Chapter 2: The Variety of the Evidence

o Most archaeological remains are simple: food remains, broken pottery, fractured stone tools, debris that formed as
people went about daily lives

Ecofact: non artifactual organic and environmental remains that have cultural relevance
• Ecofacts and artifacts are best studied when they are together on sites and are most productively studied with
their surrounding landscapes and grouped together into regions.
• Ecofacts can indicate what people ate or environmental conditions they lived in
• e.g. human skeleton, animal bones, plant remains, faunal and floral material, soils, sediments

Artifacts: humanly made or modified portable objects

• e.g. stone tools, pottery, metal weapons
• Artifacts help answer key cultural questions:
o E.g. clay pot can be analyzed for:
§ Date
§ Source of material - give evidence for the range and the contacts of the groups
§ Pictorial decoration on ports surface- may tell about ancient beliefs
§ Shape and food residues - may indicate information about pots use and/or ancient diet

Features: not portable artifacts

• e.g. hearths, architectural elements, soil stains, post holes, ditches, floors = evidence for complex features or
structures defined as buildings of all kinds (houses, temples, palaces, etc.)

Sites: places where artifacts, ecofacts, and features are found together
• Places where significant traces of human activity are identified
• Tell: A Near Eastern term that refers to a mound site formed through successive human occupation over a long
timespan

Context: an artifact’s context consists of its:

• matrix (the material surrounding it usually some sort of sediment, such as gravel or clay),
• provenience (horizontal and vertical position within the matrix – its exact position within the matrix)
• association (the co-occurrence together with other archeological remains, usually in the same matrix)
• Without context, artifacts loose much of their archaeological value
• Looting – artifact looses all context
• If materials have been shifted, archeologists need to be able to recognize that it is in a secondary context
• difficult to notice secondary context when forces of nature (seas, ice sheets, wind and water action) destroy
primary context

Formation Processes: the processes affecting the ways in which archaeological materials come to be buried and
their subsequent history afterwards
• Taphonomy: the study of processes that have affected organic materials, such as bone after death; also involves
microscopic analysis of toothmarks or cutmarks to assess the effects of butchery or scavenging activities
• Cultural formation processes: include the deliberate or accidental activities of humans and they make or use
artifacts, build or abandon buildings, plow their fields, and so on.
• Natural formation processes: refer to the natural or environmental events that govern burial and survival e.g.
volcanic ash on Pompeii
o more common example, gradual burial of artifacts or features by wind-borne sand or soil
o activities of animals burrowing into a site or chewing bones and pieces of wood
***vital to the reconstruction of human past activities and vital to know the distinctions between the two!!
• e.g. if trying to reconstruct human woodworking activities by studying cutmarks on timber, need to be able to
recognize but marks made by beavers versus cutmarks made by human stone or metal tools
• Experimental archeology: study of past behavioral processes through experimental reconstruction under carefully
controlled scientific conditions
o Help to understand formation processes and whether it was natural or cultural
Cultural formation processes
• Original human behavior is often reflected archeologically in at least 4 major categories
• In the case of a tool, there may be:
1. Acquisition
2. Manufacture
3. Use (a distribution)
4. Disposal or discard when tool is worn out or broken
• Remains can enter archeological record at any one of these stages
• Hoards: deliberately buried groups of valuables or prized possessions, often in times of conflict or war
and that have not been reclaimed. Metal hoards are a primary source of evidence for the Bronze Age in
Europe.
o Difficult to distinguish between hoards originally intended to be recovered or not
o Major source of evidence if from burial of the dead
• Human destruction - burning can often improve chance of survival for a variety of remains, such as plants,
clay

Natural formation processes

Survival of inorganic materials:

Stone tools:
§ Main source of evidence for human activities during Paleolithic period, even though wooden or bone tools
may have originally equaled stone tools in importance
Fired Clay:
§ Virtually indestructible if well fired
§ For periods after introduction of pottery, ceramics main source of evidence
Metals:
§ such as gold, silver and lead survive well in nearly all environments
§ Some metals such as copper can corrode depending on soil conditions and iron rarely survives in an
uncorroded state
§ Oxidation powerful destructions for iron
Sea is destructive
§ Underwater remains broken or scattered by waves, currents, tidal action
§ On the other hand, sea can cause metal to be coated with a thick hard casing of metallic salts which helps to
preserve
§ Way to clean sea artifacts before air erodes them
o Electrolysis: a standard cleaning process in archaeological conservation. Artifacts are placed in a
chemical solution, and by passing a weak current between them and a surrounding metal grill, the
corrosive salts move from the cathode (object) to the anode (metal grill), removing any accumulated
deposit and leaving the artifact clean.
§ Standard process in underwater archeology
o Inorganic materials tend to remain better preserved in a wider variety of conditions compared to organic
materials. Of course, inorganic materials also change through burial: metals corrode and weaken, and porous
materials like stone and ceramic can be broken or absorb harmful salts.

Organic materials:
§ Survival largely determined by the matrix and climate, with occasional influence from natural disasters
§ Matrix varies in preservation effect
o Chalk preserves human and animal bone well (+ inorganic material)
o Acid destroy bones, but leave telltale discolorations where postholes or hut foundations once stood
o Matrix may have metal ore, salt or oil – which help preservation
§ Copper can prevent activity of micro-organisms
§ Combination of salt and oil
Climates
§ Caves are natural conservatories because their interiors remain protected from outside climatic effects
§ Organic materials are usually best preserved in hot, dry environments (like in Egypt) or in wetter, colder
environments where they remain in relatively constant temperatures with low oxygen exposure.
§ Sometimes organic materials do survive in marine environments (e.g. wooden shipwrecks).
 § Bad for preservation:
o Tropical climates are most destructive – heavy rain, acid soil
o Temperate climates (much of Europe and north America) - variable climates and weather not goof
Natural disasters:
§ Sand, mudslides, volcanic ash

***Apart from these special circumstances, he survival of organic materials is limited to cases involving extremes of
moisture, that is, very dry, frozen, or waterlogged conditions***

Preservation of Organic Materials: Extreme Conditions

Dry:
§ Shortage of water ensure that many micro-organisms are unable flourish
§ Peru even saw tattoos
Cold:
§ Natural refrigeration
§ E.g. Pazyryk bodies
Waterlogged:
§ Wetland sites: lakes, swamps, marshes, fens, and peat bogs
§ Effectively sealed in wet airless environment
o Needs to be permanent, not periodic drying
§ Vary differently in preservative qualities
o Acidic peat bogs: preserve = wood, plant remains, destroy = bone, iron, even pottery
§ Peat bogs mainly occur northern latitudes – most important environments for wetland archeology
o Peat bog bodies: violent death executed as criminals or used as sacrifice
o Bogs preserve skin
§ Lake-dwellings
o Provide abundant well-preserved timber for the study of tree rings
§ Major problem with waterlogged finds is that they deteriorate rapidly when uncovered, beginning to dry
and crack almost at once. They therefore need to be kept wet until they can be treated or freeze-dried
at a laboratory
o Conservation methods help to explain the enormous cost of both wetland and underwater
archeology – however rewards are enormous
 Chapter 3: Survey and Excavation of
Sites and Features
Off-site evidence/ non-site evidence: Data from a range of
information that provide important evidence about human
exploitation of the environment
• Includes scatters of such artifacts and features as
plowmarks and field boundaries
• Study of entire landscapes by regional survey
• Low density of artifacts
• As archaeologists have become more interested in
reconstructing the full human use of the landscape,
they have begun to realize that there are very faint
scatters of artifacts that might not qualify as sites, but
that nevertheless represent significant human activity
(off-site, non-site)
o useful in areas where people had a mobile way of life

Non-destructive means of assessing the layout of sites and features:

• Surface surveying: 2 basic types that can be identified: unsystematic and systematic
• Remote sensing: the imaging of phenomena from a distance, primarily through airborne and satellite imaging.
“Ground based remote sensing” links geophysical methods, such as radar, with remote sensing methods applied
at ground level.

Locating Archaeological Sites and Features

Ground Survey: The collective name for a wide variety of methods for identifying individual archaeological sites,
including consultation of documentary sources, place- name evidence, local folklore, and legend, but primarily actual
fieldwork.

Documentary sources
• Examples: Bible, Iliad (Troy)
• Biblical archaeology usually tries to ink named biblical sites with archeological sites, but sometimes it can lead
to new archeological sites
o E.g. low mounds of L’Anse aux Meadows
Cultural Resource Management and Applied Archaeology
• Archaeologist locates and records sites before they are destroyed by new roads, buildings, or dams or by
peatcutting and drainage in wetlands
Survey
• Look for the most prominent remains in a landscape, particularly surveying remnants of walled buildings, and
burial mounds
• In the last few decades, survey has developed from being simply the preliminary stage fieldwork (looking for
appropriate sites to excavate), to a more or less independent kind of inquiry, an area of research in its own
right that can produce information quite different from that achieved by digging
• Excavation may not occur at all sometimes
• Much survey today is aimed at studying the spatial distribution of human activities, variations between
regions, changes in population through time, and relationships between people, land, and resources
Survey in Practice
• Goal: maximum information, minimum cost and effort
• First, the region to be surveyed needs to have its boundaries defined: natural (e.g. valley, island) (easiest to
establish), cultural (e.g. extent of an artifact style) or purely arbitrary
 • Second, the history of development needs to be examined to identify what archaeological work may have
been completed before hand, and whether surface material that may have been covered or removed by
natural processes (could include animal disturbance)
o This background info will help to determine the intensity of surface coverage of the survey
• Other factors to take into consideration are time and resource availability, and how easy it is to actually reach
and record an area
o e.g. easier in drier areas
• Must also consider the lifestyle of the group and how this will effect the kind of archeological artifact found
o e.g. hunter-gatherers will leave sparser imprint that a stable community
• Two kinds of survey:
o Unsystematic: involves field walking i.e. scanning the ground along one’s path and recording the
location of artifacts and surface features
§ Pro: Simple + flexible
§ Con: Biased, as walkers tend concentrate on areas that seem richer, rather than obtaining a
sample representative of the whole area
• Type: class of artifacts defined by the consistent cluttering of attributes
o Systematic: less subjective and involves a grid system, such that the area is divided into sectors and
these are walked systematically,
§ Pro: More accurate
§ Con: constraints on time and money mean that cannot survey the entire
area, therefore certain sector are picked from the entire area (sampling
strategy)
§ Sampling Strategies: objective to draw reliable conclusions about the
whole areas. Types of sampling:
• Simple random sample: areas divided into kind, then divided into
squares depending on the percent of area that area covers
• Stratified random sampling: a form of sampling in which the region
or site is divided into natural zones or strata, such as cultivated land
and forest; units are then chosen by a random number procedure so
as to give each zone a number of squares proportional to its area,
thus overcoming the inherent bias in simple random sampling.
• Systematic sampling: selection of a grid on equally spaced locations
(potential bias)
• Stratified unaligned systematic sampling: combines the
Types of sampling: (A) simple random; (B) stratified characteristics of simple random sampling and systematic sampling
random; (C) systematic; (D) stratified unaligned into a single strategy that limits their drawbacks. Divided into smaller,
systematic. regularly-spaced regions, then a sample unit is chosen randomly
from each of these regions. The sample units are evenly dispersed,
but not so regularly positioned as to miss equivalently positioned but
offset sites.
• Transects vs. Squares: transects are long straight paths, each one consisting of smaller collection units,
sometimes preferable to square especially when a lot of vegetation – easily segmented into units. On the
other hand, squares have the advantage of exposing more area to the survey, thus increasing the probability
of intersecting sites. A combination of the two methods is often best: using transects to cover long distances,
but squares when larger concentrations of material are encountered.
• Two types of investigation: excavation tells us a lot about a little of a site, and can only be done once,
whereas survey tells us little about lots of sites, and can be repeated
Extensive and Intensive Survey: Extensive = combining results from neighboring projects to produce very large-scale
views of change in landscape, land-use, and settlement overtime. Intensive = aiming at total coverage of a single large
site or site-cluster

Aerial Survey: Survey using airborne or spaceborne remote sensing

• 2 Parts: Data collection, comprised of taking photographs or images, AND data analysis, and often integrated
with other evidence
• Used for a wide range of purposes from: discovery, recording, monitoring changes etc.
• Aerial photography are generally classified as being vertical or oblique:
 o vertical photograph is one which has been taken with the camera axis directed toward the ground as
vertically as possible
o oblique photograph is one which has been taken with the camera axis directed at an inclination to the
ground.
§ Archeological features show more clearly
o BOTH TYPES used to provide overlapping stereoscopic pairs of prints
§ Both can be rectified or georeferenced to remove scale and perspective distortions of oblique
images and can correct for tilt and distortion in vertical ones
§ After correction, photos are layered in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) GIS: software-
based systems designed for the collection, organization, storage, retrieval, analysis, and display
of spatial and digital geographical data held in different “layers.” A GIS can also include other
digital data.
• Identifying archeological sites from above:
o For site to be detected from above,
needs to have altered soil or subsoil
o experience helps you to distinguish
between natural and man-made features
o Drones: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
(UAVs) are now commonly used to
produce overlapping sets of pictures and
3D models of sites using Structure from Motion (SfM) software
o Aerial images record relief sites through a combination of highlight and shadow, so the time of day and
season of the year are important factors in creating the most informative image of such sites
o LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging): A remote-sensing technique using the same principle as radar.
Light is transmitted to a target, some of which is reflected back to the instrument. The time that the light
takes to travel to the target and back is used to determine the range to the target. Same as ALS (Airborne
Laser Scanning)
§ once reflections from leaves and trees (the “first return”) have been filtered out using a software
algorithm the earthworks are clearly visible (right).
• E.g. Caracol, Maya City
o SLAR: Side-looking airborne radar is an aircraft- or satellite-mounted imaging radar pointing
perpendicular to the direction of flight.
o Satellite Imagery and Google Earth:
§ Used at the largest scales
o Other Satellite Techniques
§ SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar): usually taken from space (but can from aircraft)
• Multiple radar images are processed to yield extremely detailed high-resolution results
that can provide data for maps, databases, land-use studies, and so forth. SAR records
height information and can provide terrain models of territory being surveyed.
• PRO: unlike conventional aerial photography, it provides results day or night and
regardless of weather conditions
o Rapid, non-destructive alternative to surface survey
§ ASTER (Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection
Radiometer: is an imaging instrument onboard Terra, the flagship
satellite of NASA's Earth Observing System and is used to obtain
detailed maps of land surface temperature, reflectance, and elevation.
§ PROs to satellite techniques: place archaeological sites in a much
larger context, showing past social landscapes in all their complexity
and helping greatly with quality assessment + aid in determining where
to excavate and may precede archeological survey. Archaeologists may
need to rethink surveying and excavation strategies in light of new
information

Geographic Information Systems: software-based systems designed for the collection,

organization, storage, retrieval, analysis, and display of spatial and digital geographical data
held in different “layers.” A GIS can also include other digital data.
• Can be divided into different geographical layers
• Many different types of data can be integrated
 • Once basic outlines of site have been mapped with reasonable accuracy by means of GPS, and control points are
placed around the site, standard practice is to use a total station (An optical, electronic instrument used in
surveying and to record excavations) to record its more detailed features to a greater degree of accuracy.
• It is an electronic transit theodolite integrated with electronic distance
measurement (EDM) to measure both vertical and horizontal angles and the slope
distance from the instrument to a particular point, and an on-board computer to collect
data and perform triangulation calculations.
• Most useful aspect is the construction of predictive models of site locations
o e.g. site more likely to occur next to water and on southerly aspects (not too cold and easy walking
distance from water)

Assessing the Layout of Sites and Features

• Finding and recording sites if first stage ➝ Next is to make some assessment of site size, type, and layout
• Landscape archaeology: study of the ways in which people in the past constructed and used the environment
around them.
• Survey can only tell us a great deal about a relatively small area
• Remote sensing and survey important for selecting which sites to excavate
• Other main methods for investigating sites without excavating them:

Site Surface Survey: studying the distribution of surviving features and recording and possibly collecting artifacts
from the surface.
Reliability of Surface Finds
• Shallow sites show most reliable surface evidence
• Bias in favor of most recent periods
• Use of subsurface detection devices

Subsurface Detection: The collective name for a variety of remote-sensing techniques operating at ground
level and including both invasive and non-invasive techniques.
Probes:
• probing the soil with rods or augers, and noting the positions where they strike solids or hollows
o CON: risk of damaging frail artifacts
• Soil resistivity: method of subsurface detection that measures changes in conductivity by passing an
electrical current through ground soils using a resistivity meter. These changes are generally caused by
moisture content, and in this way, buried features can be detected by differential retention of groundwater.
Shovel Test Pits (STPS)
• Small pits dug into ground at consistent distance from each other
o E.g. diameter dinner plate, < meter down
Probing The Pyramids
• Mini probe cameras and endoscopes

Ground-Based Remote Sensing: Geophysical sensing devices, which can be active (e.g. pass energy of various
kinds through soil and measure response in order to “read” what lies beneath) or passive (e.g. measure physical
properties such as magnesium and gravity without the need use energy to obtain a response)
Electromagnetic Methods
• Ground Penetrating (or probing) Radar (GPR): employs radio
pulses, microwave band of the radio spectrum, and detects the
reflected signals from subsurface structures. The 3D maps of
remains can be produced.
• Slice-maps: 3D model can be sliced, and each slice
corresponds to a depth underground. Variety of shades a color
used to make visual images that are more easily interpretable
o e.g. areas with little or no subsurface reflection may be colored blue, those with high
reflection may be red.
Earth Resistance Survey
 • Electrical currents pass through soil using a resistivity meter. Changes are generally
caused by moisture content, and in this way, buried features can be detected by
differential retention of groundwater
o e.g. Silted-up ditches or filled-in pits retain more moisture than stone walls or roads
• Technique works particularly well for ditches and pits in chalk and gravel, and masonry in clay
• Involves placing two remote probes which remain
stationary in the ground
Magnetic Survey Methods
• Helpful identify fired-clay, iron object, pits, and ditches
o Such features distort magnetic fields due to
minute amount of iron
• Fluxgate Magnetometer
Metal Detectors
Pass electrical current through transmitter coil

Excavation
• Contemporary activities take place horizontally in space, whereas changes in those activities overtime occur
vertically

Stratigraphy: the branch of geology concerned with the

order and relative position of strata and their relationship to the
geological time scale. Analysis of vertical, horizontal, space
dimension.
• Archeological strata accumulate over much shorter
periods of time than geological ones, however, same
law of superstition
• Law of superstition refers to the sequence of
deposition and not the age of the material in the
different strata
• How to check artifacts have not been tampered?
(stone and bone)
o a surprising number of cases flakes of stone or bone can be fitted back together again: reassembled in
the shape of the original stone block or pieces of bone from which they came.

Methods of Excavation:

• Broadly speaking we can divide excavation techniques into:

1. those that emphasize the vertical dimension, by cutting into deep deposits to reveal stratification; and
2. those that emphasize the horizontal dimension, by opening up large areas of a particular layer to reveal the
spatial relationships between artifacts and features in that layer.
• Most excavators employ combination of both, but there are different ways of
achieving this
o Wheeler box-grid: an excavation technique developed by Sir Mortimer
Wheeler that involves retaining intact baulks of earth between excavation
grid squares, so that different layers can be correlated across the site in
vertical profiles.
§ This leaves a freestanding wall of earth—known as a "balk"
o Open-area excavation: the opening up of large horizontal areas for
excavation, used especially where single-period deposits lie close to the
surface as, for example, with the remains of Native American or European
Neolithic long houses.
§ introduction since Wheeler’s day of more advanced recording
methods, including field computers, makes this more demanding
open-area method feasible, and it has become the norm, for
instance, in much of British archaeology.
o Step-trenching: a trench cut in a series of steps from the base to the top
of a mound for determining the cultural levels of an archaeological site.
Excavating in the Digital Age
• 3D computer generate model created of site before excavation begins and every stage documented
• Improves excavation

Underwater Archeology
Underwater Survey
• Geophysical methods of underwater survey include:
1. A proton magnetometer towed behind a survey vessel, to detect iron and steel objects that distort the
Earth’s magnetic field
2. Side-scan sonar that transmits sound waves in a fan-shaped beam to produce a graphic image of
surface features on the seabed, used to image or “see” the ocean floor (or lake or river bottoms). The
method uses pulses of sound (sonar) shot and measure how long it takes to be shot back
3. A sub-bottom profiler that emits sound pulses that bounce back from buried features and objects.
Underwater excavation
• Baskets attached to balloons to raise objects and air lift (suction hoses) to remove sediment

Recovery and Recording of the Evidence

• Aim to recover and plot the 3D province of every
artifact
• Given number/ labeled, tagged/ catalogued
• Drawing, photos, then ANALYSIS

Processing and Classification

• Important: Clean and Sort
o However, should also be analyzed before
cleaned because, for example, certain
pots may contain food residues, and tools
may have blood residues
• (Typology) Classification done on the basis of 3
kinds of attributes:
1. surface attributes (including decoration
and color)
2. shape attributes (dimensions as well as
shape itself)
3. technological attributes (primarily raw
material).
• Groups of artifact (and building) types at a
particular time and place are termed assemblages
- Archeological culture: a consistently reoccurring
assemblage of artifacts assumed to be
representative of a particular set of behavioral
activities carried out at a particular time and place
• At the end of the day all goes to waste if:
RESULTS NOT PUBLISHED
 Chapter 4: Dating Methods and
Chronology
Relative Dating
• Relative dating: is used to determine a fossils approximate age by comparing it to similar rocks and fossils of
known ages. Figuring out age relative to what came before and after it

Stratigraphy: Ordering Archeological Layers

• Have to detect whether human or natural disturbance
to layers since deposited
• Important to know association because if one of the
objects can be given an absolute date later on, then
all other objects in same association can be given
same/similar date
• It is this interconnecting of stratigraphic sequences
with absolute dating methods that provides the most
reliable basis for dating archaeological sites and their
contents
• *Important: date is not the date used but of the date deposited – therefore necessary to be
clear about what activity we are dating!

Typological Sequences: Comparing Objects

• Can relatively date based upon specific attributes of the pot that may be older or newer
(from basic knowledge of pots – the same way you would do with electronics for example)
• Underlying relative dating through typology is two ideas:
1. products of a given period and place have a recognizable style: through their
distinctive shape and decoration they are in some sense characteristic of the society
that produced them
2. the change in style (shape and decoration) of artifacts is often quite gradual, or
evolutionary
• arrange thing in likeliness to one another and then a natural chronological
order will form – “like goes with like”
• Very helpful for pottery, stone tools, hand-axes typology, but other tools
such as metal weapons change quite rapidly in style
Seriation: Comparing Assemblages of Objects
Seriation: a relative dating technique based on the chronological ordering of
a group of artifacts or assemblages, where the most similar are placed
adjacent to each other in the series
Frequency Seriation: relies on changes on proportional abundance or
frequency observed among finds (left diagram)

Environmental Sequences
• Class of sequences based on changes in the earth’s climate, used for relative dating on local, regional, and even
global scale
• Climactic fluctuations are recorded in deep-sea cores, ice-cores, and sediments containing pollen
Deep-Sea cores and Ice Cores
• contain shells of microscopic marine organisms known as foraminifera, laid down on the ocean floor through the
slow continuous process of sedimentation. Variations in the chemical structure of these shells are a good
indicator of the sea temperature at the time the organisms were alive
• Radio-Carbon and uranium-series dating (uses the radioactive decay of uranium to calculate an age) applied to
foraminiferan shells to provide absolute dates
 • Deep seas cores are core extracted from polar ice of the Arctic and Antarctic
o Last for 2000-3000 years – for earlier periods less visible
• Evidence of major volcanic eruptions can be preserved in
ice-cores
Pollen Dating
• Preservation of pollen in bogs and lake sediments
• Allows for detailed sequences of past vegetation and climate
• Regional pollen zone sequences must first be established
and then sites and finds in the area can be linked to them –
not all pollen zones are uniform across large areas
• Provide info for as far as 3mya

Absolute Dating
• Absolute dating: is used to determine a precise age of a fossil by using radiometric dating to measure the decay
of isotopes, either within the fossil or more often the rocks associated with it.
• Most commonly used:
1. Calendars and historical chronologies
2. Tree-ring dating
3. Radiocarbon dating
4. Potassium-argon dating (Paleolithic period)
Calendars and Historical Dating
• Three things to bear in mind
1. Chronological systems need to be carefully reconstructed and any list of rulers of kings needs to be
reasonably complete
2. Number of years in each reign needs to be linked with modern calendar
3. Artifact, features, or structures have to be dated in accordance to their association with the historiacal
chronology (e.g. a ruler or an emperor)
• Maya most precise calendrical system
Using a Historical Chronology
• Relatively easy for archaeologist to use a historical chronology when abundant artifacts are found relatively close
to it
• Dating by historical methods remains the most important procedure for the archaeologist in countries with a
reliable calendar supported by a significant degree of literacy. Where there are serious uncertainties over the
calendar, or over its correlation with the modern calendrical system,
the correlations can often be checked using other absolute dating
methods, to be described below

Annual Cycles
• Annual cycles in climate lead to patterns in the environment that can
then be counted
o Lands boarder polar regions, melting of ice sheet each year
leads to the formation of annual deposits of sediments in
lake beds called varves which can be counted
Tree Ring Dating (dendrochronology)
o two distinct archaeological uses:
1. as a successful means of calibrating or correcting
radiocarbon dates
2. as an independent method of absolute dating in its
own right
o New ring of wood each year
o Limitations:
§ Only trees outside tropics
§ Limited to wood from those species that (a) have
yielded a master sequence back from the
present; (b) people actually used in the past;
and where (c) the sample affords a sufficiently long record to give a unique match.
Radioactive Clocks
• radioactive decay: the regular process by which
radioactive isotopes break down into their decay products
with a half-life that is specific to the isotope in question
(see also radiocarbon dating)
Radiocarbon Dating
• Most useful method of dating
• Measuring the amount of C14 (unstable isotope) in a fossil.
Done because of an understanding in half-life: time taken
for half the quantity of a radioactive isotope to decay
Calibration of Radiocarbon Dates
• Concentration of C14 in
atmosphere has varied overtime
therefore tree-ring dating provides means of
correcting or calibrating radiocarbon dates
o Was greater concentrations of C14 earlier
Contamination and Interpretation
• Major source of error in radiocarbon dating are:
o Contamination before sampling (e.g.
waterlogged sites can dissolve amount
of C14 in sample)
o Contamination during or after sampling
(any modern organic material coming
The wiggles of the INTCAL09 calibration into contact with a sample can contaminate it)
curve over the last 9000 years. The straight
line indicates the ideal 1:1 timescale. o Context of deposition (many errors arise because the excavator has not fully
understood the formation processes of the context in question… need to
understand how the dated material found its way to its find spot, and how and
when it came to be buried)
o Date of context (sometimes the wood found, e.g. on charcoal may have been cut down far longer before
it’s actual use, so date of wood does not align with date of use)
• Several dates are needed – get stratigraphy dating and test with radiocarbon dating to see if relatively correct
Impact of Radiocarbon dating
• Can be used for anything as long as organic origin
• Take back 50,000 years – however cannot be used <400years
Other Radiometric Methods
• For inorganic or very ancient materials, other methods have to be used
• The most important of them are also radiometric—they depend upon the measurement of natural radioactivity
o Use elements that have longer half-lives
• 2 drawbacks
o (1) depend upon elements less frequently found in archaeological contexts than is carbon
o (2) the long half-lives generally mean dating’s are less precise.
• Potassium-argon dating: method of dating rocks and archaeological remains associated with them, by
measuring the ratio of radioactive argon to radioactive potassium in the rock.
o Precision: 10 ± percent
o Range: older than 80,000 years
o Good for volcanic strata
• Uranium-Series Dating: based on of radioactive isotopes of uranium
o Range: 10,000 – 500,000 years
o Precision: ± 1- 10 percent (error margin few thousand years)
o Applications:
§ dates travertine (calcium carbonate) – cave walls and floors, and therefore can be used to date
surrounding artifacts and bone
§ teeth
§ skulls of old homo sapiens
§ useful in areas with no volcanic activity
o Can be cross checked with electron spin resonance (ESR
• Fission-Track Dating: depends on spontaneous fission (or division) of radioactive uranium atoms
 o Present in wide range of rocks and minerals, volcanic and manufactured glasses, and such minerals as
zircon and apatite, found within rock formations - damage is recorded in pathways called fission tracks
o Radioactive clock set at 0 by the formation of mineral or glass
• !!!ALL METHODS ARE USEFUL FOR DATING SURROUNDING ARCHAOLOGICAL EVIDENCE FOUND!!!

Other Absolute Dating Methods

• thermoluminescence (TL) dating: A technique that relies indirectly on radioactive decay, overlapping with
radiocarbon dating in the time period for which it is useful, but also has the potential for dating earlier periods. It
has much in common with electron spin resonance (ESR).
o Minerals sufficiently heated - pottery, baked clay, burned stone – clocks set when originally fired
o Precision: 5- 10 ± percent on site; 25 otherwise
o Up to 100,000 years ago
• Optical Dating: similar to TL but used for minerals exposed to light rather than heat
• electron spin resonance (ESR): This technique enables trapped electrons within bone and shell fragments to be
measured without the heating that thermoluminescence (TL) dating requires
o good for cross checking
• Archaeomagnetic Dating and Geomagnetic Reversals:
o Archaeomagnetic (Or Paleomagnetic) Dating: Archaeomagnetic dating is the study and interpretation of
the signatures of the Earth's magnetic field at past times recorded in archaeological materials.
§ Direction of that magnetic field is recorder in any baked-clay structure
o Geomagnetic Reversal: A geomagnetic reversal is a change in a planet's magnetic field such that the
positions of magnetic north and magnetic south are interchanged.
• Genetic Dating: use DNA samples from living human populations to date population events, notably migration
o Using assumptions about genetic mutation rates, they can date approximately the appearance of new
genetic categories, and thus give a date to such important processes (e.g. “Out of Arica”)

World Chronology
 Chapter 5: Social Archaeology
• Must first address the scale of the society, and second look at internal organization
o Top up perspective: looking at whole society and seeing how organization fits into that
o Bottom-up: looking at individual and seeing how they fit in that society

Establish the Nature and Scale of the Society

• What was the largest scale social unit, and what kind of society, in the broadest sense, was it?
• Question often best answered from a study of settlement and settlement patterns
• Ethnoarchaeology is the ethnographic study of peoples for archaeological reasons, usually through the study of
the material remains of a society.
Classification of Societies
• Anthropologists have outlined broad patterns of social organization that can be applied to many human societies
• Elman Service four-fold classification of societies
1. mobile hunter-gatherer groups
2. segmentary societies
3. chiefdoms
4. states
• Mobile Hunter-Gatherer Groups
o “Bands” fewer than 100 people who move seasonally to exploit wild food resources
o No marked economic differences in status among members
o Kill sites, work sites (tools made and carried), and camp sites
• Segmentary Societies (aka. “tribes”)
o relatively small and autonomous groups, usually of agriculturalists, who regulate their own affairs
o Larger than bands however no more than few thousand
o Settled, do not move - but they may be nomad pastoralists with a mobile economy based on the
intensive exploitation of livestock
o Diet or subsistence is based largely on cultivated plants and domesticated animal
o Many individual communities integrated into larger society through kinship
o Settled agricultural homesteads or villages
o Archeologist finds evidence for isolated permanently occupied homes (a dispersed settlement pattern) or
for permanent villages (a nucleated pattern)
• Chiefdoms
o Characterized by ranking – difference in social status among people
o Different lineages are graded on a scale of prestige
o Rank based on closeness to chief
o Range between 2,000 and 50,0000
o Local specialization in craft production
o temples, residences of the chief and his retainers, and craft specialists
o permanent ritual and ceremonial center that acts as a central focus for the entire group
o chiefdoms give indications that some sites were more important than others
o personal ranking also evident in grave goods
• Early States
o Share many features of chiefdom, but ruler (e.g. king/queen) has explicit authority to establish laws and
enforce them by use of army
o Stratified into classed (not kinship)
o Territory owned by ruling lineage and populated tenants who have obligation to pay taxes
o Early states have evidence of urban settlement patterns in which cities play prominent role
• Complex societies show increased specialization in work and culture
• Need for more food intensifies as population grows
• As specialization takes place, so does the tendency for certain people to become wealthier and yield more
authority – differences in social status and ranking develop
• Methods for looking at process of increased specialization, intensification, and social rank help archeologist to
identify presence of more complex societies
Methods of Social Analysis
• Difference in gathering info between hunter-gather
groups and states because often larger states are literate
Settlement and Site Hierarchy
• Best way to figure out scale of society is to understand
settlement – find major centers of settlement
• Survey will result in map and a cataloged of sites
discovered, together with details of each site including
size, chronological range, architectural features, and
possibly an approximate estimate of population
o Aim: site hierarchy
§ How to establish site hierarchy?
§ Simplest based solely on site-size –
smallest settlements will have the most
frequent – arrange histogram
• histograms allow comparisons to be made between the site hierarchies of different
regions, different periods, and different types of society, and organization of the
settlement system will often be a direct reflection of the organization of the society that
created it
o band societies – narrow range of variation therefore no hierarchy
§ more hierarchical settlement pattern, the more hierarchical the society
• Mobile Hunter-Gatherer Groups
o Organization exclusively at local level
o Cave sites vs. open sites
§ Cave sites: Occupation deposits are extensive, and may span over thousands of years the fore
meticulous excavation and recording of stratigraphy a required to interpret accurately
§ Open sites: occupied shorter time, deposits suffer greater erosion
o proves possible to distinguish single short phases of human occupation at a hunter-gatherer site, we can
then look at the distribution of artifacts and bone fragments within and around features and structures
(hut foundations, remains of hearths) to see whether any coherent patterns can be observed
o in addition to conventional sites, need to look for sparse scatters of artifacts consisting of just perhaps 1-
2 object every 10 square meters
o look for artifacts and see where concentrations lie and create map around that
• Sedentary societies
o Includes segmentary societies, chiefdoms, and states, best approached with investigation of settlement
o Need to be excavated
o Careful excavation of individual houses and complete villages is standard procedure for segmentary
societies – opens way to study household and community structures
o Look at differences in skeletal remains are treated can indicate a hierarchy
o First step when looking at complex society is to locate one or more primary centers – size!
o Size note only importance – try to find out how the society in question viewed itself and its territories –
most states have written records so not as difficult to figure out
§ There records may name various sites and identify their place within the hierarchy
• Arachnologist need then to find that site
o A highest-order center may be identified from direct indications of central organization and comparing the
highest-order center to other comparable highest-order centers
o In the center, consider factors such as kinship, bureaucratic organization, redistribution and storage of
goods, organization of ritual, craft specialization, and external trade

Burial Analysis: The Study of Ranking Individual Burials

• Most informative insight into induvial and their status is bones/ash along with artifacts
o Communal burials tricky because not always clear which artifacts go with which body
• Important to know that what they are buried with doesn’t necessarily indicate their status, as it is placed there by
a living individual
• Need figure out if burial reflects status achieved by the individual or instead hereditary status through birth
o Not easy – look at children and preferential attention in their burial, if seem high rank, likely hereditary rank
 • How to recognize value? Maybe those took longest to make, or made from materials that were brought from
distance or difficult to obtain
Monuments and Public Works
• May inform religious beliefs and social organization

Written Records
• Important to decipher ancient texts
• Can figure out laws - laws cover many aspects of life—agriculture, business transactions, family law, inheritance,
terms of employment for different craftspeople, and penalties for such crimes as adultery and homicide

Ethnoarchaeology
• involves the study of both the present-day use and significance of artifacts, buildings, and structures within living
societies, and the way these material things become incorporated into the archaeological record—what happens
to them when they are thrown away or (in the case of buildings and structures) torn down or abandoned
• Indirect approach to the understanding of any past society
• archaeologists no longer assume that it is an easy task to take archaeological assemblages and group them into
regional “cultures,” and then to assume that each “culture” so formed represents a social unit

The Archeology of the Individual and Identity

Social Inequality
• comparing the value of artifacts
Ethnicity and Conflict
• ethnicity difficult to process without written
records
o frequently correlation between
language and ethnic groups
• increasing amount of evidence to suggest
that warfare in prehistory was not so much
the exception as the norm
Investigating Gender
• overlap with feminist archaeology, which often had the explicit objective of exposing and correcting the male bias
(androcentrism) of archaeology
• sex vs. gender
• DO I NEED TO WRITE ABOUT FEMINIST ARCHEOLOGY?
Chapter 6: Environment, Subsistence,
•
& Diet
Plant and animal remains and the residues found on artifacts can give indirect clue to diet, but only direct
evidence is from actual human remains: stomach contents, fecal material, teeth, and bones

Investigating Environments on a Global

Scale
• Climate
Evidence from Water and Ice
• Sediments on ocean floor contain
climate history of thousand or even
millions of years
• Study cores extracted from the
seabed and fluctuations in the species
represented and the physical form of single species through the sequence
• Oxygen isotope analysis of foraminifera can also reveal changes in the environment
• Cores can also be extracted from stratified ice sheets
Ancient Winds
• Isotope studies can tell us about winds in different periods
• Ratio between isotopes O18 and O16 can calculate temperature difference between that place and the
equatorial region
• Raindrops from hurricanes have more O16 than normal rain
• Winds have great impact on human activity – human sea migration
Tree-Rings and Climate
• Growth varies with climate
o Show whether growth was slow (implying dense local forest cover) or fast (implying light forest)
• Annual and decade-to-decade variations show up far more clearly in tree-rings than in ice cores, and tree-rings
can also record sudden and dramatic shocks to the climate

Reconstructing the Plant Environment

• Plants at bottom of food chain - plant communities of a given area and period will therefore provide clues to local
animal and human life, and will also reflect soil conditions and climate
• shifts of plant communities in both latitude and altitude are the most direct link between climatic change and the
terrestrial human environment
Microbotanical Remains
• Study must be carried out by specialist (not
archeologist)
Pollen Analysis
• palynology: study and analysis of fossil pollen
• gives an idea of fluctuations in vegetation overtime
• proved that certain deserts used to be lakes
Phytoliths
• minute particles of silica (plant opal) derived from the
cells of plants, and they survive after the rest of the
organism has decomposed or been burned
• common in hearths and ash layers, but are also
found inside pottery, plaster, and even on stone
tools and the teeth of animals
• can survive in sediments that are hostile to pollen (because of oxidation or micro bacterial activity)
Diatom Analysis
• single-cell algae that have cell walls of silica instead of cellulose
Macrobotanical Remains
• retrieval of vegetation from sediments made easier by development of screening (sieving) and flotation (method of
screening (sieving) an excavated matrix in water so as to separate and recover small ecofacts and artifacts)
Seeds and Fruit
Plant Residues
Remains of Wood
• Many charcoal samples are the remains of firewood, but others may come from wooden structures, furniture, and
implements burnt at some point in a site’s history
Other Sources of Evidence
• Art, texts, photographs

Reconstructing the Animal Environment

• Animal remains first evidence used to characterize climates of past because of recognition that certain animals
survived in different layers of sediments
Microfauna
• reflect the immediate environment more
accurately than larger animals, whose
remains are often accumulated through
human or animal predation
• need to make sure that animal deposits
were made at the same time they died
rather than them having been buried by
humans
• bird remains help because birds sensitive
to change in climate
• Insects: since know the distribution and environmental requirements of their modern descendants, it is often
possible to use insect remains as accurate indicators of the likely climatic conditions
Macrofauna
• Help build picture of human diet
• Not as helpful for climate analysis because less sensitive to climate changes + because remains likely deposited
by humans
• Bones from animals selected by carnivores, including humans, have been selected, and so cannot accurately
reflect the full range of fauna present in the environment
• Therefore want animal bones brought about by natural disaster or catastrophe
• Teeth can tell us about diet
• Figure out what climates/environments they were able to tolerate
• Large animals not good indicators of vegetation since herbivores can thrive in a wide range of environment and
eat a variety of plant
• thus individual species cannot usually be regarded as characteristic of one particular habitat
• Fauna can be used to determine which season of the year a site was occupied

Subsistence and Diet

• Distinction between meals (direct evidence of various kinds as to what people were eating at a particular time) and
diet (spanning over lifetime)
• Meals: Written record, art, understanding of range of options, and physical remains
• Diet: Analysis of human bones
• Archaeozoology: study past human use of animals
• Paleoethnobotany: study of past human use of plants
o In both, focus of interest evolved not just to study what was eaten, but the ways in which they were
managed – process of domestication
• only incontrovertible proof that a particular plant or animal species was actually consumed is the presence of its
traces in stomach contents or in desiccated ancient fecal matter
• otherwise have to figure out whether something was eaten through context or condition of the finds (e.g. bones
cut/burned may indicate human consumption)
• plants that were staples in diets may be underrepresented due to generally poor preservation of vegetable
remains – fishbones the same
• archeologist has to find out how far a a site’s food remains are representative of a whole diet
 o need to asses sites function and whether it was inhabited once or frequently
§ long-term settlement likely to provide more representative food remains

What Can Plant Foods Tell Us about Diet?

Macrobotanical Remains
• What archeologist needs is large number of
samples from a single period on the site,
and, if possible, from a range of types of
deposit, in order to obtain reliable
information about what species were
exploited, their importance, and their uses
during the period of time in question
• When we have obtained enough samples,
we need to quantify the plant remains: for
example by weight or by number of
remains
o Some archeologists arrange based on abundance; however this can be misleading because not always
indicative of actually plants that were there
o Similarly, species that produce large quantities of seeds or grains may appear more important in the
archaeological record than they actually were
Interpreting the Context and The Remains
• Archeologists want to find out about the human use of plants
• In many cases, it is the plant remains that reveal the function of the location where they were found and thus the
nature of the context, rather than vice versa
Chemical Residues in Plant Remains
• Various chemical survive in plant remains: these compounds include proteins, fatty lipids, and even DNA
Plant Impressions
• Common in fired clay
• Such impression do not prove that the species was important in the economy or diet, because represents
skewed sample
Analysis of Plant Residues on Artifacts
• Microwear Analysis: the study of the patterns of wear or damage on the edge of stone tools, which provides
valuable information on the way in which the tool was used.
Domestication of Wild Plant Species
• How to figure out if the plants were wild or domesticated?
o Sheds light on the transition from a mobile (hunter-gatherer) to a settled (agricultural) way of life
Art also shed light, however, only demonstrate short-term diets

Investigating Diet, Seasonality, and Domestication from Animal Remains

• Figure out whether animals present through
human action or natural causes
• Animals may also have been exploited at a
site for non-dietary purposes
• Important for Paleolithic (stone age)
Proving Human exploitation of Animals in
Paleolithic
• Differentiation between different kinds of
cut marks on animal bones
o Therefore context needs to be
studied
• Burning of bones
• amount of meat represented by a bone will depend on the sex and age of the animal, the season of death, and
geographical variation in body size and in nutrition
Strategies of Use: Deducing Age, Sex, and Seasonality from Large Fauna
• sex: measurement of certain bones
• age: degree of closure of sutures in the skull, or, to a certain extent, from the stage of development of limb bones
o + eruption and wear and tear of teeth
 • Season of death: identification of species only available at certain times of year, or which shed their antlers in
specific season and/or remains of young fetus can show which season of occupation
Question of Animal Domestication
• Crucial to know in order understand human development over time
• Non-indigenous animal introduced on to an island
• Human interference of natural breeding habits
• plows, yokes, and horse trappings are indications
• deformities and disease

Assessing Diet from Human Remains

• stomach or feces only direct evidence
• coprolites: fossilized feces; these
contain food residues that can be
used to reconstruct diet and
subsistence activities.
• abrasive particles in food leave
striations on the enamel, the
orientation and length of which are
directly related to the meat or
vegetation in the diet and its process of cooking
• increase in horizontal and a decrease in vertical striations, and a decrease in average striation length over time =
less and less effort was needed to chew food, and meat may have decreased in importance as the diet became
more mixed
• cavities and tooth decay
• isotopic analysis of human tooth enamel and bone collagen can reveal a great deal about long-term food intake
o read signatures left in or bodies by food
• Plants of different groups leave differing ratios of isotopes
 Chapter 8: Bioarcheology of People
• Aim: to recreate lives of people in the archeological record
• Bioarcheology: The study of human remains

Identifying Physical Attributes

• Differences in bones between men and women
Sex
• Intact body: facial hair, genetalia
• Skeleton: Pelvis shape!
o Not applicable for children – teeth (recently DNA analysis)
Life Length
• Biological age rather than actual age
• Teeth! - eruption and replacement of the milk teeth; the sequence
of eruption of the permanent dentition; and finally the degree of
wear
• Tooth enamel grows at a regular, measurable rate, and its
microscopic growth lines form ridges that can be counted…
measuring tooth growth ridges in fossil specimens
• Bones!
o sequence in which the articulating ends of bones become fused to the shafts gives a timescale that can
be applied to the remains of young people
o skull thickness… thicker = older
• Small fragments
o Bone microstructure
o changes in bone structure are visible under the microscope as
humans grow older. The circular osteons become more numerous
and extend to the edge of the bone (diagram)
• can only average age of death at death for bodies and
skeletons that survived
o one person’s death is not representative of an
entire communities average age of death
What Did They Look Like?
• Facial reconstructions from bone structure
Relations
• Assess relationships between individuals by studying: skull
shape, analyzing hair, blood groups, dental morphology
o some dental anomalies run in families, such as
enlarged or extra teeth, and especially missing
wisdom teeth
• DNA Analysis
Origin
• best information on early population movements is the
genetic material we all carry ourselves
• Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), no contained in the cell nucleus but in other bodies in our cells, and is passed on
only by females
• Since mtDNA is inherited only through the mother, unlike nuclear DNA, it preserves a family record that is altered
over the generations only by mutations
• Homo-sapiens originated in Sub-Saharan Africa
• study of Y-chromosome DNA, which is inherited in the male line (and which likewise does not recombine as the
genetic material is passed on to the next generation)
• DNA cannot tell us about species that die out
Ancient DNA (Neandertals)
• Neandertal genome project
• date of divergence between modern humans and Neanderthals is estimated to lie between 440,000 and
270,000 years ago
 • Neanderthals closer to Europeans and Asians than to modern Africans
Ancient DNA of “Modern” Humans
• Cold conditions are favorable to the preservation of ancient DNA, and so most of the positive results
so far come from samples found in northern Europe, Siberia, or North America

Disease, Deformity, and Death

• Paleopathology (the study of ancient disease) tells us far more about life than death
o Forensic Archeology
Evidence in Soft Tissue
• Since most infectious diseases rarely leave detectable traces in bones, a proper analysis of ancient diseases can
only be carried out on surviving soft tissue
• Show skin problems, evidence of violent death
• Computed Tomography (CT) scanning: the method by which scanners allow detailed internal views of bodies,
such as mummies. The body is passed into the machine and images of cross-sectional “slices” through the body
are produced AND MRI’s
Richard III
• Richard was buried with little fanfare in a nearby churchyard and his burial place was then forgotten
• Because the Tudor claim to the throne was very distant, it was in their interests to malign the image of Richard III,
raising questions about the validity of that image through history
• This includes the idea that he had severe scoliosis, most famously portrayed in the Shakespeare play
• Had 11 wounds, all of them peri-mortem (since none of them show signs of heals)
• This micro-CT image shows two potentially fatal injuries near to the point where the skull meets the spine (A). B is
probably a cut from a sword, while C is a massive slice taken out by something like a halberd
• Michael Ibsen, a descendant of Richard III’s sister. A second descendant was also located and was also a match.
The comparison was made using mtDNA
• There was no evidence for a coffin, clothing or artifacts in the grave. If there was a shroud, it has long since rotted
away. The position of the hands, crossed over the right hip, is unusual in English burials of this period and could
indicate that the wrists were tied
• Hands missing due to construction done in the area
• DID HAVE SCOLIOSIS, as portrayed in Shakespeare
o However no evidence that walked with an overt limp because legs were symmetrical
• He also had roundworms
Skeletal Evidence for Deformity and Disease
• Effects on bone divided into:
o Caused by violence or accident
o Caused by disease or congenital deformity
• Disease that effect bone does so via either erosion, growths, or an altered structure
• Infections, nutritional deficiencies, and cancers show on bones
• Possible to detect growth disorders by the overall shape and size of bones

Diet and Nutrition

Malnutrition
• Harris lines, detected by X-rays on bones, indicate periods of arrested growth during development, and these are
sometimes caused by malnutrition
• Same in teeth where patches of poorly mineralized enamel reflect growth disturbance brought about by a diet
deficient in milk, fish, oil, or animal fats
• Lack of Vitamin C creates scurvy
• Carbon isotopes in bone can be used to detect diet rich in marine resource
• Consumption of maize can be detected
Cannibalism
• 2 main categories of evidence:
o presence of human bones with marks of cutting, smashing, or burning
o the presence of human bones mixed with animal bones with similar marks or treatment
 Chapter 9: Cognitive Archeology
Cognitive Archaeology: The study of past ways of
thought and symbolic structures from material remains
• usually impossible to infer the meaning of a
symbol within a given culture from the symbolic
form of the image or object alone
o have to see how it is used

Investigating how Human Symbolizing Faculties

Evolved
• Primarily concerned with homo sapiens
• cannot make the assumption that they had
innate cognitive facilities much like our own
• modern human abilities have been present since the emergence of Homo sapiens 200,000 to 500,000 years ago
• some archeologists consider homo habilis to around 2million ya to create language, along w/ first chopper tools
• little evidence to clarify origin of self-consciousness
Design in Tool Manufacture
• homo erectus design axe -advanced
• cognitive map: an interpretive framework of the world exists in the minds of humans
• tendency through time to produce an increasingly well-defined variety or assemblage of tool types. This implies
that each person making tools had a notion of different tool forms, no doubt destined for different functions
o planning and design relevant to our consideration of cognitive abilities of early hominins
• study of processes involved in making artifacts offers one of the few insights available into the way cognitive
structures underlay complex aspects of human behavior
Procurement of Materials and Planning Time
• planning time: time between planning act and its execution
• sense of possession over objects
Deliberate Burial of Human Remains
• act of burial itself implies some kind of respect or feeling for the deceased individual, and perhaps some notion of
an afterlife (less easy to prove)
• adornment seems to imply that objects of decoration can enhance a person’s appearance (beauty, prestige, or
otherwise)
• evidence of ritual acts give insight into cognition
Representations
• Paleolithic period, there are two issues of prime importance:
o Evaluating date (and hence in some cases the authenticity)
o Confirming the status as a depiction

Working with Symbols

• Hope to establish some of the original
relationships between symbols observed
• Consider cognitive archeology in terms of 5
different uses to which symbols are put
Establishing Place: Location of Memory
• Establishment of a center
• Various features (the home, the tilled
agricultural land, the pasture) together
constitute a constructed landscape in which
the individual lives
• the landscape has social and spiritual meaning as well as utility
Measuring the World
• development of units of measurement was big cognitive step
• help us organize our relationships with the natural world
Planning: Maps for the Future
• rarely does archeologist find actual maps
• Symbols allow us to cope with the future world, as instruments of planning. They help us define our intentions
more clearly, by making models for some future intended action, for example plans of towns or cities
• alternative strategy is to seek ways of showing that regularities observed in the finished product are such that they
could not have come about by accident
o e.g. the design of a particular cave such so that the light would enter perfectly in
Symbols of Organization and Power
• used to regulate and organize relations between human beings and material world. Money is a good example of
this, and with it the whole notion that some material objects have a higher value than others. Beyond this is a
broader category of symbols, such as the badges of rank in an army, that have to do with the exercise of power
in a society
• symbols of power commanding obedience and conformity
• demonstration that gold objects were highly valued by society implies that the individuals with whom the gold
finds were associated had a high social status
Archeology of Religion
• framework of beliefs that are supernatural and go beyond material world
• cult can be embedded within everyday functional activity, and thus difficult to distinguish from it archaeologically
Recognition of Cult
• Performance of expressive acts of worship towards the deity or transcendent being
o 4 components
§ Focusing of attention: range of attention-focusing devices, including a sacred location,
architecture
§ Boundary zone between this world and the next: risks of pollution and of failing to comply
with the appropriate procedures: ritual washing and cleanliness are therefore emphasized
§ Presence of the deity: symbolized by material form or image
§ Participation and offering

Impact of Literacy
• Ancient literature in all its variety, from poems and plays to political statements and early historical writings,
provides rich insights into the cognitive world of the great civilizations
Literacy in Classical Greece
• Greeks wrote on papyrus
• Had important role in democratic government of Greek states
Cannibalism at Cowboy Wash
YES
• coprolite tested positive for human myoglobin, which is found in human muscle tissue
o this type of myoglobin was not found in 20 'control' coprolites in comparable sites.
• blood residues on stone points
• stone tool kit appropriate for butchering a mid-sized mammal was found
• cut marks on femur
• defleshing, fragmentation of long bones to extract marrow, chopped, cut, and blackened bones
• Patterns of burning indicate that many were exposed to flame while still covered with flesh, which is what would
be expected after cooking over a fire
• nearly all bones were broken
• remains not intentionally buried or respectfully treated
• were not found directly with burial goods
• bones had the same markings as the ancient remains of butchered animals
• similar evidence found at 32 other sites
• bodies found in the middle of the village which is unusual for mortuary practices
NO
• Cutmarks could have come from extreme violence or mutilation of the dead, disturbance of secondary burials, or
the destruction of witches
• cut marks on bone are too crude to distinguish whether bodies were dismembered for food or part of mortuary
practice
• argue that coprolite should have been tested by other independent labs, and that it could have been produce by
another carnivorous animal, rather than a human being
• Cannibalism is the worst thing possible for a human to do (FOR US)
Why?
• certain groups in the Mesa Verde area, out of desperation, then turned to a strategy of warfare and cannibalism
• drought struck the region, prompting groups to move and seek food
• warfare-related cannibalism
• 2 kinds of cannibalism
o eating people as an insult (enemies)
o mortuary cannibalism – compassionate

The Kalahari Debate

• Debate about how the San people and hunter-gatherer societies in southern Africa have lived in the past
Richard Lee and Irven DeVore = considered traditionalists or "isolationists”
• consider the San to have been, historically, isolated and independent hunter/gatherers separate from nearby
societies
• view the San as isolates who are not, and have never been, part of a greater Kalahari economy
• traditionalists believe that the San have adapted over time but without help from other societies
o emphasis is thereby placed on the cultural continuity and the cultural integrity of the San peoples
• although they had trade with outsiders, it had minimal impact on their culture
Edward Wilmsen and James Denbow = revisionists or "integrationists"
• believe that the San have not always been an isolated community, but rather have played important economic
roles in surrounding communities. They claim that over time the San have become a dispossessed and
marginalized people
• “The isolation in which they are said to have been found is a creation of our own view of them, not of their history
as they lived it.”
• say that anthropologists’ judgment is clouded because they already have a predisposed view of the San and
hunter-gatherer societies as being isolate
• believe the San in the Kalahari are a classless society because they are actually the lower class of a greater
Kalahari society. The revisionists believe the !Kung San were heavily involved in trade. They believe the San were
transformed by centuries of contact with Iron Age, Bantu-speaking agro-pastoralists
• metal and pottery found in the Dobe, Xia, and Botswana regions. Cow bones have also been found in northern
Botswana, at Lotshitshi. These products are believed to be payment to the San for labor of caring for or possibly
herding Bantu cattle
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