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archaeological culture - ✔✔- Subdivision of culture areas are called "traditions" or archaeological cultures
- archaeological cultures are not ethnographic cultures
- spatial patterning in material cultures defines archaeological cultures
- usually use the same materials
- multiple different groups of people would have lived here
- by seeking out clusters of temporal types, we construct site components
- record change over space
archaic period - ✔✔- 8,000 - 1,000 B.C.
- a time when people made heavier use of plant foods, began to develop distinctive regional traditions in
material culture, and experimented with agricultural crops (i.e. maize)
assemblage - ✔✔- a collection of artifacts of one or several classes of materials (stone tools, ceramic,
bones) that comes from a defined context, such as a site, feature or stratum
- collections of artifacts recovered from some unit of provenience
attribute - ✔✔- an individual characteristic that distinguishes one artifact from another on the basis of its
size, surface texture, form, material, method of manufacture, or design pattern
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,- there is no rule governing the number of attributes to record but archaeologists try to use as few as seem
necessary to accomplish the purpose of typology
cataloging - ✔✔- begins with the classification of artifacts into types, or typology
- essential because provenience is lost without it and without providence an artifact's value to future
researchers is greatly reduced
component - ✔✔An archaeological construct consisting of a stratum or set of strata that are presumed to
be culturally homogeneous. A set of components from various sites in a region will make up a phase.
conservation - ✔✔- the first step after excavation is to conserve the recovered materials
- for every week spent excavating, archaeologists spend 3 to 5 weeks or more cleaning, conserving, and
cataloging the finds
- begins with the classification of artifacts into types, or typology
culture area - ✔✔- subdivision of culture areas are called "traditions" or archaeological cultures
- twentieth-century concept used when scholars recognized not all Native American socities were alike
- formalized observations into culture areas, large regions defined primarily in terms of what people ate
functional type - ✔✔- a class of artifacts that performed the same function; these may or may not be
temporal and/or morphological types
- reflect how objects were used in the past
historic period - ✔✔- European contact
- in America after 1500
lithics - ✔✔the technical name for tools made from stone
Mississippian period - ✔✔- A.D. 1,000 - 1,5000
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, - chiefdoms, population changes, agriculture, pottery shape changes
morphology - ✔✔- the first analytical step is to describe the artifacts carefully and accurately by grouping
into morphological types to make sense of the past
- the study of the shape of artifacts
morphological type - ✔✔- they are abstract and purely descriptive
- types are not the artifacts, they are composite descriptions of many similar artifacts meaning that every
type must encompass a certain range of variability (several colors may have been applied, absolute size
may fluctuate, etc.)
- help communicate what the archaeologist found without describing every single specimen
- no set rules exist for creating these types, although basic raw material is normally the first criterion,
followed by shape
paleoindian period - ✔✔- 25kya - ~8,000 B.C.
- first occupation to domestication and pottery
period - ✔✔- archaeologists divided pre-history into periods based on gross changes in easily observable
archaeological remains
- the concept of periods is still used to organize archaeological thinking about time
- periods record change over time
phase - ✔✔- a block of time that is characterized by one or more distinctive artifact types
- defined by temporal types
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