Archaeology Wordsmith

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Results for diagnostic:

diagnostic: SYNONYM: diagnostic artifact
CATEGORY: artifact
DEFINITION: An artifact or some other aspect of a site that is known to be associated with a particular time period
diagnostic trait: CATEGORY: term
DEFINITION: Any cultural trait that helps to distinguish one group of people from another. A diagnostic trait appears in one group but not in another with which it might be confused.
diagnostics: SYNONYM: diagnostic
CATEGORY: technique
DEFINITION: Artifacts that can be used as index fossils in a cultural context.
bout coupé: CATEGORY: lithics
DEFINITION: In British archaeology, a well-made cordiform or sub-triangular refined biface from northwest Europe. It may be a diagnostic Mousterian tool.
Chindadn point: CATEGORY: lithics
DEFINITION: A small teardrop-shaped bifacial point found in central Alaska and dating to c 12,000-10,000 bp; they are diagnostic of the Nenana complex.
hand ax: SYNONYM: hand ax, hand-ax, handaxe; biface
CATEGORY: lithics
DEFINITION: A large bifacially worked core tool, normally oval, pointed, or pear-shaped, and one of the most typical stone tools of the Lower Palaeolithic. It is the diagnostic implement of certain Lower Palaeolithic industries (Abbevillian, Chellean, Acheulian), and one variety of the Mousterian. In spite of the name it was not an ax at all and probably served as an all-purpose tool. The oldest and crudest hand axes have been found in Africa; the finer, Acheulian, tools are known from most of Africa, Europe, southwest Asia and India. It was used for chopping, chipping, flaking, cutting, digging, and scraping. Hand axes first appear between one and two million years ago and they were common in assemblages for about a million years.
Hohokam: CATEGORY: culture
DEFINITION: A prehistoric tradition of southern Arizona which began as a sedentary farming culture around 300 BC and existed until 1400/1450 AD. It was a cultural unit within the Cochise subculture and it had large villages, canal irrigation, and pottery-making. The finest craft products were shell jewelry and objects of carved stone. Diagnostic traits include small villages of shallow, oblong pit-houses with no formalized community plan, cremation of the dead, plain grey or brown paddle and anvil smoothed pottery (or sometimes painted red on buff). The tradition is divided into: Pioneer (150-550 AD), Colonial (550-900 AD), Sedentary (900-1100 AD), Classic (1100-1450 AD), and Post-Classic (1450-1700 AD). Between 550-1200 AD, renewed Mexican contacts brought foreign elements to the Hohokam: courts for the ball-game, platform mounds, new types of maize, slab metates, mosaic mirrors, exotic symbolism from Mexican religion, and the use of copper bells. From about 1100, certain groups began to construct pueblos under Anasazi influence. After 1400/1450, the Hohokam territory along the Gila and Salt Rivers seems to have been partially abandoned. Their cultural heirs are the Pima and Papago Indians. Snaketown is an important Hohokam site.
index fossil: SYNONYM: index fossil concept; index species
CATEGORY: artifact; technique
DEFINITION: A fossil with widespread geographical range but which is restricted in time to a brief existence. In archaeology, it is a theory that proposes that strata containing similar fossil assemblages will tend to be of similar age. This concept enables archaeologists to characterize and date strata within archaeological sites using diagnostic artifact forms, making an animal species the basis for dating by faunal association. Artifacts that share the attributes of index fossils are useful in the cross-dating and correlation of deposits that contain them and in the construction of chronologies.
Llano: SYNONYM: Llano tradition
CATEGORY: culture
DEFINITION: The earliest Palaeoindian Big Game Hunting culture, from the plains of New Mexico, 10,000-9000 BC. Best-known is the type site of Blackwater Draw; other sites were located in what was once boggy lakeshore. Its chief diagnostic trait is the presence of Clovis materials, especially the fluted point, in association with mammoth remains. Evidence of the culture exists throughout North America: as far south as Iztapan, Mexico, as far north as Worland, Wyoming, and possibly as far east as Debert, Nova Scotia. The large plateau of Llano Estacado covered eastern New Mexico and the Texas Panhandle.
Magosian: CATEGORY: culture
DEFINITION: A stone industry found in eastern and southern Africa, dated to c 10,000-6000 BC. The diagnostic tools include small points, microliths, and small blades, as well as Middle Stone Age artifacts. An advanced Levallois technique was employed for the production of flakes for the manufacture of other tools, together with a punch technique for the production of microlithic artifacts. Projectile points were produced by pressure flaking. The culture may have been transitional between the Middle and Later Stone Ages. The type site is Magosi in Uganda. Other sites in central and southern Africa that are dated to the Pleistocene epoch (1,600,000-10,000 years ago) are often considered to represent the same material culture and hunting-and-gathering adaptation.
minimum number of elements: SYNONYM: MNE
CATEGORY: measure
DEFINITION: The least number of whole bones or their diagnostic parts that can account for a sample of bone fragments.
Mortillet, Gabriel de (1821-1898): SYNONYM: Mortillet, (Louis-Laurent-Marie) Gabriel de
CATEGORY: person
DEFINITION: French prehistorian who, after being a student of Edouard Lartet, proposed an alternative to Lartet's Palaeolithic classification scheme. For the palaeontological criteria of Lartet he substituted archaeological ones based on tool forms rather than faunal remains. He extended into prehistory the geological system of periods, or epochs, each characterized by a limited range of type fossils. Each period had 'type names' after a 'type site' where the diagnostic material was well represented -- such as Mousterian, Aurignacian, and Solutrean. By 1869, de Mortillet's scheme for the Stone Age had the following subdivisions: Thenaisian (for the now discredited eoliths), followed by Chellean, Mousterian, Solutrean, Aurignacian, Magdalenian, and (for the Neolithic) Robenhausian, named after a lake village -- though alterations and additions (Acheulian) were made later. With further modifications, this classification was widely adopted and remained the standard terminology for European archaeology until well into the 20th century. De Mortillet saw his epochs as periods of time or as stages of development with a universal validity, and his scheme was basically a refinement of the Three Age System. He did not allow for purely local variants within a single epoch; he divided the Palaeolithic into time periods, not cultures or traditions. This is no longer accepted and de Mortillet's epochs are now thought to represent cultures and to have local validity only. The practice of using type site names, however, proved so useful that it became standard practice. He founded, in 1864, one of the earliest archaeological journals, Matériaux pour l'Histoire positive et philosophique de l'Homme". His classifications were published in "Le Préhistorique: antiquité de l'homme" (1882; "The Prehistoric: Man's Antiquity") and in subsequent revisions."
Obanian culture: CATEGORY: culture
DEFINITION: A group of kitchen midden settlements of the western Scottish coast, a Late Mesolithic culture (c 3065-3900 BC) named from Oban in Argyll. The sites are rock shelters and shell middens on post-glacial raised beaches. Diagnostic tools include barbed spears, some limpet-picks scoops), and antler harpoon heads.
Old Cordilleran Culture: SYNONYM: Old Cordilleran
CATEGORY: culture
DEFINITION: A late Pleistocene cultural tradition based on the hunting of small game and the collection of wild foods in the mountain and plateau region of western North America, especially Oregon and Washington, between c 9000-5000 BC (or later). The diagnostic tool is the leaf-shaped Cascade point, a distinctive bipointed lanceolate point. It was usually accompanied by scraping tools (chopper tools, bolas) and occasionally by milling stones (burins). The type site is Five Mile Rapids, Oregon (9800 BP). They may have been contemporaneous with Big Game Hunting tradition. The tradition has a terminal date of c 7000 BP and it may have cultural ties to the San Dieguito.
outline: CATEGORY: artifact
DEFINITION: A key and obvious diagnostic feature is the outline or silhouette of the implement. The outline is the two dimensional image perceived when viewing the outer perimeter of an artifact with a blade face towards the viewer. Some projectile point types have distinctive outlines and can be accurately identified by this singular feature.
passage grave: SYNONYM: passage tomb
CATEGORY: structure
DEFINITION: A category of megalithic or chambered tomb in which there is a burial chamber and a separate passage into the tomb; the chamber is reached from the edge of the covering mound via a long passage. It includes the earliest known megalithic graves of Europe, dating from about 5000 BC (in Brittany). The diagnostic features are a round mound covering a burial chamber (often roofed by corbelling) approached by a narrower entrance passage. The distinction between passage and funerary chamber proper is very marked. The origin of the passage grave is unclear. Passage graves occur throughout the area where megalithic tombs occur in Europe, but have a predominantly western distribution. In some areas, passage graves were still being constructed in the Bronze Age.
Plainview: CATEGORY: lithics; culture
DEFINITION: The name of a Plano projectile point which has parallel sides and a concave base and the name of the type site in Texas as well as the complex. The complex is associated with the point and non-diagnostic stone and bone tools.
polythetic: CATEGORY: term
DEFINITION: Pertaining to a group in which each of its members possess many but not all group characteristics, i.e. each characteristic is possessed by many members and no single characteristic is diagnostic of group membership.
reworking: CATEGORY: artifact
DEFINITION: Flaking applied to a broken or dulled tool so as to reclaim it for additional use. Sometimes called Lateral Rejuvenation, reworking was the characteristic means by which an implement was resharpened. Alternate and bifacial beveling, serration, and other diagnostic features of blade renewal are very important to age determination as well as for the purpose of assembling attribute clusters for typological analysis. Typically reworked blades or points have a different outline than their former pristine outline. Reworking of lithic objects was employed by early people due to the general lack of high quality lithic materials.
shatter: CATEGORY: lithics
DEFINITION: All angular waste resulting from stone toolmaking activities that are not otherwise diagnostic.
sheep: CATEGORY: fauna
DEFINITION: A ruminant (cud-chewing) mammal of the genus Ovis, usually stockier than its relative the goat. Sheep were first domesticated from wild species of sheep by at least 5000 BC, and their remains have been found at numerous sites of early human habitation in the Middle East, Europe, and Central Asia. Domesticated sheep are raised for their fleece (wool), for milk, and for meat. The flesh of mature sheep is called mutton; that of immature animals is called lamb. The moufflon (Ovis orientalis) of Syria, Turkey, and Iraq, was the first food animal to be tamed, probably c 9000 BC. The urial (O. vignei) lived further east, between the Caspian and Tibet and its bones have been identified c 4900 BC, and it was introduced into Europe in the Neolithic. In practice, the bones of sheep and goats from archaeological sites are lumped together by many researchers who do not distinguish between them in archaeological site reports and refer instead to sheep/goat, ovicaprid, caprovine etc. as only a few of them, notably the horn cores, are firmly diagnostic. Goats are distinguished from sheep by differences in scent glands, lack of 'beard', the number of chromosomes, and the possession of tightly curled horns.
spiral fracture: CATEGORY: term
DEFINITION: Type of bone fracture where the breakage curves along and around the shaft. It is seen by some specialists as diagnostic of human use of bones for tools.
Strelets culture: CATEGORY: culture
DEFINITION: Upper Palaeolithic culture of the Oka-Don Lowland of European Russia, dated to c 40,000-25,000 bp. The earliest assemblages include Middle Palaeolithic scrapers, points, and bifaces. Later assemblages have scrapers, burins, non-stone tools, and art objects. The diagnostic tool is a small triangular bifacial point with concave base.
Tula: SYNONYM: Tollán
CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: The Toltec capital, located in the modern state of Hidalgo, Mexico, then identified as Tollán. Founded on an already existing settlement in c 960 AD, it grew to cover 11 sq. km. The site gained importance c 800 AD after Teotihuacán fell. There was a stepped pyramid on which there was a temple and buildings had colonnaded halls. At its height, there were some 1000 mounds and at least as many low rectangular house mounds, and five ball courts. The monumental civic architecture featured Talud-Tablero architecture. In sculpture, the most diagnostic figures are the Chac Mools, reclining human figures holding offering dishes, and the famous Atlantean statues that supported the roof of Pyramid B. The earliest pre-architectural phases at Tula are characterized by the presence of Coyotlatelco ware, but the dominant ceramic occurring after c1000 is Mazapan ware. Imported Plumbate Ware also occurs frequently. Although the Toltec are associated with the introduction of metallurgy into central Mexico, no metals have been found. Tula was violently destroyed, probably by a Chichimec group, in either 1156 or 1168 AD (depending on how one reads the Calendar date). Although its exact location is not certain, an archaeological site near the contemporary town of Tula in Hidalgo state has been the consistent choice of historians.

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