ANT2100 Exam 1 Questions and
Answers 100% Pass
Artifacts - ✔✔Human made objects retrieved from sites that are the primary source of information for
archaeologists.
BC - ✔✔Before Christ, ex 3200BC (letters follow the date)
- latest BC date is 0BC
AD - ✔✔Anno Domini
- indicates a year that falls within the Christian era (after the birth of Christ)
- AD goes before the numerical age, ex: AD1066
- Earliest AD date is AD 1
CE - ✔✔- Common Era
- basically same thing as AD but is intended to avoid religious connotations
BCE - ✔✔- before Common Era
- basically same thing as BC, but it avoids the religious connotation
BP - ✔✔- Before Present
- most archaeologists prefer to use an age estimate
- AD 1950 is arbitrarily selected as zero point
EMILY CHARLENE © 2025, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 1
,- AD 1950- AD 1066 = 884 BP
Classical archaeology - ✔✔The branch of archaeology that studies "classical" civilizations of the
Mediterranean, such as Greece and Rome and the Near East
Antiquarian - ✔✔- studied antiques (ancient objects) largely for the sake of the objects themselves, not to
understand the people or culture that produced them
Middens - ✔✔- refuse deposit resulting from human activities, generally consisting of sediment; food
remains such as charred seeds, animal bone, and shell; and discarded artifacts
- trash heaps people created
Potsherds - ✔✔- fragment of pottery
Stratigraphy/strata - ✔✔- a site's physical structure produced by the deposition of geological and/or
cultural sediments into layers, or strata, to reveal age and original inhabitants
- established by Gertrude Caton-Thompson
Culture History - ✔✔- the kind of archaeology practiced mainly in the early to mid-twentieth century; it
"explains" differences or changes over time in artifact frequencies by posting the diffusion of ideas
between neighboring cultures or the migration of a people who had different mental templates for artifact
styles
New Archaeology - ✔✔An approach to archaeology that arose in the 1960s emphasizing the
understanding of underlying cultural processes and the use of the scientific method; today's version of
the "new archaeology" is sometimes called processual archaeology.
Why was Charles Lyell's 1865 book The Geologic Evidences for the Antiquity of Man important? - ✔✔it
connected time and geology
EMILY CHARLENE © 2025, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 2
, - uniformitarianism: idea that same geological processes that go on today have always occurred (shifting
of plates, sedimentary layers)
What is "Deep Time"? - ✔✔- the recognition that life was far more ancient than biblical scholars
recognized and that human culture had evolved over time
- Crude stone tools discovered in England and continental Europe, along with bones of long extinct
mammals "prove the existence of very ancient man" (Jacques Boucher Crevecoeur de Perthes)
Nabonidus - ✔✔- Most historians list him, the last king of the neo-Babylonian Empire as the "first
archaeologist"
- he rebuilt temples of ancient Babylon and searched the foundations for inscriptions of earlier kings
- "he looked to the physical residues of antiquity - things - to answer questions about the past."
Francesco Petrarch - ✔✔- During the Renaissance he proposed that the remote past was an ideal of
perfection and he looked to antiquity for moral philosophy
- the "father of humanism"
- he and his contemporaries began to collect ancient texts and to make systematic observations on
archaeological monuments
Boucher de Perthes - ✔✔- Challenged the understanding that the age of the earth was no more than about
6000 years
- found ancient axe heads in the gravel of the Somme river and the bones of long-extinct mammals and
realized that there was a very ancient man
James Ussher - ✔✔- Irish prelate who deduced from the Bible that Creation occurred in the year 4004 BC
(1581-1656)
EMILY CHARLENE © 2025, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 3
Answers 100% Pass
Artifacts - ✔✔Human made objects retrieved from sites that are the primary source of information for
archaeologists.
BC - ✔✔Before Christ, ex 3200BC (letters follow the date)
- latest BC date is 0BC
AD - ✔✔Anno Domini
- indicates a year that falls within the Christian era (after the birth of Christ)
- AD goes before the numerical age, ex: AD1066
- Earliest AD date is AD 1
CE - ✔✔- Common Era
- basically same thing as AD but is intended to avoid religious connotations
BCE - ✔✔- before Common Era
- basically same thing as BC, but it avoids the religious connotation
BP - ✔✔- Before Present
- most archaeologists prefer to use an age estimate
- AD 1950 is arbitrarily selected as zero point
EMILY CHARLENE © 2025, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 1
,- AD 1950- AD 1066 = 884 BP
Classical archaeology - ✔✔The branch of archaeology that studies "classical" civilizations of the
Mediterranean, such as Greece and Rome and the Near East
Antiquarian - ✔✔- studied antiques (ancient objects) largely for the sake of the objects themselves, not to
understand the people or culture that produced them
Middens - ✔✔- refuse deposit resulting from human activities, generally consisting of sediment; food
remains such as charred seeds, animal bone, and shell; and discarded artifacts
- trash heaps people created
Potsherds - ✔✔- fragment of pottery
Stratigraphy/strata - ✔✔- a site's physical structure produced by the deposition of geological and/or
cultural sediments into layers, or strata, to reveal age and original inhabitants
- established by Gertrude Caton-Thompson
Culture History - ✔✔- the kind of archaeology practiced mainly in the early to mid-twentieth century; it
"explains" differences or changes over time in artifact frequencies by posting the diffusion of ideas
between neighboring cultures or the migration of a people who had different mental templates for artifact
styles
New Archaeology - ✔✔An approach to archaeology that arose in the 1960s emphasizing the
understanding of underlying cultural processes and the use of the scientific method; today's version of
the "new archaeology" is sometimes called processual archaeology.
Why was Charles Lyell's 1865 book The Geologic Evidences for the Antiquity of Man important? - ✔✔it
connected time and geology
EMILY CHARLENE © 2025, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 2
, - uniformitarianism: idea that same geological processes that go on today have always occurred (shifting
of plates, sedimentary layers)
What is "Deep Time"? - ✔✔- the recognition that life was far more ancient than biblical scholars
recognized and that human culture had evolved over time
- Crude stone tools discovered in England and continental Europe, along with bones of long extinct
mammals "prove the existence of very ancient man" (Jacques Boucher Crevecoeur de Perthes)
Nabonidus - ✔✔- Most historians list him, the last king of the neo-Babylonian Empire as the "first
archaeologist"
- he rebuilt temples of ancient Babylon and searched the foundations for inscriptions of earlier kings
- "he looked to the physical residues of antiquity - things - to answer questions about the past."
Francesco Petrarch - ✔✔- During the Renaissance he proposed that the remote past was an ideal of
perfection and he looked to antiquity for moral philosophy
- the "father of humanism"
- he and his contemporaries began to collect ancient texts and to make systematic observations on
archaeological monuments
Boucher de Perthes - ✔✔- Challenged the understanding that the age of the earth was no more than about
6000 years
- found ancient axe heads in the gravel of the Somme river and the bones of long-extinct mammals and
realized that there was a very ancient man
James Ussher - ✔✔- Irish prelate who deduced from the Bible that Creation occurred in the year 4004 BC
(1581-1656)
EMILY CHARLENE © 2025, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 3
