Archaeology Wordsmith

Results for field:

Celtic fields: CATEGORY: feature
DEFINITION: A term used for small plots with low earthen banks formed around them, which were field systems of pre-Roman times in Britain and northwest Europe. These date to the Early Bronze Age (1800 BC), so it is a misnomer to attach 'Celtic' to them. Traces of these systems may still be visible where later agriculture has not removed them. The oldest examples in Britain are blocks of arable land (sometimes associated with farmsteads, hollow ways, stockades, and enclosures) divided into a patchwork of more or less square units. They are defined by lynchets at the upper and lower edges, and by slightly raised ridges at the sides. Similar fields are known from Scandinavia and the Netherlands.
drained fields: CATEGORY: geography
DEFINITION: Intensive form of agriculture in which fields are created by draining plots of swampy land.
field: CATEGORY: database design
DEFINITION: A space in a file dedicated to the storage of information about a particular attribute.
field archaeology: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: archaeological field survey; humps and bumps archaeology
CATEGORY: technique; branch
DEFINITION: The study of archaeological remains through observation and interpretation of what is in the field" without recourse to excavation. Some features are readily seen and identifiable and others must be sought out or are found only by chance disturbance. The technique is associated with O.G.S. Crawford who demonstrated its methods and value. The three stages are observation (link with air photography) interpretation and accurate recording."
field notes: CATEGORY: technique
DEFINITION: A written account of archaeological research, usually kept by each investigator, recording all stages of research design, but especially the conduct of data acquisition. It is the written record containing firsthand, on-the-spot observations. Field notes are considered primary field data.
field operations journal: CATEGORY: technique
DEFINITION: A running record of activities and finds during an archaeological excavation.
field school: CATEGORY: term
DEFINITION: A formal field archaeology experience under the supervision of trained professionals.
field specimen: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: FS
CATEGORY: artifact
DEFINITION: An artifact found during fieldwork
field supervisor: CATEGORY: term
DEFINITION: The person reporting to the excavation director, who has immediate on-site supervisory responsibility for the excavating.
fieldwalking: CATEGORY: technique
DEFINITION: Systematic exploration of an area by a team of investigators, walking, collecting, and recording surface artifacts or noting earthworks and other phenomena.
fieldwork: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: field study
CATEGORY: technique
DEFINITION: Any form of archaeological research or exploration carried out in an actual setting in the natural environment -- excavation, surveying, fieldwalking, etc. -- rather than in a laboratory, museum, or other such facility. Some archaeologists call everything they do outdoors 'fieldwork', but others distinguish between fieldwork and excavation. Fieldwork, in the narrow sense, consists of the discovery and recording of archaeological sites and their examination by methods other than the use of the shovel and the trowel.
Lancefield: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: Lancefield Swamp
CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: A small swamp in south-central Victoria, Australia, containing bones of an extinct megafauna representing an estimated 10,000 individuals, dated to c 24,000 BC. Six species are represented, but Macropus titan, a giant kangaroo, predominates. A few stone tools have been found in the bone beds, indicating that men and megafauna were contemporary in the area, probably for 7000 years. Cut-marks on some bones have been interpreted as the teeth marks of the carnivorous predator Thylacoleo carnifex, an extinct marsupial carnivore.
Lockshoek: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: formerly Smithfield A
CATEGORY: culture
DEFINITION: A non-microlithic Later Stone Age industry of the Oakhurtst complex in interior South Africa, c 12,000-8000 BP. It was contemporary with the Albany industry of Cape Province.
Moore, Clarence Bloomfield (1852-1936): CATEGORY: person
DEFINITION: American archaeologist considered one of the forefathers of Americanist archaeology. He worked on the southeastern coast of North America with major contributions at Moundville, Alabama, and Poverty Point, Louisiana.
pedestrian survey: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: pedestrian tactic, surface survey, fieldwalking
CATEGORY: technique
DEFINITION: A method of examining a site in which surveyors, spaced at regular intervals, systematically walk over the area being investigated.
Sheffield plate: CATEGORY: artifact
DEFINITION: Copper plated with silver, especially as produced in Sheffield from 1760 to 1840.
Smithfield: CATEGORY: culture
DEFINITION: A Later Stone Age industry and hunting and gathering culture of southern Africa, originally thought contemporary with the Wilton, but technologically different from it, and now referring to a complex between 1300-1700 AD. The culture was on the same level as that of the Mesolithic people of Europe or the modern Kalahari bushmen. The unifying feature of this industry was the almost complete absence of backed microliths and tiny semicircular scrapers.
Swanscombe, Barnfield Pit: CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: British Lower Palaeolithic site on a terrace of the lower Thames Valley, North Kent, England, with a skull of possibly an archaic Homo sapiens with strong Neanderthal features. The skull bones are considerably thicker than those of modern European or Neanderthal skulls; the skull pieces may be the oldest of Homo sapiens found in Europe. More recent opinion holds that the skull is non-sapiens and has closer affinities with those of Neanderthal type. There is a succession of artifact-bearing strata of the Mindel-Riss interglacial period (400,000-200,000 years ago), with the earliest tools of Clactonian type. Middle Acheulian handaxes and a pointed biface assemblage were found in the Middle Gravel level and in the Upper Loam level, Middle Acheulian tools of a more evolved form and a refined ovate assemblage. The deposits contain useful environmental evidence, including abundant mollusk and mammal remains and large assemblages of stone tools.
urnfield: CATEGORY: feature
DEFINITION: A type of cremation grave or cemetery in which the ashes of individuals were placed in pottery vessels or funerary urns. Sometimes unurned cremations may also be present.
Urnfield period: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: Urnfield period; Urnfield; Urn culture, Urnfield complex
CATEGORY: culture
DEFINITION: A widespread group of related Bronze Age cultures practicing burial by cremation in pottery urns, at first in central and eastern Europe and later spreading to northern and western Europe. Such funerary urns were buried in a cemetery of urns (urnfields) and the practice dates from c 1300 BC to c 750 BC. Other features of the Urnfield period include copper-mining, sheet bronze metalworking, and fortified settlements. At the start of the Iron Age, inhumation once again became the dominant form of burial in many areas. A small pot with holes in it is often found interred with the urn, which may have been the ritual fire igniter or an incense burner. The Urnfield cultures succeeded the Tumulus culture in central Europe and developed into the Hallstatt Iron Age culture.
abstract data type: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: ADT
CATEGORY: database design
DEFINITION: A class of data that does not conform to alphanumeric, numeric, Boolean, text, or string types; includes time and date fields as well as special data types for ordinal time, statistical dates, stratigraphic order, and spatial context.
aerial photography: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: air photography, aerophotography, aerial reconnaissance
CATEGORY: technique
DEFINITION: A technique of photographic observation and survey of the ground from an aircraft, spacecraft, or satellite which provides detailed information about sites and features without excavation. It is most important for locating archaeological sites before destruction of the landscape through building, road construction, or modern agricultural practices. When viewed from the air, sites may be revealed as crop marks, soil marks, shadow marks, or frost marks. For example, the plan of a site, ditches, walls, pits, etc. can be reflected in the way the crops grew (crop marks) or a pattern of dark occupation soil may show against a lighter topsoil or stone from walls may be just under the surface (soil marks). Oblique aerial photos, from lower altitudes, detect shadows created by earthworks and permit more detailed interpretations of known sites (shadow marks). Variations in the amount of frost retained on the ground may indicate the presence of buried archaeological features (frost marks). Though these can sometimes be recognized on the ground by careful fieldwalking and contour planning, much larger areas can be examined from the air and overall patterns will be clearer. The same site may not be susceptible every year to aerial photographs, as local climatic variation affects the nature of the feature fillings; a site may only be seen once in ten or twenty years. The use of false-color infrared photography has increased the versatility of aerial photography and the development of photogrammetry allows the accurate mapping of both archaeological and geographical information. Recording of thermographic and radar images complements photographic methods. Aerial photography has proved to be one of the most successful methods of discovering archaeological sites. Large areas of ground can be covered quickly, and the ground plan of a new site can be plotted from the photographs. Features can be revealed in extraordinary detail by these means. The pioneers of this technique were O.G.S. Crawford and Major Allen in Britain and Père Poidebard in Syria, though its first use goes back to 1906 at Stonehenge.
alphanumeric: CATEGORY: database design
DEFINITION: A field type that allows entry of characters and/or numerals but will not allow any arithmetic operations on them.
amateur: CATEGORY: term
DEFINITION: A person actively interested in archaeology but who has not received advanced academic training in the field; also those who have studied but do not pursue work in the field.
Anaeho'omalu: CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: A site on Hawaii dating to the 10th century AD as a fishing camp and later a settlement. It has one of the largest petroglyph fields in the Hawaiian Islands with over 9000 figures.
Anaeho'omalu: CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: A site on Hawaii dating to the 10th century AD as a fishing camp and later a settlement. It has one of the largest petroglyph fields in the Hawaiian Islands with over 9000 figures.
Anlo: CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: A site in Holland with a long sequence of occupation, starting with the Funnel Beaker culture. It was followed by a cattle enclosure during the Late Neolithic (protruding foot beaker) people, then a cemetery of five flat graves with foot beakers and bell beakers with cord ornament. The next phase was a settlement with late varieties of Beaker pottery, followed by a Middle Bronze Age plow soil, and a Late Bronze Age urnfield.
anthropological archaeology: CATEGORY: related field
DEFINITION: The tradition of archaeology that is derived from, and most strongly oriented toward, the larger field of anthropology.
applied anthropology: CATEGORY: branch
DEFINITION: The use of data and information from the four core subfields of anthropology to provide practical solutions to problems in society.
Apulian pottery: CATEGORY: artifact
DEFINITION: An important type of South Italian Pottery, mostly decorated in the red-figured technique. Production seems to have started in the late 5th century BC and may have been influenced by Athenian pottery. One of the early centers may have been Tarentum. In the middle of the 4th century the scenes became more ornate with additional figures inserted in the field and an increased use of added colors. Plain wares were also produced alongside.
archaeoastronomy: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: astroarchaeology
CATEGORY: branch
DEFINITION: The study of the relationship between prehistoric knowledge of astronomical events through calendars, observatory sites, and astronomical images in art and past cultural behavior. The field includes the study of mathematical correlations between archaeological features and the movements of celestial bodies. Some sites (Stonehenge, New Grange) show a definite interest in simple solar observations. Ancient astronomical knowledge can be inferred through the study of the alignments and other aspects of these archaeological sites.
archaeobotany: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: palaeoethnobotany, paleoethnobotany, paleoentomology, palaeoentomology
CATEGORY: branch
DEFINITION: The study of botanical remains at archaeological sites. The field examines the natural surroundings of flora as well as the human-controlled flora on sites. The terms palaeoethnobotany, palaeoentomology, and palaeobotany are sometimes used interchangeably in the literature of archaeology.
archaeological chemistry: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: archeological chemistry
CATEGORY: branch
DEFINITION: The application of chemical theories, processes, and experimental procedures to obtaining archaeological data and to solutions of problems in archaeology. This field includes laboratory analysis of artifacts and materials found in archaeological context.
archaeological geology: CATEGORY: branch
DEFINITION: The use of geological techniques and methods to archaeological work. It is different from geoarchaeology in that the latter is a subfield of archaeology focusing on the physical context of deposits.
archaeology: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: archeology (from archaia"
CATEGORY: and "logos"
DEFINITION: science knowledge or theory)" branch The scientific study and reconstruction of the human past through the systematic recovery of the physical remains of man's life and cultures. Artifacts, structures, settlements, materials, and features of prehistoric or ancient peoples are surveyed and / or excavated to uncover history in times before written records. Archaeology also supplements the study of recorded history. From the end of the 18th century onwards, archaeology has come to mean the branch of learning which studies the material remains of man's past. Its scope is, therefore, enormous, ranging from the first stone tools made and fashioned by man over 3 million years ago in Africa, to the garbage thrown into our trash cans and taken to city dumps and incinerators yesterday. The objectives of archaeology are to construct cultural history by ordering and describing the events of the past, study cultural process to explain the meaning of those events and what underlies and conditions human behavior, and reconstruct past lifeways. Among the specialties in the field are: archaeobiology, archaeobotany, archaeozoology, and social archaeology. Modern archaeology, often considered a subdiscipline of anthropology, has become increasingly scientific and relies on a wide variety of experts such as biologists, geologists, physicists, sociologists, anthropologists, and historians. The methods appropriate to different periods vary, leading to specialized branches of the subject, e.g. classical, medieval, industrial, etc., archaeology.
archaeomagnetic dating: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: archaeomagnetic intensity dating, archaeomagnetism, palaeointensity dating, archaeomagnetic age determination
CATEGORY: technique
DEFINITION: A chronometric method used to date objects containing magnetic materials -- especially for buried undisturbed features such as pottery kilns, earthen fireplaces, and brick walls -- which can be compared to known schedules of past magnetic alignments within a region and fluctuations in the earth's magnetic field. Clay and rocks contain magnetic minerals and when heated above a certain temperature, the magnetism is destroyed. Upon cooling, the magnetism returns, taking on the direction and strength of the magnetic field in which the object is lying. Therefore, pottery which is baked in effect fossilizes" the Earth's magnetic field as it was the moment of their last cooling (their archaeomagnetism or remanent magnetism). In areas where variations in the Earth's magnetic field are known it is possible to date a pottery sample on a curve. This method yields an absolute date within about 50 years."
archaeometric: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: archaeometry, archeometry
CATEGORY: technique
DEFINITION: Relating or referring to the use of scientific techniques from fields such as chemistry, geology, physics, and other sciences for the analysis of archaeological data.
archaeometry: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: archaeological science
CATEGORY: branch
DEFINITION: The large field of work that entails the physical and/or chemical analyses (measurement) of archaeological substances, their constituents, ages, residues, etc.
Ardagh Chalice: CATEGORY: artifact
DEFINITION: A large, two-handled silver cup decorated with gold, gilt bronze, and enamel, that is one of the finest examples of early Christian art from the British Isles. Discovered in 1868 along with a small bronze cup and four brooches in a potato field in Ardagh, Ireland, the chalice may have been part of the buried loot form a monastery after an Irish or Viking raid. The outside of the bowl is engraved with the Latin names of some of the Apostles. There are similarities between the letters of the inscription and some of the large initials in the Lindisfarne Gospels, which probably dates from about 710-720 AD. Thus, the Ardagh Chalice is thought to date from the first half of the 8th century. The chalice displays exceptional artistic and technical skills applied to a variety of precious materials. So far, its manufacture has not been attributed to a particular workshop but the chalice does have similarities to the celebrated Tara brooch and the Moylough belt-reliquary. It is now housed in the National Museum of Ireland at Dublin.
area: CATEGORY: technique
DEFINITION: A sector of units of excavation that consists of a group of closely related, usually contiguous, squares. The numbering of Areas is by capital letters, e.g., Area A, Area M, etc., and squares by Arabic numbers, Area A, Square 1. In some systems of excavation what is an Area in the above description is called a field, and instead of the smaller unit of squares already described, that unit is called an area, e.g., Field 1, Area 1.
aroids: CATEGORY: flora
DEFINITION: The edible tubers of the Aracae family that were important in prehistoric Oceanic, South Asian, and Southeast Asian subsistence. The species is grown in irrigated terraces or fields or cultivated in pits cut to groundwater. Aroids were cultivated by at least 3000 BC and had spread from India to Egypt and Africa by the late 1st millennium BC.
Atlantic Bronze Age: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: carp's tongue sword complex
CATEGORY: culture
DEFINITION: A late Bronze Age metalworking industry which developed on the west coast of France (Brittany to Gironde) c 1000-500 BC and spread to southern England and Iberia. The unifying factor of these areas was very active trading along the Atlantic seaways. It is known from a large number of hoards with typical products being the carp's tongue sword, end-winged ax, hog-backed razor, and bugle-shaped object of uncertain function. The tradition flourished west of the area dominated by the central European Urnfield cultures.
attribute pointer: CATEGORY: database design
DEFINITION: In relational databases, a field in a many" file that makes a relation with the key attribute of a "one" file. "Site number" could be an attribute pointer in an artifact cataloguing file and refer to the key attribute "Site number" in another file "Sites" with a unique record for each site."
Bahrain: CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: An island in the Persian Gulf that has been identified with the ancient land of Dilmun (Telmun) of about 2000 BC, a prosperous trading center linking Sumeria with the Indus Valley. Written records of the archipelago exist in Assyrian, Persian, Greek, and Roman sources. Burial mounds in the north of Bahrain Island suggest a period of Sumerian influence in the 3rd millennium BC. There are densely packed fields of tumuli in Bahrain and at several places on the adjacent mainland. They are associated with densely packed complexes of cist burials. Excavation has shown the island to be an important link in the sea trade between that region and the Indus civilization. Two important sites in the north of the island belong to the 'Dilmun period': a walled town at Qala'at al-Bahrain and a complex temple building at Barbar. Among the finds of this period are circular steatite stamp 'Persian Gulf' seals, related to Indus Valley seals, but probably made locally.
Bambuk: CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: An area of alluvial gold fields in Guinea, near the headwaters of the Niger and Senegal Rivers. The gold, traded to trans-Saharan markets, contributed to the wealth of the empires of Ghana and Mali which had an intermediate position between Bambuk and the markets.
Ban Chiang: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: Ban Chiang Hian
CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: A settlement site in northeast Thailand with burial deposits from 3600 BC-1600 AD and which was occupied from c 4500 BC. Rice was grown and bronze cast according to the earliest records. Iron and rice paddy field cultivation began in the 2nd millennium. The basal burials are associated with incised and cord-marked pottery, copper and bronze artifacts. Levels dated to the late 2nd and 1st millennia BC have produced a variety of curvilinear painted red-on-buff pottery, together with iron, and bones of water buffalo. However, there is disagreement over the dating of Ban Chiang,, especially for the bronze, iron, and painted pottery.
Barbar: CATEGORY: site; culture
DEFINITION: A site and culture of northern Bahrain with a sequence of square temples built on an oval platform, dating from the late 3rd to mid-2nd millennium BC. The culture had distinctive pottery and seals and included sites at Qal'at al Bahrain, Bahrain Tumulus Fields, and others from Failaka to Qatar.
Basra: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: Arabic Al-Basrah
CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: The second-largest city and principal port of Iraq, which from ancient times was a center of commerce, finance, letters, poetry, and science. It was founded as a military encampment by the second caliph, 'Umar I, in 638 about 8 miles (13 km) from the modern town of az-Zubayr, southeastern Iraq. Its proximity to the Persian Gulf on the west bank of the Shatt al-Arab gives it easy access to both the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and eastern frontiers. The first architecturally significant mosque in Islam was constructed there in 665. From the late 9th century Basra suffered a series of disasters and gradually declined. The Zanj (Negro slaves who worked in the fields and plantations of southern Iraq) revolted in 869-873 and sacked the city, and in 923 it was plundered by the Qarmarthians. In 1050, parts of the city were in ruins.
beans: CATEGORY: flora
DEFINITION: The seeds or pods of certain leguminous plants of the family Fabaceae and important to man since the beginning of food production. Most modern beans are of the genus Phaseolus, different species of which occur wild in two hemispheres. Their cultivation commenced at an early date in both. These species all originated in Mexico and South America, spreading to the Old World after Columbus. The earliest finds of cultivated Phaseolus beans are from 6th millennium BC Peru and Mexico. Vicia faba, the ancestor of the broad bean, was confined to the Old World, and was already being grown in the Neolithic Near East. Later in the Neolithic, the species appeared in Spain, Portugal, and eastern Europe. During the Bronze Age, the field bean grew in southern and central Europe, and by the Iron Age it reached Britain.
beehive tomb: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: tholos
CATEGORY: structure
DEFINITION: An architectural structure of the Mycenaean civilization, a pointed dome built up of overhanging (corbeled) blocks of conglomerate masonry cut and polished, often with an alley or approach and a great door. The rich or noble of the Bronze Age were buried in these sometimes enormous, perfectly proportioned vaults though they were built in the Shaft Grave Period as well, perhaps first in Messenia in the 16th century and then in Greece by the middle of the 15th century. The tholos tomb has three parts: a narrow entranceway, or dromos, often lined with fieldstones and later with cut stones; a deep doorway, or stomion, covered over with one to three lintel blocks; and a circular chamber with a high vaulted or corbeled roof, the thalamos. Most tholos tombs have collapsed, often when the lintel cracked and gave way, and their contents have largely been looted
biological anthropology: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: physical anthropology
CATEGORY: branch
DEFINITION: A subfield of anthropology dealing with the issues of human evolution and variation.
Botta, Paul-Emile (1802-70): CATEGORY: person
DEFINITION: French consul in Mosul, Iraq, and archaeologist whose discovery of the palace of the Assyrian king Sargon II at Dur Sharrukin in 1843 started the large-scale field archaeology of ancient Mesopotamia. He was seeking the vanished cities of Assyria, known at that time only from the accounts of ancient writers and from biblical references. Botta revealed the remains of the great palace of Sargon II (721-505 BC), with its famed winged figures, relief sculptures, and cuneiform inscriptions -- but he mistakenly thought he had found ancient Nineveh. The remains tended to disintegrate quickly after being unearthed and one shipment of antiquities was sunk in transit, but another reached Paris and the Louvre. He published Monuments of Nineveh..." in 1949-50 with beautiful illustrations by E.N. Flandin. Later Botta was devoted to deciphering cuneiform."
Buchau: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: Wasserburg Buchau
CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: A Late Bronze Age settlement site in southern Germany with two Urnfield period occupations. There were single-room buildings and a larger two-roomed building in one occupation; the second settlement had nine complexes of large multi-room houses with outbuildings.
caesium magnetometer: CATEGORY: tool
DEFINITION: A highly sensitive portable magnetometer that can detect minute magnetic variations, down to about one millionth of the earth's magnetic field.
Caka: CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: A Late Bronze Age urnfield cemetery in Slovakia with some high-status burials of bronze breastplate.
campo santo: CATEGORY: feature
DEFINITION: In Spanish, holy field" or a cemetery or burial ground associated with a church."
Cayla de Mailhac: CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: A site in southwestern France with a settlement and a series of cemeteries of Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age c 700-100 BC. Occupation began with an urnfield culture. Iron became common in a second phase and a cart burial from La Redorte shows similarities to the Hallstatt Iron Age cultures. Phase III is dated to the second half of the 6th century BC by imports of Greek black figure ware and Etruscan pottery. The settlement of Phase IV was enclosed by a rampart and had houses of sun-dried brick. Datable material included Greek red figure pottery and fibula brooches of Hallstatt/early La Tène types. The last phase was of the La Tène culture.
ceramic sociology: CATEGORY: related field
DEFINITION: A field of study involving the reconstruction of past social systems from distributions of stylistic attributes of pottery in time and space.
ceremonial center: CATEGORY: term
DEFINITION: In the prehistoric New World, a complex of buildings that served as the focus of religious and governmental activities, differing from a village or town. These buildings were used at prescribed times by the peoples lived in a dispersed areas. Permanent residence was restricted to very few people on these sites, usually the elite and their retainers. Sites such as Teotihuacan, Tikal, and Monte Alban, have been interpreted as ceremonial centers. However, subsequent fieldwork beyond the major architectural features has shown that many sites were directly associated with large populations and thus challenges the original premise of their being ceremonial centers. Other more valid examples may be La Venta and San Lorenzo.
Chaco Canyon: CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: An alluvium-filled 20-km stretch of canyon in northwest New Mexico, occupied by the Anasazi during Pueblo I and II, c 850-1150 AD. Now a national park, it contained spectacular pueblos, including Pueblo Bonito (c 919-1130) which housed some 1,200 people. There were at least a dozen pueblo-like towns and hundreds of small villages. During a period of increased rainfall between 950-1150, several other pueblos were constructed in the Canyon, with fields, irrigation canals, an elaborate road system, and signal stations for long-distance trade. The entire complex of ruins has been studied with the aid of photogrammetry, including infrared air photography, satellite photographs, image enhancement, and computer mapping. When the climate started to become dryer, in c 1150, the main occupation of Chaco Canyon ended.
chariot: CATEGORY: artifact
DEFINITION: A light vehicle of war, usually carrying two people, a warrior, and a driver. Examples have been found from the Uruk period in Mesopotamia and the chariot was on the standard of Ur. It first appeared in the Near East in the 17 century BC, associated with the immigrant peoples who became the Hyksos, Kassites, and Hurri. Its arrival in Egypt can be fairly reliably dated to the Second Intermediate Period (1650-1550 BC). The Aryans carried it to India, and in China it formed the core of the Shang army. The Mycenaeans introduced it to Europe, where it spread widely and rapidly. It revolutionized warfare by allowing warriors to be transferred rapidly from one part of a battlefield to another. It was mainly for aristocrats, which explains its popularity as a funeral offering. Burials of complete chariots with horses and charioteers have been excavated in Shang China (1200 BC), in Cyprus from the 7th century BC, and among the La Tène Celts. The earliest Celt chariot burials are in the Rhineland and eastern France with dates around 500 BC, and later burials are in east Yorkshire and Europe as far east as Hungary, Bulgaria, and southern Russia. The chariot was replaced by the mounted warrior or knight when horses of sufficient strength had been bred in the late and post-Roman periods.
chinampa: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: chinampas; floating garden
CATEGORY: geography; term
DEFINITION: A system of cultivation on small, stationary, artificial islands made of vegetation and mud in shallow freshwater lakes, created in the Valley of Mexico (Xochimilco). These very fertile fields were created by massive Aztec reclamation projects and consisted of little islands, each averaging 6 to 10 m (19.7 to 32.8 feet) wide and 100 to 200 m (30.5 to 656.2 feet) long, with fertilization from the organic wastes in mud and aquatic life. Periodic renewal of this mud layer created a permanent supply of fertile soil so that as one crop was harvested it could be immediately replaced with another. Much of Aztecs' Tenochtitlan utilized such intensively farmed, reclaimed land. The champas were normally separated by a system of canals which allowed both access and water circulation.
classical archaeology: CATEGORY: branch
DEFINITION: A field within historical archaeology specializing in the study of Old World Greek and Roman civilizations, their antecedents and contemporaries.
Colossi of Memnon: CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: Two colossal seated statues of Amenhotep III (1390-1352 BC), carved from quartzite sandstone, which are located at the eastern end of the site of his much-plundered mortuary temple in western Thebes; each of the figures is flanked by a representation of Tiy. The two remaining statues are 70-feet (21-meters) high, each hewn from a single block of stone. The more northerly of these was partly destroyed by an earthquake in 27 BC, resulting in a curious phenomenon. Every morning, when the rays of the rising sun touched the statue, musical sounds like the twang of a harp string were heard. This was supposed to be the voice of Memnon responding to the greeting of his mother, Eos. After the restoration of the statue by the Roman emperor Septimius Severus (170 AD) the sounds ceased. The sounds had come from air passing through the pores of the stone, caused by the change of temperature at sunrise, and the masonry patching caused the singing" to cease. These statues once flanked the gateway in front of the temple pylon but now sit alone in the middle of cultivated fields."
compilation: CATEGORY: term
DEFINITION: A set of interrelated propositions (data) describing material remains, usually through symbolic representation, that facilitates the study of ancient people. Examples are field notebooks, artifact catalogues, archaeological databases.
conservation archaeology: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: cultural resource management
CATEGORY: branch
DEFINITION: A subfield of archaeology which focuses on the preservation of archaeological resources and explicitly recognizes archaeological sites as nonrenewable resources. This branch of archaeology seeking to preserve the archaeological record from destruction, by protective legislation, education, and efforts such as the Archaeological Conservancy.
Cortes de Navarra: CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: An Urnfield settlement site of the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages near Sargossa in the Ebro Valley of northern Spain. Narrow, rectangular mudbrick houses were arranged in rows on terraces and the site is actually a tell. Some archaeologists regard the appearance of such traits in southern France and northern Spain in the early 1 millennium BC as indicating the movement of Celtic groups into the area.
Crawford, O.G.S. (1886-1957): CATEGORY: person
DEFINITION: British archaeologist who made many contributions to the development of the field -- including being the first exponent of the mapping of distributions, of air photography, of field archaeology, of the national mapping of antiquities, and of enlightening the public. He was the editor of the popular journal Antiquity for its first 31 years and Archaeological Officer of the Ordnance Survey, where he was largely responsible for the high standard of mapping of archaeological sites in Britain.
cultural anthropology: CATEGORY: related field
DEFINITION: A subdiscipline of anthropology emphasizing nonbiological aspects -- the learned social, linguistic, technological, and familial behaviors of humans; a term used in the Americas. Two important branches of cultural anthropology are ethnography (the study of living cultures) and ethnology (which attempts to compare cultures using ethnographic evidence). In Europe, the field is referred to as social anthropology. In the US, prehistoric archaeology is usually considered a subdivision of cultural anthropology.
Dalmatia: CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: A Roman province on the east coast of the Adriatic, roughly corresponding to modern Yugoslavia. The Roman expansion began c mid-2nd century BC and ended around the 9th century AD when it became the province of Illyricum. The fall of the Dalmatian capital, Delminium, in 155 brought Roman civilization to the country. On the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, Dalmatia fell under the power of Odoacer in 481 and later under that of Theodoric. It was a battlefield during the wars between the Goths and the Byzantine emperor Justinian I and valuable to Rome for its mineral deposits, land routes and harbors, and legendary soldiers. Illyricum was soon subdivided into two provinces, known by the Flavian period as Dalmatia and Pannonia. The name Dalmatia probably comes from the name of an Illyrian tribe, the Delmata, an Indo-European people who overran the northwestern part of the Balkan Peninsula beginning about 1000 BC.
Dalton: CATEGORY: culture
DEFINITION: A complex of the late Paleo-Indian and Archaic periods of the midwestern and eastern U.S., associated with the Dalton projectile point class. The point was varied due to reuse and resharpening. The Dalton sites indicate that hunting deer was important. Brand in northeast Arkansas and Stanfield-Worley Bluff in Alabama are the best-known sites.
data dictionary: CATEGORY: database design
DEFINITION: Documentation of all the files, fields, relations, and processes used in a database.
Deverel-Rimbury culture: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: Deverel-Rimbury people
CATEGORY: culture
DEFINITION: A Bronze Age culture of southern Britain of the 15th-12th centuries BC. It was named after two sites in Dorset, and was characterized by Celtic fields, nucleated small farmsteads and palisaded cattle enclosures, and by inurned cremations, either in flat urnfields or under low barrows. The distinctive pots were globular vessels with channeled or fluted decoration, and barrel- or bucket-shaped urns with cordoned ornament. It is thought that people came over from France and were great farmers, introducing the plow into England. The square lynchets, which can be seen today, are the result of their plowing.
Diaguita: CATEGORY: culture
DEFINITION: Indian peoples of South America, formerly inhabiting northwestern Argentina and the Chilean provinces of Atacama and Coquimbo. They are characterized by distinctive ceramic complexes. Two principal subgroups have been defined -- the Argentinian, on the eastern side of the Andes and the Chilean, on the western side -- which have some cultural traits in common: funerary practices, use of bronze, and probably language. The Calchaquí, the Argentinian subgroup, farmed terraced fields, built irrigation canals, and kept herds of llama. They did loom weaving of llama-wool textiles, which they dyed; basket making; and had a rather elaborate ceramic industry. Metallurgy was also known. Religious beliefs involved shamanistic practices for the cure of illness felt to be caused by witchcraft. Polychrome funerary urns were used for burial for children; adult burials were stone-lined pit inhumations. The Chilean Diaguita ceramics are, on the whole, smaller and more delicately decorated. Influence from the north (Tiahuanaco in the early stages and Inca later) is also apparent. Petroglyphs are common throughout the Diaguita area. The earliest date for Diaguita is c 900 AD and it continued till the Spanish Conquest.
differential fluxgate gradiometer: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: fluxgate gradiometer, differential fluxgate magnetometer, magnetometer
CATEGORY: tool
DEFINITION: A magnetic surveying instrument used in subsurface detection that records changes in the intensity of a magnetic field. Readings can be obtained continually rather than as individual spot measurements of a proton magnetometer. However, it is an expensive alternative to the proton gradiometer. Its electronics involve two detectors with mu-metal strips of a staff which is carried vertically; an initial pure sine-wave voltage is applied, and the difference in intensities observed between the two detectors corresponds to disturbance in the magnetic field cause by baked clay or buried features. These differences are displayed on the instrument's meter.
El Paraiso: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: Chuquitanta
CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: A large ceremonial site in the Chillón Valley on the central coast of Peru,) dating to the Late Preceramic and Initial Period. It has a massive architectural complex of 6-7 mounds, courts, and rooms interconnected by corridors. Five to six building phases are evident in the constructions of fieldstone masonry laid in clay. No pottery or maize has been found, but twined and woven textiles are common in burials and domesticated beans and squash remains have also been recovered.
Engaruka: CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: An Iron Age site on the western side of the Eastern Rift Valley in northern Tanzania with the remains of an Iron Age irrigation system of the 14th century AD. It was an important and concentrated agricultural settlement, occupied for over a thousand years. Water from streams flowing into the valley was dispersed through an elaborate network of stone-lined furrows to serve a large number of small stone-terraced fields. Sorghum was one of the crops that was cultivated. However, its pottery does not seem to have been related to those that became widespread in the 1st millennium AD. It is assumed that its inhabitants were Cushitic speakers.
environmental archaeology: CATEGORY: branch
DEFINITION: A subfield of archaeology which is the study of the environment in archaeological contexts. It includes not only the study of past flora (pollen analysis, palaeobotany, palaeoethnobotany, archaeobotany), and fauna (archaeozoology), but also that of insects (insect analysis), fish (fish bone analysis), and snail shells (molluscan analysis). All are studied in an attempt to recover the total environment of a past society and to understand man's impact on, and changes to, that environment. It is a field in which interdisciplinary research, involving archaeologists and natural scientists. Many disciplines are involved in this study: climatology, Quaternary geology, soil science, palaeobotany, zoology, and human biology.
Erbenheim sword: CATEGORY: artifact
DEFINITION: Heavy bronze flange-hilted sword with a leaf-shaped blade for slashing rather than thrusting. Originating in the early urnfield traditions of central Europe, examples were exported to surrounding areas, some arriving in Britain, for example, in the Penard Phase of the later Bronze Age, the 12th century BC.
ethnography: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: ethnographic study
CATEGORY: related field
DEFINITION: The description and analysis of contemporary cultures, which is based almost entirely on in-depth fieldwork. The formulating of generalizations about culture and the drawing of comparisons are components of ethnography. It is part of the subdiscipline of cultural anthropology. An important technique is participant observation, whereby the anthropologist lives in the society being studied. Ethnography provides data to archaeologists through analogy and homology. An ethnographic study is that of the cultural characteristics of a particular ethnic or social group.
ethnology: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: cultural anthropology
CATEGORY: related field
DEFINITION: The use of ethnographic data to study contemporary cultures; one of the four subdisciplines of cultural anthropology. The study of the varieties of the human race in a comparative analysis to understand how they work and why they change. Ethnology is a term more widely used in Europe, and encompasses the analytical and comparative study of cultures in general, which in American usage is the academic field known as cultural anthropology (in British usage, social anthropology).
fallow period: CATEGORY: term
DEFINITION: The time allowed for a field to rest, when no crops are grown on it.
fallowing: CATEGORY: term
DEFINITION: Practice of letting agricultural fields lie unused through one or more planting seasons in order to restore their fertility.
file: CATEGORY: database design
DEFINITION: An entity for storage of a particular class of data, containing records with identical sets of field types to record the same kinds of attributes.
flat grave: CATEGORY: feature
DEFINITION: Any burial consisting of a simple oval or rectangular pit containing an inhumed individual. The pit was infilled but not marked by a mound or other earthwork. The genuine Urnfield tradition was flat graves. In the Hallstatt, cremation was practiced in cemeteries of flat graves.
flint scatter: CATEGORY: artifact
DEFINITION: A general term applied to collections of worked flint, stone, debitage, and associated raw material gathered up from the surface of ploughed fields or disturbed ground. Such collections range in size from a few dozen through to many thousands of pieces, and may have been collected from areas of any size from a few metres across to several hectares. As such they do not represent distinct kinds of archaeological site but rather the archaeological manifestation of many different kinds of activity; their unity is a product of the way material has been recovered rather than the processes by which it was created in the first place. Much work has been devoted to characterizing flint scatters in terms of what they represent. It is now clear that some are caused by the erosion of underlying features and deposits which relate to a vast range of activities including settlements, stoneworking sites, and middens. In other cases the scatters reflect episodes of activity in the past that involved little more than the deposition of material on the contemporary ground surface which has subsequently become incorporated into the topsoil through natural and anthropogenic formation processes.
floodwater farming: CATEGORY: term
DEFINITION: A method of farming that recovers floodwater and diverts it to selected fields to supplement the water supply.
Fox, Sir Cyril (1882-1967): CATEGORY: person
DEFINITION: British archaeologist who made important contributions to the development of field archaeology in the 1920s-1930s. With Wheeler, he led the development of excavation techniques in Britain and he is also remembered for his geographical approach to archaeological problems, as in his Archaeology of the Cambridge Region" (1923) and "Personality of Britain" (1932) in which he described the concept of a division of Britain into Highland and Lowland Zones."
geomagnetic reversals: CATEGORY: term
DEFINITION: An alternation of the Earth's magnetic polarity in geologic time. It is an aspect of archaeomagnetism especially relevant to the dating of the Lower Paleolithic, involving complete reversals in the earth's magnetic field.
geomagnetic surveying: CATEGORY: technique
DEFINITION: A method of remote sensing that uses deviations in the earth's gravitational field to locate archaeological deposits.
geomagnetism: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: geomagnetic sensing
CATEGORY: related field
DEFINITION: The study of the source, configuration, and changes in the Earth's magnetic field and the study and interpretation of the remanent magnetism in rocks induced by the Earth's magnetic field when the rocks were formed (paleomagnetism). The geological variant of archaeomagnetism.
Gnedovo: CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: A site outside Smolensk on the River Volga, where excavations have revealed one of the largest Viking Age gravefields of Russia. Most of the grave mounds contained cremations associated with oval brooches and other objects dating from the 9th and 10th centuries. The burial area itself seems to be associated with a very large Baltic trading center.
Golasecca: CATEGORY: culture
DEFINITION: An Iron Age culture whose type site is a cemetery in Lombardy, Italy. Occupied from the 9th century BC to the 3rd century BC, it is an urnfield cemetery with some burials accompanied by wheeled vehicles. Some contain rich grave goods of metal, showing connections both with the Hallstatt Iron Age culture of central Europe and with the Etruscans in central Italy.
gradiometer: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: proton gradiometer, fluxgate gradiometer, differential fluxgate gradiometer
CATEGORY: tool
DEFINITION: A geophysical device used to conduct surveys by measuring the gradient in a magnetic or gravitational field. This instrument is used to identify shallowly buried features and structures.
Gwithian: CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: A Middle Bronze Age farming site in Cornwall, England, with prehistoric and medieval remains. There are houses of the Beaker Period, field systems of the Middle Bronze Age, and small square fields of Celtic type. The sites of the post-Roman period include a small settlement of circular drystone huts, a shell midden, and a late Saxon chapel. There are also sub-Roman (400-950), early Christian (550-850), and the Late Saxon (850-1050) levels which have been determined by the pottery. Gwithian ware and Mediterranean imports mark the first phase, and Grass-Marked pottery, the second. The chapel of St. Gocanius is one of the few pre-Conquest buildings in Cornwall (c 9th-10th century).
Hötting: CATEGORY: culture
DEFINITION: A late Bronze Age urnfield culture of the North Tyrol and Upper Australia. The Hötting people controlled the huge copper mines of Mitterberg and were probably the principal suppliers of the metal throughout the east Alpine region.
Hallstatt: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: Hallstatt period
CATEGORY: site; culture
DEFINITION: A site on Lake Hallstatt in the Austrian Alps with a cemetery of over 3000 cremation and inhumation graves with great quantities of local and imported grave goods. There were prehistoric salt mines in the area. Hallstatt is also a late Bronze age and early Iron Age cultural tradition, c 1200-6000 BC in continental temperate Europe. The term also refers to a cultural period of the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age in central Europe, divided into four phases, Hallstatt A, B, C, and D. In central European archaeology the terms Hallstatt A (12th and 11th centuries BC) and Hallstatt B (10th-8th centuries BC) are used as a chronological framework for the urnfield cultures of the Late Bronze Age. The first iron objects north of the Alps appear at the close of this period, and the Iron Age proper begins with the Hallstatt C (or I) stage of the 7th century BC. The area of fullest development is Bohemia, upper Austria and Bavaria, where hillforts were constructed and the dead were sometimes interred on or with a four-wheeled wagon, covered by a mortuary house below a barrow. Sheet bronze was still used for armor, vessels, and decorative metalwork, but the characteristic weapon was a long iron sword (or bronze copy). These swords are found as far afield as southeast England, in the so-called 'Iron Age A' cultures. During the Hallstatt D (or II) period, in the 6th century, the most advanced cultures are found further west, in Burgundy, Switzerland, and the Rhineland. Wagon burials are still prominent and trade brought luxury objects from the Greek and Etruscan cities around the Mediterranean. By the close of this period in the mid-5th century BC, elements of Hallstatt culture are found from southern France to Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. The Hallstatt precedes the La Tène period; the Hallstatt Iron Age culture certainly developed out of the Urnfield Bronze Age groups.
Hang Gon: CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: A prehistoric bronze-working site in southern Vietnam from the late 1st millennium BC. It overlapped the Cu Lao Rua and had urnfield remains.
harrow: CATEGORY: artifact
DEFINITION: A frame set with teeth used to drag over ploughed fields to break down the earth clods etc.
Hittite: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: Hatti, Kheta
CATEGORY: culture; language
DEFINITION: A people of obscure origin who infiltrated Anatolia and the Levant from the north during the later 3rd millennium BC. In the Old Kingdom (c 1750-1450) they established a state in central Turkey with its capital first at Kussara, then at Boghazköy. They overran north Syria c 1600 and pushed on as far as Babylon. Under the empire (1450-1200) a more stable state was built up over most of Anatolia and north Syria, displacing the kingdom of the Mitanni and successfully challenging Assyria and Egypt. The end came quite suddenly in the Late Bronze Age c 1200 BC, notably by movements of the Peoples of the Sea and Anatolian groups from the north. The Hittite outposts in north Syria, however, survived as a chain of Syro-Hittite or neo-Hittite city-states -- Karatepe, Sinjerli, Sakçe, Gözü, Malatya, Atchana, and Carchemish -- down to their final annexation by the Assyrians in the 8th century BC. They are also known for their metal-working. They exploited and traded copper, lead, silver and also iron; indeed, they were among the first peoples to use iron, and for a period maintained a virtual monopoly in the new metal. Their language, Hittite and Hieroglyphic Hittite, is Indo-European, the earliest to be recorded. Hurrian, the language of the Hurri, was non-Indo-European, as of course was the Akkadian much used for commercial and foreign correspondence. The Akkadian cuneiform script was generally used too, though for monumental purposes local hieroglyphs were preferred. The discovery of the Hittite language was the major advance this century in the field of Indo-European languages -- with archives yielding thousands of tablets in many languages. The great period of the empire was 14th-13th centuries BC when a vast amount of material was recorded -- some in the important sister Anatolian languages of Palaic and Luvian.
Holmes, William Henry (1846-1933): CATEGORY: person
DEFINITION: American archaeologist who extinguished the more bizarre theories of the origins of humans in North America and who helped establish professional archaeology in the US. Holmes opposed a popular belief that there was a period in New World prehistory comparable to Upper Paleolithic (Old Stone Age) Europe. His 1903 monograph on ceramics laid the foundation for the culture history of the eastern United States. He was curator of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC. His other published works include Handbook of Aboriginal American Antiquities (1919).
huaca: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: guaca; wak'a
CATEGORY: feature
DEFINITION: A Quechua word meaning 'holiness', 'sacredness', or 'sanctity' and referring to ancient mounds, ruins, tombs, or their contents, in Latin America. Diverse in nature, they range from portable amulets to large natural phenomena such as caves or stones piled in a field (apachitas) to stepped pyramids and were thought by the Inca, Quechua, or Aymara to have magical or religious powers. Huaca means spirits that either inhabit or actually are physical phenomena such as waterfalls, mountains, or man-made shrines. The term is also used to refer to sacred ritual or the state of being after death.
intensive agriculture: CATEGORY: term
DEFINITION: Field crop production by means of the annual preparation of fields intended for cultivation on a more or less permanent basis facilitated by use of the plow and other machinery, draft animals, fertilizers (anciently often animal and human fetal matter), irrigation, water storage technologies, and the like.
Itazuke: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: Itatsuke
CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: An early agricultural village in Fukuoka Prefecture, Japan, that is the type site for Early Yayoi pottery. The site had extensive paddy field remains. The pottery was associated with wooden hoes and semilunar stone harvesting-knives. There are also Early Yayoi graves and Middle and Late Yayoi occupation levels. Other artifacts recovered from the site include spindle whorls and bronze weapons.
Kalibangan: CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: A site in India near the extinct Ghaggar/Hakra River with Early and Mature Harappan settlements. A Chalcolithic settlement similar to Kot Diji and the site underlying the Indus city at Harappa has given radiocarbon dates of c 2750 BC. An intact plowed field has been discovered, indicating that the plow was already in use before the main Harappan period. About 2450 a small town of the Indus civilization was built over it, which flourished to c 2150 BC. In the Mature Harappan period, the site consisted of a citadel and a lower town, both defended, and laid out, in the normal Indus Valley grid pattern.
Karlgren, Bernhard (1889-1978): CATEGORY: person
DEFINITION: Swedish archaeologist was the first person to reconstruct the phonology of Chinese characters in use around 600 AD and then in earlier periods. He reconstructed the vowel system of Old Chinese to account for the language in Classic of Poetry" (800-600 BC). He studied numerous fundamental texts of the pre-Han period and succeeded in assessing their authenticity and in translating them into English and providing commentaries. In field of early bronzes he laid the foundations for an analytical method the principles of which are still valid."
Kietrz: CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: A large urnfield cemetery of the Lusatian culture of Silesia, Poland, containing over 3000 graves. Some appear to have had mortuary structures erected above them.
Knovíz culture: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: Knovís
CATEGORY: culture
DEFINITION: A Bronze Age urnfield culture of Bohemia, Thuringia, and Bavaria, following the decline of the Tumulus Bronze Age, c 1400-900 BC. Except for the burial rite, the Knovíz culture is similar to that of the neighboring Milavce group. The Knoviz group is one of the exceptions to the normal urnfield rite in that inhumation is more frequent than cremation burial. Few large settlement sites are known, the bulk of material deriving from small farmsteads with pits and post-holes and cemeteries. Hengiform monuments and horseshoe-shaped enclosures are occasionally associated with Knoviz pottery. The vessel form is the Etagengefass, with a large bulging body and a smaller bottomless pot fused on top of it to form the neck.
Kuk: CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: A site complex in the New Guinea Highlands, near Mount Hangen, which has produced several systems of swamp-drainage ditches, going back to about 7000 BC. A drain and evidence of clearance took place then and a sequence of field systems were made from about 6000 bp to the present. The findings have great significance because they appear to document a totally independent origin of horticulture in the New Guinea Highlands, quite separate from any Austronesian influence. There is also a 30,000-year-old hearth.
Laming-Emperaire, Annette (1917-1977): CATEGORY: person
DEFINITION: French prehistorian specializing in prehistoric rock art who found and studied sites in Chilean Pantagonia -- Englefield, Ponsonby, Munición -- and in Brazil, José Vieira and several sambaquis (shell middens). She also excavated at Marassi (Tierra del Fuego), Lapa Vermehla, and Lagoa Santa.
landscape archaeology: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: total archaeology
CATEGORY: branch
DEFINITION: The study of individual features including settlements seen as single components within the broader perspective of the patterning of human activity over a wide area. It is the recovery of the story of an area of countryside using all possible techniques -- surface scatters, field and other boundaries, standing buildings, as well as excavation. This approach within archaeology emphasizes examination of the complete landscape, focusing on dispersed features and on areas between and surrounding traditional sites as well as on the sites themselves.
Latians: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: Latin
CATEGORY: culture
DEFINITION: The ancient people of Latium; an Iron Age people of the region just south of Rome. Their cremation cemeteries are known particularly from the Alban Hills, and from Rome itself. The Latians seem to have developed from the Pianello urnfielders, notably those who buried their dead in the cemetery at Allumiere, and were certainly the ancestors of the Romans. The first huts on the Palatine Hill were built by these people in the 9th century BC. Latium was an ancient area in west-central Italy, originally limited to the territory around the Alban Hills, but extending by about 500 BC south of the Tiber River as far as the promontory of Mount Circeo.
Lausitz: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: Lusatia, Lusatian
CATEGORY: culture
DEFINITION: A northeasterly group of the European Urnfield cultures, occurring in East Germany, Poland, and parts of Czechoslovakia, which emerged c 1500 BC and survived well into the Iron Age c 300 BC. Fortified settlements occur, seen in the well-preserved site at Biskupin. The dead were cremated and placed in urns and buried either in urnfields or under barrows. The good-quality pottery was often decorated with graphite painted designs and plastic ornament. The bronze industry, of general Urnfield type, flourished; iron was introduced from the Hallstatt Iron Age culture from the later 7th century BC. Historic Lusatia was centered on the Neisse and upper Spree rivers, in what is now eastern Germany, between the present-day cities of Cottbus (north) and Dresden (south).
Lindholme Hoje: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: Lindholm Hills
CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: A site on the northern shore of Limfjord in Jutland, used as a gravefield from the prehistoric period until the Viking era, including a Viking ship cemetery. In the 11th century it was overlaid by a Viking village which functioned as a small trading and industrial settlement. One interesting find was a spoked wagon wheel. The settlement went out of use around 1100 due to the silting-up of the fjord and continual sand drifts.
Lovcicky: CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: Late Bronze Age settlement of the Velatice group in southern Moravia of the Urnfield period.
Lusatian culture: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: Lausitz culture; Lusatia
CATEGORY: culture
DEFINITION: A Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age (Hallstatt period) culture of Poland and eastern Germany, an urnfield culture which had formed by c 1500 BC. Larger settlements, such as Biskupin, Senftenberg, and Sobiejuchy, are fortified. The culture is noted for its bronzework and its fine dark pottery, sometimes graphite-burnished and generally decorated with bosses and fluted ornament. Iron tools were adopted in the north throughout the earlier Iron Age. In some classifications, the Middle Bronze Age 'pre-Lausitz' phase is considered the first stage of the Lusatian culture proper.
lynchet: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: terracette
CATEGORY: feature
DEFINITION: A bank of earth which accumulates on the downhill side of an ancient plowed field as the disturbed soil moves down the slope under the action of gravity. It is a small-scale terracing effect visible particularly in ancient field systems which is caused by accumulation of soil against an obstruction such as a field boundary. Field boundaries, such as banks or walls, become enlarged and overlaid by material loosened in the cultivation process. A corresponding erosion from the downslope side of the boundary creates a negative lynchet. Lynchets are conspicuous in the square Celtic fields (Bronze Age to Romano-British in date) and in the long rectangular fields, the so-called strip lynchets, laid out on sloping terrain in post-Roman and medieval times.
Müller, Sophus (1846-1934): CATEGORY: person
DEFINITION: Danish prehistorian and paleontologist who succeeded Christian Jurgensen Thomsen as Director of the National Museum of Denmark in 1865. In the field, Müller improved the techniques of excavation, particularly in recognizing stratigraphic relationships. Müller developed new techniques of excavation and monument preservation and supported the principle of the influence of Mediterranean civilization on northern Europe. He built detailed typological sequences and cross-dated them by reference to the historical calendars of the Near Eastern civilizations. He was aware of the possibility of variation in culture among contemporary groups and suggested, for instance, that there were several contemporary versions of the Neolithic of northern Europe. During the late 19th century, he discovered the first of the Neolithic battle-ax cultures in Denmark.
magnetic: CATEGORY: term
DEFINITION: Of or pertaining to magnetism, the ability to be magnetized or affected by a magnet, or relating to the earth's magnetic field. Magnetism is a class of physical phenomena associated with the motion of charge, the attraction for iron observed in lodestone and a magnet. It is associated with moving electricity, exhibited by electric currents, and characterized by fields of force. It can be an electric current in a conductor or charged particles moving through space, or it can be the motion of an electron in atomic orbit.
magnetic dating: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: paleomagnetic dating
CATEGORY: technique
DEFINITION: Any theoretically chronometric dating technique which uses the thermo-remanent magnetism of certain types of archaeological material. These methods use the known changes have taken place in the direction and intensity of the earth's magnetic field. Magnetic minerals present in clay and rocks each have its own magnetic orientation. When heated to the so-called blocking temperature, the original magnetic orientation of the particles is destroyed, and they will take on the orientation of the earth's magnetic field in a fixed alignment -- which does not alter after cooling. These methods are most suitable for kilns and hearths. Once the direction of the archaeological sample has been determined, it may be possible to date it by fitting it to the secular variation curve established for the local area. There is no universal curve, since not only the earth's main field varies, but there are also local disturbances. Since the dating of the curve has to be constructed through independent dating techniques, and these are not available for every area, there are not established curves for every region. As a dating technique, it is strictly limited to those areas where dated curves have been established. A more recent dating technique using thermo-remanent magnetism is palaeointensity dating (archaeomagnetic intensity dating). The principle is that the thermo-remanent magnetism in burnt clay is proportional to the intensity of the magnetic field acting on the clay as it cools down. The measurement of its intensity, and a comparison with the intensity revealed by reheating in today's magnetic field, gives a ratio for the past and present fields which can be used to establish a curve of variation in the earth's magnetic field intensity. The method promises to be useful since direction in situ is not required and it can therefore be used for pottery and other artifacts as well as hearths and kilns.
magnetic surveying: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: electromagnetic surveying
CATEGORY: technique
DEFINITION: A technique for the location of archaeological features adapted from techniques used in geological surveying. It is based on the fact that features with thermo-remanent magnetism, like hearths or kilns, or features with a high humus content, like pits or ditches, and iron objects, distort the earth's magnetic field from the normal. Instruments such as the proton magnetometer or the differential fluxgate gradiometer are used to measure those disturbances, and by plotting the results, a map of the features can be built. The ways in which the different types of feature distort the magnetic field vary, though they can all be picked up on the same instrument. Hematite or magnetic, present in most clays, have a small magnetic effect when unburnt, since the grains point in random directions and cancel each other out. Once heated to about 700? C or more, the grains line up, increasing the magnetic effect and causing an anomaly in the magnetic field. This thermo-remanent magnetism is also the basis for magnetic dating. The presence of modern iron as in wire fences can cause problems with this technique of location; if the area to be surveyed is clearly crossed with power lines or fenced with iron posts, a resistivity survey may be more suitable. The method of surveying used requires a grid to be measured out on the site and readings to be taken at regular intervals. The nature of the site may prevent such a grid being laid out, for instance if it is heavily wooded, and magnetic survey may not be possible on these sites. It is one of the most commonly used geophysical surveying methods.
magnetic susceptibility: CATEGORY: geology
DEFINITION: A property of soil and sediment, measured as a ratio of intensity of magnetization of the material to the strength of an applied magnetic field. Topsoil often has a somewhat enhanced 'magnetic susceptibility' due to magnetic minerals in the material, especially compared with the subsoil. The filling of a ditch or a pit has greater susceptibility than the surrounding area because of higher humus content and perhaps the presence of burnt occupation material. On the basis that contrast between feature and surroundings locates the features, walls, and other stone settings can also be located since they have less susceptibility than the area around them, i.e. they exhibit a reverse anomaly.
magnetometer: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: proton magnetometer
CATEGORY: tool
DEFINITION: A geophysical instrument that measures the intensity and sometimes direction of the Earth's magnetic field. It is used in electromagnetic surveying to identify changes in the field within soil or sediment that might be caused by subsurface features, hearths, kilns, or metal artifacts. When a current is passed through a coil in a bottle of water or alcohol the protons of the hydrogen atoms align themselves to its magnetic field. When the current is cut off, the protons realign themselves according to the earth's field, its strength being indicated by the frequency of their gyration on realignment. This sets up a weak current which is transmitted back from the bottle to the instrument and there registered on dials. The resulting figures are plotted to reveal anomalies in field strength -- usually due to buried iron, kilns, hearths, or to pits or ditches. These features can thus be rapidly located without disturbance of the ground, and excavation can be directed to the most promising areas. Magnetrometry is the use of a magnetometer for mapping subsurface anomalies. There are a number of designs, but two are particularly widely used. The proton magnetometer makes an absolute measurement of field strength, but is intermittent in operation: each reading is initiated by the push of a button, and takes some seconds to appear on the display of the instrument. Fluxgate magnetometers work on a different principle, and give a continuous reading, which makes surveying less time-consuming. Most fluxgate machines do not however measure field strength directly, but rather are gradiometers, measuring the vertical gradient of the earth's' magnetic field, i.e. how fast the field strength changes with vertical distance from the earth's magnetic field Gradient measurements can also be used in archaeological surveys and have an advantage over absolute measurements. The earth's field strength varies continuously during the day at any one location. Absolute measurements taken at different times have to be calibrated for this effect if they are to be comparable. Gradient measurements are not affected by this diurnal drift in field strength, and so do not need to be calibrated. Proton gradiometers are also available. The fluxgate, differential fluxgate, and proton gradiometer take continuous measurements of relative vertical change in the intensity of field strength.
Mailhac: CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: A series of important Late Bronze Age and Iron Age sites near Narbonne in southwest France, dating from the 8th-1st centuries BC. The sites comprise a defended hilltop settlement (Le Cayla) and a series of urnfield cemeteries (Le Moulin, Grand Bassin I and II). The earliest phase has an urnfield-type cemetery, wooden houses, and evidence of farming supplemented by hunting. In the second phase (early 6th century BC), Hallstatt influences include iron and a chieftain's wagon burial (La Redorte). Greek and Etruscan imports appear in both graves and occupation deposits in this and in the succeeding phase. Occupation ended early in the 1st century BC with a burning, probably a Roman punitive action after threatened uprisings in the area.
maize: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: corn
CATEGORY: flora
DEFINITION: A tall cereal grass widely grown in Mexico, South America, and the US which originated as a staple food in Mexico about 9000 years ago. A field of maize is a milpa. No wild maize appears to exist today. The plant originated in the Central Mexican Highlands, where pollen belonging to maize, or one of its near relatives, has been found in cores from Mexico City, dated to between 60,000-80,000 bp. The earliest macrofossils of maize appear in the Tehuacan Valley in Mexico between 7000-5000 BC. These early finds have very small cobs and kernels and it has been suggested that they come from wild maize. Archaeologically, the oldest cultivated maize in Mexico is from the Coxcatlan period in the Tehuacan Valley (4800-3500 BC), and maize appears in the caves of Tamaulipas, northeast Mexico, around 3200 BC. In South America, the oldest direct evidence comes from the Valdivia culture of Ecuador, around 3000, though maize phytoliths were found in the preceding Vegas period, c 6000 BC. It was in fairly general use in the southwestern US by 1000 BC, though it did not reach the eastern Woodlands until about the time of Christ. It was an important early domesticated food plant in the New World and one of the trio which provided a balanced diet for early American farmers (the other two being beans and squash).
Mali: CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: A landlocked country in western Africa, one of the early African Sudanic states which rose to prominence in the 12th-13th centuries. It effectively took over control of the Bambuk goldfields from ancient Ghana -- as well as their links with the trans-Saharan trade. By the 14th century its rulers controlled an extensive stretch of territory, including the Songhai country of the middle Niger, and Mali's ruler made the pilgrimage to Mecca. The empire declined in the late 15th century after its overthrow by Songhay. Mali was occupied in the Paleolithic and Neolithic, with remains including Asselar man, a human skeleton found north of Timbuktu in 1927, and rock paintings and carvings.
Malta: CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: A Mediterranean island south of Sicily with a settlement of the impressed ware culture at Skorba dated to c 4900 BC. Further immigrants arrived from Sicily c 3500. These people from c 4000-2400 BC erected a startling and unique series of megalithic temples, some 30 still surviving, of sophisticated plan and construction. They are among the oldest human monuments in the Mediterranean basin. The major temple complexes, most of which contained two or three separate temples, were built in several phases over a long period of time. The temples are built of local limestone in Cyclopean masonry and are characterized by a series of apsidal courts or chambers arranged on either side of a central corridor opening from a monumental facade. The whole structure is enclosed by a solid outer wall and the space between this and the building itself filled with stone and earth rubble. They have a number of installations which are presumably ritual, including altar-like constructions, niches, and porthole openings. The temples are unique in form and construction and are in any case too early to be derived from any east Mediterranean stone architecture. They are now seen as a local development. The people of this time were succeeded by warlike immigrants, possibly from western Greece or Carthage (8th-7th c BC), who dug an urnfield into the ruins of the temples and built villages on naturally defended hilltops; it is to this period that the mysterious 'cart-ruts' belong. The island was finally brought under the control of the Phoenicians in the 9th century BC and conquered by Rome in 218 BC.
mausoleum: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: Greek mausoleion
CATEGORY: structure
DEFINITION: A storage structure for the dead which was above ground; a large, impressive sepulchral monument. The original mausoleum was the gigantic tomb of Mausolus, ruler of Caria, in southwest Asia Minor, built at Halicarnassus c 353-350 BC. It was considered one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. The word later came to be used for any tomb built on a monumental scale, such as Augustus in the Field of Mars and Hadrian on the banks of the Tiber (now the Castel Sant'Angelo, Rome). As one of the Seven Wonders of the World, it was famous not only for its vast dimensions, but also for the refinement of its decoration and sculptures. Attributed to the architect Pythius, it seems to have been constructed entirely of white marble, and reached a total height of some 40 meters. It consisted of a massively broad and high plinth, surmounted probably by a temple with Ionic peristyle, topped by a pyramid, and the whole capped with a gigantic chariot-and horse group. Some time before the 15th century, it collapsed due to earthquake damage. The colossal statues identified as those of Mausolus and Artemisia were brought to the British Museum, together with sculpture and frieze details. Probably the most ambitious mausoleum is the white marble Taj Mahal at Agra, in India, built by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan for his favorite wife, who died in 1631. Other famous mausoleums are those of Vladimir Lenin and Napoleon III.
Maya: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: Classic Maya
CATEGORY: culture
DEFINITION: Very important culture of Mesoamerica, one of the major Classic civilizations, which occupied the peninsula of Yucatan and Belize, the lowland jungle south of it, and the highlands of Guatemala and western Honduras. The civilization developed from other pre-Classic cultures by about 200 BC and continued until being conquered by the Spaniards in 1541 AD. By c 200 BC, at sites like Tikal and Uaxactún, the first pyramids were being built. Population increase and the introduction of new ceramic and architectural forms are accompanied by an artistic transition from Olmec through Izapan to Mayan. The classic Maya civilization dates to c 292 AD, the earliest Long count date found on stele 29 at Tikal. The Early Classic period (200-600) was the golden age of the lowland culture and the great centers acted as foci for administration, religion, and the arts. Architecture, sculpture, and painting were highly developed; records were kept in hieroglyphic writing, and elaborate ceremonies were carried out in the temples on top of their pyramids. A class of astronomer-priests observed the sun, moon, and planets, and had evolved a calendrical system more accurate than the Julian calendar used in Christian Europe. In mathematics the priests used a vigesimal system with the concept of zero and with a positional notation. The Classic Maya culture is characterized by an immense investment of labor in construction of ceremonial architecture, the erection of stelae, and a growing differentiation between the elite and the peasant population. The Maya practiced swidden agriculture as well as intensive agriculture, terracing and raised fields, and arboriculture. Polychrome pottery is a hallmark of the Maya Lowland Classic culture. The Late Classic period (c 600-900 AD) shows development in sculpture and architecture -- and regional styles can be recognized. Northern Yucatan began to come into its own at sites like Chichén Itzá and Uxmal, where fine buildings in the Punc style were erected during the 7th-9th centuries. The later part of this period witnessed the end of civilization in the lowlands; the great centers were abandoned during the 9th and early 10th centuries. The Post-Classic period, c 900 to the Spanish conquest, had strong Mexican influence, particularly at Chichén Itzá where buildings were constructed in the Toltec style of central Mexico, and the art shows representations of Toltec warriors overpowering Maya chiefs. During the collapse in the southern Lowlands, centers in the northern Lowlands began to grow, c 800-1000 AD. The South's decline may have played a role in the North's prosperity. Sometime around 1200, the Itzá were driven from their capital, and Mayapán became the leading city of Yucatan. In about 1440-1450, Mayapán was overthrown and there followed a time of disunity and warfare which lasted until the Spaniards conquered Yucatan in 1541. The Maya kingdoms of highland Guatemala were subdued in 1525, but in the lowlands the descendants of the exiled Itzá held out until 1697. The collapse of Maya culture (in c 900) is a puzzling phenomenon, but its relative suddenness still remains without satisfactory explanation. There are no Long Count dates after 900, after which time lowland populations dwindled by as much as 90 percent. The term Maya also refers to a culture area and is typically divided into the lowland and highland Maya. Descendants of the Maya still occupy the region.
Memphis: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: Men-nefer
CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: The capital of Egypt in the Archaic Period and Old Kingdom (c 2575-c. 2130 BC), and thereafter one of the most important cities of the Near East. Located in Lower Egypt, it stood near the key point where the Nile begins to divide its waters at the head of the delta, 15 miles south of Cairo. The only surviving remains are the cemeteries west of the city, most notably the pyramids and Great Sphinx of Giza. The main pyramid fields are: Abu Ruwaysh, Giza, Zawayet el-Aryan, Abu Sir, Saqqarah (Saqqara), and Dahshur. It is said to have been founded by the 1st Dynasty ruler Menes c 2925 BC and was the seat of the creator god Ptah. During the New Kingdom (1539-1075), Memphis probably functioned as the second, or northern, capital of Egypt. Despite the rise of the god Amon of Thebes, Ptah remained one of the principal gods of the pantheon. The Great Temple was added to or rebuilt by virtually every king of the 18th dynasty. Chapels were constructed by Thutmose I and Thutmose IV and by Amenhotep III. Amenhotep III's son, the religious reformer Akhenaton, built a temple to his god, Aton, in Memphis. A number of handsome private tombs dating from this period in the Memphite necropolis testify to the existence of a sizable court. In 332 BC, Alexander the Great used Memphis as his headquarters while making plans for his new city of Alexandria. From the Fifth Dynasty onwards there was a very marked reduction in the size of the royal tombs, together with the use of materials and techniques which involved a lesser expenditure of effort and resources in their construction. By the First Intermediate period, the construction of monumental tombs seems to have stopped.
mensuration: CATEGORY: term
DEFINITION: Any act of measuring; measurement. The earliest standard measurements appeared in the ancient Mediterranean cultures and were based on parts of the body, or on calculations of what man or beast could haul, or on the volume of containers or the area of fields in common use. The Egyptian cubit is generally recognized to have been the most widespread unit of linear measurement in the ancient world. It came into use around 3000 BC and was based on the length of the arm from the elbow to the extended finger tips. It was standardized by a royal master cubit of black granite, against which all cubit sticks in Egypt were regularly checked. One of the earliest known weight measures was the Babylonian mina, though the two surviving examples vary widely -- 640 grams (about 1.4 pounds) and 978 grams (about 2.15 pounds).
microtoponymy: CATEGORY: related field
DEFINITION: The extension of toponymy -- place-name research -- to the uninhabited places such as fields, small parts of forests. Hodonymy is the study of the names of streets, roads, etc. Hydronymy is the study of the names of bodies of water and oronymy concerns names of mountains.
Middle Horizon: CATEGORY: chronology
DEFINITION: A division of time in Andean/Peruvian South America, c 600-1000 AD, used to refer to the first imperialistic domination of area under the unifying forces of Tiahuanaco and Huari (Wari) cultures. It was the time of the first large-scale imperial expansions. During the first half of the Middle Horizon, in central Peru, the Huari came to control the highlands and possibly the coast. The remains of large groups of food-storage buildings in the Huari strongholds suggest military activity like that of the late Inca. Huari is closely linked in its art style to the monuments of the great site of Tiahuanaco, located on Lake Titicaca, Bolivia. Tiahuanaco expanded over the altiplano and adjacent regions of Bolivia, southern Peru, and northern Chile. The principal buildings of Tiahuanaco include the Akapana Pyramid, a huge platform mound or stepped pyramid of earth faced with cut andesite; a rectangular enclosure known as the Kalasasaya, constructed of alternating tall stone columns and smaller rectangular blocks; and another enclosure known as the Palacio. They practiced the raised-field system of agriculture. Some Tiahuanaco effigy vessels have been discovered at Huari, but otherwise they seem to have been independent entities. In the second half of the Middle Horizon, the political and economic systems slowly collapsed. The decline of these two states was followed by a period of more localized political power. The Late Intermediate Period began about 1000 AD.
Milavce: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: Milavec
CATEGORY: site; culture
DEFINITION: The type site of a southeastern Bohemian culture stemming from the Tumulus Bronze Age but showing elements of the new urnfield rite. This Middle Bronze Age site was related to Knoviz and most of the cremations were urnless except for one richly furnished grave with ashes in a wheeled cauldron of cast bronze.
Milazzo: CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: A town founded in 716 BC by colonists from Zankle (Messina). It was taken by the Athenians in 426 BC and by the Syracusan tyrant Agathocles in 315 BC. The consul Gaius Duilius won the first Roman naval victory over the Carthaginians in the bay in 260 BC. It is located on the northeast coast of Sicily, facing the Aeolian Islands, and demonstrates close cultural connections with the prehistoric sequence on these islands. It was occupied throughout the Bronze Age; the Middle Bronze Age culture had a cemetery of pithos burials (with the dead placed in large jars in the crouched position) while in the succeeding Late Bronze Age phase (Ausonian culture) had a cemetery of urnfield type, characterized by cremations in urns and bronzes of local Urnfield (Proto-Villanovan) type. The old town on a hill above is partly surrounded by Spanish walls from the 16th century and contains a 13th-century Norman castle.
milpa: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: milpa agriculture
CATEGORY: term
DEFINITION: An agricultural technique whereby forest vegetation is cut down annually and burned in place to prepare fields for crops -- slash-and-burn agriculture. Its derivation is from a term referring to the cultivation of maize fields, usually for only a few years, by swidden agriculture. Depictions on Maya frescos and codices coupled with ethnographic evidence of modern-day methods of cultivation in the Maya Lowlands, gave rise to the theory that milpa agriculture was the basis of Maya subsistence. Exhaustion of the land by its indiscriminate practice was long held to be a factor in the Maya collapse.
multiplier effect: CATEGORY: term
DEFINITION: A term used in systems thinking to describe the process by which changes in one field of human activity (subsystem) sometimes act to promote changes in other fields and in turn act on the original subsystem itself. An instance of positive feedback, it is thought by some to be one of the primary mechanisms of societal change.
Naples: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: Neapolis
CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: Naples was founded about 600 BC as Neapolis (New City") by Greek settlers close to the more ancient Palaepolis. Both towns were extensions of Greek colonies on the nearby island of Pithecusa (now Ischia) and at Cumae on the adjacent mainland. The principal Greek city of Campania southern Italy it was only of modest size and importance during the Roman period. Earlier occupation of this fertile location framed on one edge by Mount Vesuvius and by the sulphurous plains of the 'Phlegraean Fields' on the other is extremely likely. It was taken over by the Romans in 326 BC. Among the traces that still survive of the Greco-Roman city stretches of Greek city walling have been identified in several areas and a portion of 6th-7th century BC necropolis located in the Pizzofalcone region. A 700-meter tunnel on the Via Puteolana joining Naples and Puteoli was originally constructed by Augustus' architect Cocceius. Under the empire Naples and its environs served as a center of Greek culture and erudition and as a pleasure resort for a succession of emperors and wealthy Romans whose coastal villas extended from Misenum on the Gulf of Pozzuoli (the ancient Puteoli) to the Sorrentine peninsula. The Museo Archeologico Nazionale contains an extensive collection of Campanian antiquities and much material from Pompeii and Herculaneum."
non-probabilistic sampling: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: nonprobabilistic sampling
CATEGORY: technique
DEFINITION: A non-statistical sampling strategy (in contrast to probabilistic sampling) which concentrates on sampling areas on the basis of intuition, historical documentation, or long field experience in the area. It is the acquisition of sample data based on informal criteria or personal judgment. It does not allow evaluation of how representative the sample is with respect to the data population.
nonprobabilistic sampling: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: non-probabilistic sampling
CATEGORY: technique
DEFINITION: A non-statistical sampling strategy (in contrast to probabilistic sampling) which concentrates on sampling areas on the basis of intuition, historical documentation, or long field experience in the area. It is the acquisition of sample data based on informal criteria or personal judgment. It does not allow evaluation of how representative the sample is with respect to the data population.
Oakhurst: CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: Cave in the southern Cape Province of South Africa with Later Stone Age material, including a microlithic industry of Wilton type overlying material without backed microliths and where utilized large quadrilateral flakes and informal scrapers were used exclusively (c 12th-9th millennia BC). This material is ascribed to the Albany or Oakhurst industry (formerly Smithfield A). Some include this industry with the Lockshoek and Pomongwe industries in the Oakhurst Complex.
off-site data: CATEGORY: term
DEFINITION: Unclustered physical remains produced by human activities; evidence from a range of information, including scatters of artifacts and features such as plowmarks and field boundaries. This data can provide important evidence about human exploitation of the environment.
paddies: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: singular paddy
CATEGORY: geography
DEFINITION: Fields for the intensive cultivation of rice, flooded naturally or by irrigation. Wet land on which rice is grown.
paleoentomology: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: archaeobotany, paleoethnobotany, palaeoethnobotany, palaeoentomology
CATEGORY: related field
DEFINITION: The study of botanical remains at archaeological sites. The field examines the natural surroundings of flora as well as the human-controlled flora on sites. The terms palaeoethnobotany and palaeobotany are sometimes used interchangeably in the literature of archaeology.
paleoethnobotany: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: archaeobotany, palaeoethnobotany, palaeoentomology, palaeobotany
CATEGORY: related field
DEFINITION: The study of botanical remains at archaeological sites; the analysis and interpretation of interrelationships between people and plants from evidence in the archaeological record. The field examines the natural surroundings of flora as well as the human-controlled flora on sites. The terms archaeobotany, palaeoentolomology, and palaeobotany are sometimes used interchangeably in the literature of archaeology.
paleomagnetism: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: palaeomagnetism, remanent magnetism; paleo-magnetism, palaeo-magnetism; archaeomagnetism
CATEGORY: technique
DEFINITION: The magnetic polarization acquired by the minerals in a rock at the time the rock was deposited or solidified. The permanent magnetism in rocks, resulting from the orientation of the Earth's magnetic field at the time of rock formation in a past geological age. It is the source of information for the paleomagnetic studies of polar wandering and continental drift. The field of paleomagnetism involves techniques for determining the age of rocks by analyzing the magnetic field polarity of certain minerals in the rock and its importance in archaeology lies in its use as a dating method. The ancient orientation and intensity of the earth's magnetic field is preserved by the magnetization of iron oxides in rocks and sediments and archaeological materials (archaeomagnetism). Ancient direction and intensity of the earth's magnetic field may be preserved in three ways: a) thermoremanet magnetism (T.R.M.) works through the alignment of the magnetic domains within iron minerals when heated to above the Curie point and subsequently cooling, b) detrital remanent magnetism works through the alignment of clay particles sinking down slowly through still lake or deep ocean water. A block of sediment is magnetized in the direction of the earth's field at the time when it was deposited., and c) sun-dried bricks as the bricks become magnetized in the current direction and intensity of the earth's field. Using igneous rocks, independently dated by potassium/argon, and kilns, hearths, pots etc. dated archaeologically, it has been possible to reconstruct something of the history of the earth's magnetic field. Palaeomagnetism proper is done by studying reversals in the magnetic field of the Earth, the youngest reversal dating to 700,000 bp. Measurement of the declination and inclination of the magnetic poles as it affects materials of different ages can be used to build regional chronologies. Palaeomagnetic dating has also been successfully applied to lacustrine deposits, deep sea cores, and volcanic rocks.
petrology: CATEGORY: related field
DEFINITION: The study of rocks, usually by microscopic and spectrographic analysis. Because most rocks are composed of minerals, petrology is strongly dependent on mineralogy. Fields of specialization in petrology correspond to the aforementioned three major rock types -- igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic.
Pianello: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: Proto-Villanovan
CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: A site near Ancona, near the Italian Adriatic coast, with a large urnfield cemetery of c 1100 BC. It is the type site of a group scattered through much of Italy and often labeled Proto-Villanovan. The ashes, sometimes accompanied by an arc fibula or quadrangular razor, were buried in a small biconical urn and covered with inverted bowls used as lids.
plane table: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: plane-table
CATEGORY: tool
DEFINITION: Portable surveying instrument that consists of a drawing board and a ruler (alidade) mounted on a tripod and used to sight and map topographic details and to plot survey lines directly form field observations. This piece of equipment is much used in earlier surveying and map-making. One end of the alidade is held on the point on the map representing the point of operation, and the other is directed at a marker on the point to be plotted. This gives the angle from the point of operation, and distance can be plotted directly along the ruler after scaling down from the original measurement. The technique has been replaced mainly by photogrammetry.
primary classification: CATEGORY: technique
DEFINITION: Any classification based on directly observable attributes, often carried out by archaeologists in the field.
proton gradiometer: CATEGORY: tool
DEFINITION: An instrument used in magnetic surveying for detecting the presence of magnetic anomalies; it takes continuous measurements of relative vertical change in intensity of field strength. There are two detector bottles filled with water or alcohol placed at either end of a staff two meters long and held vertically during operation. Protons which form the nuclei of hydrogen atoms in the liquid gyrate or precess; the frequency of precession is identical in the two bottles if no anomaly is present. Any disturbance in the magnetic intensity caused, for example, by a buried feature, results in a different frequency in the two bottles.
proton magnetometer: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: proton precession magnetometer
CATEGORY: tool
DEFINITION: An instrument used in magnetic surveying for detecting changes in magnetic field intensity; it takes intermittent measurements of absolute field strength. The detector consists of a bottle of alcohol or water around which is wound an electrical coil of 1,000 turns. The protons, which form the nuclei of hydrogen atoms in the liquid, spin and gyrate in their attempt to align themselves in the direction of the earth's magnetic field intensity. A current of one amp is passed through the coil for three seconds, which aligns the majority of the protons in the direction of the magnetic field thus produced. When this current is cut off, the protons attempt to realign in the direction of the earth's magnetic field; the speed of gyration, or frequency of precession, is amplified and measured in the instrument. This measurement reflects any alteration in the magnetic intensity caused by the presence of fired structures, soil disturbances (e.g. pits, ditches, etc.), or iron objects. It is a highly sensitive magnetometer, used in subsurface detection to record variations in the earth's magnetic field caused by buried iron, kilns, hearths, pits, or ditches.
pulsed induction meter: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: pulse radar
CATEGORY: tool
DEFINITION: An instrument used in electromagnetic surveying, mainly for the detection of metals, though on a limited scale it can be used to locate archaeological features. The instrument has a transmitter coil, which sends pulses of magnetic field to the ground: the continuous rising and falling of the field produces eddy currents in metal objects, and magnetic fields in susceptible soil. These are detected by a receiver coil. Only shallow features can be satisfactorily located, and it can be used to find metals, graves, and pottery.
Putnam, Frederic Ward (1839-1915): CATEGORY: person
DEFINITION: Curator of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, from 1875-1909. He was a leader in the founding of anthropological science in the US. He was important as an archaeologist who classified and described finds and as an administrator and archaeological sponsor. In fieldwork, he depended on scientific techniques for surveying, excavating, drawing cross-sections of excavations, and plotting finds. He did studies of the mounds of the Midwest US and on the antiquity of humans on the continent, which he believed to predate the end of the last glaciation. In 1891, Putnam began organizing the anthropological section of the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago. That collection became the basis of Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History. He was the curator of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History following that and in 1903 he went to the University of California, Berkeley, to organize both the new department of anthropology and the anthropological museum. Putnam published more than 400 zoological and anthropological articles, reports, and notes and was also a founder and the editor of the periodical American Naturalist"."
record: CATEGORY: database design
DEFINITION: In databases, the part of a file devoted to description of a single entity through specification of its attributes in various fields.
Remojadas: CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: A Classic Period center with distinctive pottery, dating to the Late Formative and lasting until the Early Postclassic, southeast of El Tajin near Veracruz, Mexico. Best known are the mold-made 'smiling face' figurines and small wheeled animals. The figurines were turned out in incredible quantity for use as burial goods. Ball-game players and warriors are frequent subjects of the figurines, but women and children are also common. Locally available natural outcrops of asphalt were used as paint to highlight some features of the figurines. Examples of wheeled animals have been found as far afield as Nayarit and El Salvador. Further down the Gulf coast plain, the Remojadas tradition of hollow pottery figurines continued to be active in the Late Classic, with a particularly large production of the mysterious smiling figures of dancing boys and girls, which were intended as funerary offerings.
rice: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: Oryza sativa
CATEGORY: flora
DEFINITION: Edible starchy cereal grain and the plant by which it is produced. The origin of rice culture has been traced to India. Rice culture gradually spread westward and was introduced to southern Europe in medieval times. Roughly one-half of the world population, including virtually all of East and Southeast Asia, is wholly dependent upon rice as a staple food. The earliest datable record is from Chirard in the Ganges Valley, before 4500 BC. By the third millennium it was widely grown in south China and it was likely domesticated at Hemudu by the eartly 5th millennium BC. Its original center of cultivation could lie anywhere between the two. The earliest cultivated rice may have been grown in natural swamps or middens, but by at least 2000 years ago many parts of southeast Asia were developing terraced or wet-field cultivation.
ridge and furrow: CATEGORY: feature
DEFINITION: A pattern of parallel ridges resulting from the plowing of strip fields in medieval and later open field systems. The fossilized remains of ancient plowmarks are a common sight in England, having the appearance of long, rounded parallel ridges with alternating ditches. There is no absolute dating for the ridge and furrow field; a few contentious examples could be Roman in date, while others are as late as the 17th and 18th centuries.
sampling: CATEGORY: technique
DEFINITION: The process of selecting part of a site for excavation or an area for fieldwork, preferably according to a strategy which allows statistical estimates and generalizations of the relation of the sample to the unexplored parts of the whole site or area. In a way, all archaeological fieldwork and excavation is sampling, since it is impossible to collect all the data from the complex mass of an archaeological site. Selection may be arbitrary or nonarbitrary -- perhaps by the need for particular evidence for a specific question (a 'judgment sample'); the question itself will be determined by the existing framework of archaeological thought. In a more specific sense, sampling or probabilistic or random sampling, uses the theory of probability to make estimates of how closely the observations obtained from the part examined ('sample') represent the characteristics of the whole group being studied ('population'), by using fixed rules of random selection so that each unit is given a known chance of selection. The area under study may be divided into sub-zones (strata) and each stratum can be sampled separately to give a more precise estimate of the whole population. The choice of sample design, the size of the sample units, and the proportion of the population sampled (the sampling fraction) will all affect the result, but even with quite small fractions accurate estimates of the entire population of sites within an area can be obtained. The method is particularly good at estimating the number of different types of site within the area. Methods are also being developed for the sampling of large groups of artifacts; excavations frequently produce very large quantities of bone or flint, and it has been shown that often it is necessary to study only a small sample of the whole population to obtain a reliable estimate of its character.
San Agustín: CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: A locality in the south Colombian Andes highland, with a number of cemeteries, house platforms, ancient fields, stone-built chambers underneath mounds, and also a series of more than 300 stone statues representing mythological personages, some of them with jaguar fangs. The mounds commonly have internal stone-lined passageways and chambers, some of which contain sculpture, suggesting their use as places of worship as well as burial. Sculptures are rendered in a variety of techniques but are usually freestanding stelae and can be up to four meters high. Though stylistic comparisons are often made with Chavin, these themes have strong parallels in Olmec iconography. Occupation extends from about 700 BC almost to the Spanish conquest. The spectacular stonework falls somewhere between 500 BC and 1500 AD. There is also incised and modeled pottery and gold ornaments from the underground burial chambers.
Sankalia, H.D. (1908- ): CATEGORY: person
DEFINITION: Indian archaeologist whose field work and publications have been important to the development of Indian archaeology. Comprehensive surveys and research papers, especially on the prehistory of the Deccan, include Archaeology in Rajasthan" (1988) "Prehistoric and Historic Archaeology of Gujarat" (1987) "The University of Nalanda" (1972) which recounts the history of one of the most important Buddhist monastic establishments."
Seacow Valley: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: Zeekoei Valley
CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: River valley in Cape Province, South Africa, with more than 14,000 Stone Age sites. The ceramic sequence dates to the millennium prior to European settlers. There is information about the Stone Age Smithfield hunter-gatherers from this area.
Seler, Edouard (1849-1922): CATEGORY: person
DEFINITION: German philologist and expert on Mesoamerica who did not work in the field but published annotated editions of the Borgia, Vaticanus B, and Fejervary-Mayer codices. Those works reveal pre-Columbian ways of thinking.
shoe-last adze: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: shoe-last celt
CATEGORY: lithics
DEFINITION: A long thin stone adze (chisel-shaped ground-stone tool) employed by the Danubian farmers of the Early Neolithic, possibly as a hoe for cultivating their fields. It is a common stone tool found in Early Neolithic Linear Pottery contexts throughout Europe. It might also have been used as an adze for carpentry.
Snaketown: CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: Large, important Hohokam site in the lower Gila River valley of Arizona with 1400 years of continuous occupation beginning c 300 BC. It is the best documented of all Hohokam villages, with 60 mounds (some rubbish heaps, others platforms) and a ball court, as well as fields, irrigation canals, and more than 200 excavated pithouses. The pottery and shell show craft specialization and contact with Mesoamerican cultures. At its peak, c 1100, the village had about 1,000 inhabitants, but was abandoned then or soon after. Snaketown followed the standard sequence of Hohokam development, with Mexican influence becoming marked during the final centuries.
sociocultural anthropology: CATEGORY: branch
DEFINITION: A subfield of anthropology dedicated to the scientific study of human culture and society in contemporary and historically recent human populations or the analytic study of culture and society.
standardized form: CATEGORY: tool
DEFINITION: Any preformatted information sheet to be completed in the field for recording archaeological data, especially during data acquisition, data processing, and analysis.
Steward, Julian Haynes (1902-1972): CATEGORY: person
DEFINITION: American anthropologist and archaeologist who influenced archaeological theory, emphasizing that the goals of both disciplines were the same: understanding of cultural change and the plotting of that change on spatial and temporal planes. His best-known book was Theory of Culture Change: the Methodology of Multilinear Evolution" (1955) and he also wrote "Handbook of South American Indians" (1946-1950) and "Irrigation Civilizations" (1955). He carried out fieldwork in the Great Basin British Columbia and the Andes planned and helped establish the Virú Valley project. He worked for the use of evolutionary and ecological thought in anthropology and archaeology; he is known as the as the founder of the theory of cultural ecology."
structure chart: CATEGORY: database design
DEFINITION: A diagram of the organization, size, and data types of fields in a database file.
Stukeley, William (1687-1765): CATEGORY: person
DEFINITION: British antiquary and field archaeologist whose surveys of the monumental Neolithic Period-Bronze Age stone circles at Stonehenge and Avebury, Wiltshire, led him to elaborate theories relating them to the Druids. His views were widely accepted in the late 18th century and this misconception about the Druid connection has no data to back it up. His extensive antiquarian travels are recorded in Itinerarium Curiosum" (1724 "Observant Itinerary")."
surface survey: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: site surface survey
CATEGORY: technique
DEFINITION: A method of data collection in which archaeological finds are gathered from the ground surface of sites and then evaluated. Surface survey helps to establish the types of activity on the site, locate major structures, and gather information on the most densely occupied areas of the site that could be most productive for total or sample excavation. There are two basic kinds of surface survey: unsystematic and systematic. The former involves fieldwalking, i.e. scanning the ground along one's path and recording the location of artifacts and surface features. Systematic survey less subjective and involves a grid system which is walked systematically, thus making the recording of finds more accurate. Surface survey usually includes the mapping of features. The study of the distribution of surviving features, and the recording and possible collecting of artifacts from the surface.
swidden agriculture: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: swidden farming; slash-and-burn agriculture; swidden; shifting cultivation; swidden cultivation
CATEGORY: term
DEFINITION: Agricultural technique whereby forest vegetation is cut down annually, let dry and burned to prepare fields for crops. The method enriches the soil with nutrients from the ash, but the fields are only productive for a few years -- at which time it is necessary to change fields. Swidden agriculture is most common to Mesoamerica. The foremost benefit of this procedure is that the plot will be relatively weed free at first.
symbolic anthropology: CATEGORY: related field
DEFINITION: A research perspective which gives prime attention to the role of symbols in society. Culture is a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms which are used to communicate and develop knowledge and attitudes. The function of culture then is to impose meaning on the world and make it understandable. The role of symbolic anthropologists is to try to interpret the guiding symbols of each culture. In this view, culture becomes a public phenomenon transcending the cognitive realization of any single individual. This field is based mainly on the work of Clifford Geertz.
terramara: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: pl. terremare; Terramara or Terramare
CATEGORY: term
DEFINITION: A local name for Middle Bronze Age settlements in the Emilia region of northern Italy's Po Valley -- consisting of mounds of dark earth formed by the accumulated rubbish of a permanent settlement occupied for a long period. The habitations were built on pilings and protected by a vallum, or defensive wall, which screened them from floods in a flat countryside with violent seasonal rains. These villages, whose dead were cremated, lasted until the Early Iron Age. The people of the Terramara culture migrated to Italy from the Danubian region during the Middle Bronze Age (early 2nd millennium BC), and introduced the rite of urnfield burial into Italy. They were excellent bronzeworkers whose products were traded over much of Italy. The society was peasant and its art was limited to the construction of dwellings and to the production and ornamentation of weapons and vases. The pottery is a dark burnished ware with concentric groove decoration, bosses, and horned handles. The Terramara culture strongly influenced the Apennine culture in its last phase. The terramara is considered a forerunner of the Roman street and camp planning and also the medieval castle and village.
Timmari: CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: Hilltop settlement site and associated cemetery near Matera, Italy, with the main occupation in the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age. The Neolithic occupation had Serra d'Alto ware. The associated cemetery is an urnfield of the so-called Proto-Villanovan group. The urns were placed in several layers and sometimes marked by small standing stones; there are some bronzes of Proto-Villanovan type. The cemetery is dated c 11th-10th centuries BC.
Tumulus culture: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: Tumulus Bronze Age, Tumulus period
CATEGORY: culture
DEFINITION: A Middle Bronze Age culture of the central Danube region in Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Bavaria, with burials beneath round barrows, dating c 1500-1200 BC. The heartland of the Tumulus culture was Bavaria, Württemberg, and the area previously occupied by the Unetice culture, but distribution extended into north Germany and west as far as Alsace. With the introduction of urnfield burial, the Tumulus culture and the Middle Bronze Age came to an end. It is defined mainly by the dominant burial rite of inhumation beneath a burial mound, as well as a number of characteristic bronze types, found both in the burials and in hoards. It continued earlier trends in ceramics and metalwork, though more elaborate in form and decoration.
Uhle, Max (1856-1944): CATEGORY: person
DEFINITION: Peruvian archaeologist, one of the greatest in South American archaeology. He was one of the first to use artifact style and stratigraphic associations to produce a chronological sequence. Uhle was the first to apply the principles of stratigraphy and seriation to central Andean material, and he carried out more fieldwork in western South America than any scholar before or since. He worked at Tiahuanaco, Pachacamac, at several Mochica sites, an early Chimú cemetery, in the valleys of Chincha, Moche, Chancay, and Ica; near Ancon, near Cuzco, and in Chile and Ecuador. He established the Early, Middle, and Late Tiahuanaco and Inca Ceramic sequence, which though corrected and elaborated, still stands today. His more than 130 volumes of unpublished notes and other records are housed at the University of California.
urn: CATEGORY: artifact
DEFINITION: Any large and decorative vase, especially one having an ornamental base and no handles, and often used for storage. It is most often found as a container for the ashes of a cremation burial, the so-called cinerary urn for jar burials. The term is widely used in the European Bronze Age and the name Urnfield Cultures, given to the late Bronze Age of much of Central, Eastern and Southern Europe, refers to the characteristic burial rite.
Valhager: CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: Migration Period nucleated settlement of the 5th and 6th centuries on the Baltic island of Gotland just off the coast of Sweden. There were cattle droveways and individual farm dwellings enclosed within stone-walled fields. The buildings are typical longhouses with central hearths.
Velatice group: CATEGORY: culture
DEFINITION: Late Bronze Age regional group of the Urnfield tradition in Moravia, c 12th century BC; there are settlements and burial grounds.
Villanovan: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: Villanovan culture; Villanova period
CATEGORY: culture
DEFINITION: Early Iron Age people of the Po Valley, Etruria, and parts of Campania, Italy, c 900-700 BC. The culture is defined by artifacts from the type site of Villanova: metalwork in gold and bronze. The craftsmen played a major part in the development of the fibula and the technique of sheet metalwork, especially the situla. The cemeteries were urnfields with decorated biconical urns and bronze objects; subsidiary vessels, fibulae, ornaments, crescentic razors, etc., frequently accompanied the ashes. The pottery was handmade, dark burnished, decorated with meanders of grooved bands. The Villanovans were replaced culturally by the Etruscans in the south in the 8th century, in the north in the 6th century. This period laid the foundations for the Etruscan culture and city-states of the 8th century BC.
weed of cultivation: CATEGORY: flora
DEFINITION: Any plant which is unable to flourish in wooded shady areas but which finds its habitat in open regions such as agricultural fields. With the removal of vegetational competition as a result of clearance of woodland, these weeds establish themselves. Where early agriculturists cleared forest for the sowing of crops, these weeds appeared. Pollen evidence from weeds of cultivation is used by palaeobotanists in recognizing phases of agriculture.
wet-rice technology: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: wet-rice farming, wet-rice society, wet-rice cultivation, wet-rice growing
CATEGORY: term
DEFINITION: A type of farming in which rice is grown in paddies, small, level, flooded fields in southern and eastern Asia. Wet-rice cultivation is the most prevalent method of farming in the Far East, where it utilizes a small fraction of the total land yet feeds the majority of the rural population. Rice was domesticated as early as 3500 BC, and by about 2,000 years ago it was grown predominantly in deltas, floodplains and coastal plains, and some terraced valley slopes. Although rice can also be grown under dry conditions, wet-rice cultivation in paddy fields is much more productive. The fields can be flooded naturally or by irrigation channels, and are kept inundated during the growing season. About a month before harvesting, the water is removed and the field left to dry.
Winlock, Herbert Eustis (1884-1950): CATEGORY: person
DEFINITION: American Egyptologist who set new standards in field archaeology and in recording excavations, especially at Lisht and Deir el-Bahri. He worked at the temples of Queen Hatshepsut and Mentuhotep II and in the surrounding area of Theban necropolis with important 11th Dynasty tombs. He wrote Excavations at Deir el Bahri 1911-1931" (1942)."

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