MIDTERM EXAM A
Name ____________________________________________
Part 1: IDENTIFICATION/MULTIPLE CHOICE. Put the number of the correct answer (from answer sheet) in the blank space for each question (2.5 points each).
____ 1. Burrowing by animals through an archaeological site, bringing artifacts to the surface.
____ 2. Excavating a shovel test every 30 meters to locate archaeological sites.
____ 3. Archaeological dating methods that measure the time elapsed since something was made/done.
____4. Study of the spatial distribution of archaeological sites across the landscape and through time.
____5. Non-portable archaeological remains, such as a pit or house pattern.
____6. Ordering artifacts in a relative dating sequence based on their similarities.
____7. Newer dating method which can be done on a very tiny piece of organic material, such as charcoal, by counting the actual carbon atoms.
____8. Ecofacts formed by mineral deposits in living plants.
____9. Ethnographic study of a living culture, but with careful observation of the material remains.
___10. Tree-ring dating of archaeological materials.
___11. Preserved feces that can give clues to past diets and health.
___12. Any object resulting from human activity, from a stone flake to a temple.
___13. Study of ancient astronomical knowledge by examination of the archaeological record, including alignments of features or structures at sites.
___14. Replication of ancient technologies and other behaviors to aid in archaeological interpretation.
___15. Manufacture method for chipped stone tools in which flakes are detached from core by striking with a hammerstone.
___16. Two of the most typical artifacts one might find at a prehistoric site in Florida.
___17. Two remote sensing methods used in archaeological survey and reconnaissance.
___18. Two subsurface investigation methods used in archaeological field survey.
___19. Time before written human history, only knowable through archaeology.
___20. Interpreting the past with reference to knowledge of ethnographically recorded cultural behavior.
___21. A proposition based on various assumptions or models of past human behavior which can be tested by scientific archaeological research.
___22. Types of human systems least able to be reconstructed in prehistoric archaeology.
___23. Study of plant remains from an archaeological site.
___24. Principle that the sequence of soil strata from bottom to top usually represents the order of deposition, from earliest to latest.
___25. Study of the raw material of an artifact to locate its source based on its chemical composition.
___26. Removal of archaeological materials from their original context with the intent of selling them; plundering sites for artifacts of commercial value but destroying evidence in the process.
___27. Excavated King Tut's tomb, important because it was not looted like others in Egypt.
___28. Exact, often three-dimensional, location of artifacts or other archaeological finds.
___29. Source of variation in the archaeological record besides time and function.
PART 2: ESSAYS. Choose one of the following questions, and write an organized essay of at least one paragraph. Use information from movies, lectures, and readings, and give concrete examples.
1. Explain how archaeologists do culture history, culture process, and contextual archaeology. Can you do them all in one project?
2. What is cultural resources management? What is conservation archaeology? Why do you never dig up an entire archaeological site?
ANSWER SHEET, ARCHAEOLOGY MIDTERM EXAM
(No answer is used more than once)
1. absolute dating
2. aerial photographs
3. AMS radiocarbon dating
4. anthropology
5. archaeoastronomy
6. artifact
7. astrology
8. bark cloth
9. bone buttons
10. ceramic sherds
11. Howard Carter
12. chronometric dating
13. coprolites
14. coring
15. corn
16. cultural transformational processes of site formation
17. Charles Darwin
18. dendrochronology
19. direct percussion
20. ecofacts
21. ethnicity
22. ethnoarchaeology
23. ethnobotany
24. ethnographic analogy
25. experimental archaeology
26. feature
27. fossils
28. geology
29. gold coins
30. half-life
31. historic archaeology
32. history
33. hypothesis
34. hypotenuse
35. ideological systems
36. indirect percussion
37. Indiana Jones
38. judgemental sampling
39. law of diminishing returns
40. law of superposition
41. lithic debitage
42. looting
43. magnetometer
44. paleontology
45. phytoliths
46. prehistory
47. pressure flaking
48. provenience
49. natural site formation process
50. radar
51. random sampling
52. relative dating
53. satellite imagery
54. settlement pattern archaeology
55. seriation
56. shell tools
57. shovel testing
58. social systems
59. stone spear points
60. stratified sampling
61. style
62. systematic sampling
63. technological systems
64. Christian Thomsen
65. trace element analysis
66. wooden clubs
67. zooarchaeology