| Term | Definition |
|---|
| Artifacts | portable objects made or modified by people |
| Examples of artifacts | pottery, stone tools, wood tools, metals, glass (rarely), mummified remains, organic remains, food remains, sandals, footwear made from fibers |
| Imperishable artifacts | tools used to make imperishable materials indicates presence of perishable materials |
| Examples of Imperishable artifacts | needles--fitted clothes; spindle whorls--yarn; paintings, figurines, casts of objects/people within ash |
| Features | large immobile artifacts |
| Examples of Features | buildings; pits; trash deposits |
| Constructed features | things made purposefully by people for a specific plan |
| Cumulative features | features which developed overtime without a specific plan; eg: trash deposits |
| Ecofacts | flora, fana, bones, plant + animal remains used by people |
| Examples of Ecofacts | bones, teeth, clam shells, fish scales, burnt plan remains, seeds with hard coatings, pollen |
| Why are ecofacts relevant to understanding human activity? | we can't usually look at a modern enviornment to infer the past, but we can look at ecofacts to infer the past enviornment |
| What can we learn from ecofacts? | -people's diets; food processing through butchering marks; whether people were domesticating plants/animals |
| What can we learn from human skeletal remains? | wounds related to interpersonal conflicts; diseases; diet {corn vs. sea protein}; mortality rates; body types; differences in stature that could imply differences in status; burial practices, associations with other objects, concepts of the afterlife and religious practices; biological relationships between people; repetitive actions with skeletal effects {64 your old woman, facets on patella, grinding corn all day}; migration {chemical + mineral composition of teeth depend on drinking water when growing up}; shaping of body for artistic purposes |
| Soils! | the kinds of earth in which you find artifacts, features, and ecofacts |
| What can we learn from soils? | Fertility--what agriculture was possible; Whether flooding affected a culture |
| Sites | any place where people did something that left some kind of material remains |
| Examples of sites | cities, temples, religious sites, multifunctional sites |
| What do sites contain? | artifacts and/or ecofacts and/or features |
| Context | the association among objects as they're found in the ground, as they are encountered in an excavation or on survey |
| Examples of contextual associations | Vertical? Horizontal? Where were objects found? What types of soil were objects embedded in? |
| What is the problem with looting? | It creates isolated items which can say only a few isolated things about specific cultures but don't help us learn very much |
| Primary context | When the objects you're studying are still where they were left by the people who made or used them. The way people left them when they were living at that site. |
| Use related primary context | objects are still where they were last used or stored by people who made/ used them. They were left as in use in the behaviors of the people who were using them in antiquity. The patterning and relationships between objects are the DIRECT outcomes of human action. |
| Examples of use related primary context | Pot with a turkey bone in it which was used to serve turkey. If bowl was left where it was stored, in preparation for use, this is still URPC. |
| Transposed primary context | objects that are still where the people who used or made them left them, but they are not where they were used or stored |
| Examples of transposed primary context | dropped/lost objects; trash {finding things in the trash means that they were contemporary} |
| Culture | a series of learned values, beliefs, etc. |
| Deranging factors | processes which take items out of p.c. and move them around so that associations are a combination of the activities by which they were used and the operation of the deranging factors |
| Examples of deranging factors | earthquakes; looting; roots of big trees; animals {esp. packrats}; floods; human activity; almost all construction; basic erosion |
| Secondary context | Most things we find. |
Combine with other sets
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