both A and B.
d. Are very good at finding both the sites that represent the general character of a
region, as well as the unique or rare sites.
What types of archaeological knowledge could be useful for law enforcement
personnel?
a. Knowing how to distinguish human from animal bone.
b. Knowing how to probe the ground to determine the location of subsurface pits.
c. Knowing how to read soil profiles, topographic maps, and soil reports, as well as map
surface evidence.
d. All of the above.
Which of the following is true of Maya kings?
a. They claimed to be descended from the gods, and conducted rituals to appease the
gods and prevent the universe from collapsing.
b. They received annual tribute from conquered populations, and allowed lesser nobles
to earn privileges and acquire control over conquered resources by helping the king.
c. They competed with one another to determine who was the greatest among them,
using war to subdue unruly neighbors as well as to demonstrate their ability to prevent
chaos in the world.
d. All of the above.
The quality of information collected through survey cannot be directly affected by the:
a. Sampling strategy.
b. Working conditions.
c. Transect interval.
d. Age of archaeologist
The Folsom site in New Mexico was discovered by:
a. George McJunkin, an ex-slave and rancher.
b. Jesse Figgins, director of the Colorado Museum of Nature and Science.
c. Boucher de Perthes, a French customs official and naturalist.
d. A. V. Kidder, Founder of Anthropological Archaeology.
If a bioarchaeologist is looking at the fusion of epiphyses on a human skeleton, he or
she is most likely trying to determine:
a. Race.
b. Age.
c. Sex.
d. Paleopathology.
A set of lineages that claims to share a distant, often-mythical ancestor is called a:
a. Moiety.
b. Clan.
c. Kinship system.
d. Berdache.
The classification of artifacts into types that organize and simplify artifact variability is
termed:
a. Attribute analysis.
b. Typology.
c. Phase designation.
d. Component designation.
In archeology, a living floor refers to
a. a distinct buried surface on which people lived.
b. an indistinct buried surface on which people may have lived.
c. a distinct surface on which people still live.
d. a distinct surface where living organisms can still be detected.
Which of the following does not apply to the concept of culture?
a. Culture is learned.
b. Culture is shared.
c. Culture is patriotism.
d. Culture is symbolic.
Anthropology is:
a. The study of past human behavior.
b. The study of all aspects of humankind.
c. The study of humans as biological organisms.
d. The study of humans as cultural organisms.
Water-screening is an especially useful technique when:
a. the deposits are coarse-grained and have low clay content.
b. artifacts are expected to be large and not easily broken, as water screening can be
very destructive.
c. artifacts are expected to be small and/or difficult to find without washing.
d. tiny fragments of carbonized plant remains must be recovered.
By the time an artifact reaches an archaeologist’s hand, it has usually long since ceased
to participate in the systemic context.
In anthropology, the terms “gender” and “sex” are used interchangeably.
It was Squier and Davis, through their intensive and thorough survey and
documentation of the mounds, who eventually concluded that the ancestors of modern
Native Americans had indeed built the mounds.
Ideology is a set of cultural, religious, or cosmological beliefs that rationalizes
exploitative relations between classes or social groups, masking the fact that one group
is exploiting another.
Because different plants use different photosynthetic pathways that discriminate against
carbon-13 in different ways, plants that are the same age can produce different
radiocarbon ages.
When Garbage Project workers investigated alcohol consumption in a sample of Tucson
households, they found that the amount of beer people reported drinking and the
amount of beer that they actually drank were quite different.
Graviturbation is an example of a formation process in the systemic context.
Bioarchaeologists can distinguish male from female skeletons, but only for adults, not
young children.
Although slavery is mostly thought of as a southern institution, it was also deeply
engrained in the north; the African Burial Ground in downtown New York City contains
the remains of between 10,000 and 20,000 people that were buried there during the
1700s.
The presence of lowland crops and animals in Chavn iconography strongly suggests
that lowland immigrants introduced these crops and animals to the highlands; because
the highland environment is so similar to that of the lowland, the imported plants and
animals would have flourished.
Research clearly demonstrates that the Bighorn Medicine Wheel in northern Wyoming
was intentionally designed as an astronomical observatory, specifically to mark the
summer and winter solstices.
A functional type is a morphological type that has specific chronological meaning for a
particular region.
Surface sites encountered on archaeological survey are generally not recorded because
they lack the contextual relationships necessary to establish solid chronologies.
Because it is illegal to rummage through people’s garbage, Rathje and colleagues
needed to obtain written permission from every household whose garbage they
analyzed.
Iconography refers to art forms or writing systems that symbolically represent ideas
about religion or cosmology.