MIDTERM EXAM B
Name ____________________________________________
PART 1: MULTIPLE CHOICE. Circle the numbers of ALL correct answers (1.25 points each).
A. Methods for locating archaeological remains. . .
1. that destroy the provenience of the materials and obtain them mostly for commercial profit or national interest have never been part of real archaeology.
2. usually take far less time than methods for excavating and analyzing them.
3. always begin with surface survey and reconnaissance, not paperwork.
4. must always include outdoor fieldwork.
5. can include remote sensing techniques such as use of aerial photos, radar, or satellite images.
6. often begin with a search of the extant literature and interview of informants and collectors.
7. should include subsurface investigation of some kind, such as coring or shovel-testing, especially in forested areas.
B. Analysis and interpretation of archaeological remains. . .
1. might include use-wear studies on lithic tools or refitting study to put the lithic debitage back together into the original core.
2. can incorporate physical and chemical techniques to determine artifact raw materials sources, thus helping to reconstruct economic interaction patterns.
3. with regard to the record of living peoples is called ethnographic analogy.
4. such as animal bone and shell left by past peoples are done by a zooarchaeologist.
5. through ethnoarchaeology means ethnography by the archaeologist, or study of the material record of a living culture as the people are depositing it.
6. using frequency seriation can obtain absolute ages for various artifacts.
7. using experimental archaeology means reconstructing how to make and use some of those remains.
8. to interpret human subsistence and settlement systems is harder than inferring ideological systems in the past.
9. includes differentiating artifact style from function, if possible.
10. that include human skeletal materials can no longer be done at all because of legal considerations.
11. of lithic artifacts can include determination of whether manufacture was through direct or indirect percussion, hard or soft hammer, or pressure flaking.
12. are purely scientific endeavors completely separated from modern politics.
C. Cultural Resources Management (CRM). . .
1. means complete excavation of a particular archaeological site.
2. can only happen on federally owned lands.
3. aims to preserve and investigate archaeological sites.
4. can only be done by trained professional conservationists.
5. includes developing legislation that can safeguard the past.
6. is only concerned with prehistoric sites.
7. measures the time elapsed since something was made/done.
8. can mean removal of significant archaeological data in the path of construction.
9. includes legislation protecting the human remains of indigenous peoples.
10. is an essential part (but not all) of public archaeology.
D. Dating archaeological materials. . .
1. made of stone is impossible because they contain no organic material.
2. is best done with several different methods, if possible, applied to one research site.
3. as small as a tiny fragment of charcoal or other organics is now possible with AMS radiocarbon dating.
4. from volcanic deposits is most often done with dendrochronology.
5. using fluorine content in bone or artifact frequency seriation gives relative dates without reference to a fixed time scale.
6. based on the law of superposition can only be done as far back as 4,000 years.
7. using archaeomagnetism can be done on organic remains only.
8. as old as the earliest African hominids is usually done with the potassium-argon method.
9. can be well done with phytoliths.
10. is only done with prehistoric materials because historic items always have known dates.
11. using archaeomagnetic (or paleomagnetic) methods is only possible with sites near the north and south poles.
E. Archaeological sampling methods. . .
1. in which shovel tests are excavated every 30 meters are known as random.
2. of the systematic type means every sample unit (e.g., grid square) has an equal chance of being chosen.
3. in which the site or survey area is divided into different portions based on natural or cultural features, then sampled in each portion, are called stratified.
4. of the systematic type may duplicate past cultural spatial patterning.
5. must be statistically rigorous to give a good idea of past human behavior.
6. can be based on the judgement of the archaeologist and not mathematically determined.
7. can include combining several different methods.
F. An archaeological feature. . .
1. is an attribute, such as size or color, of an artifact.
2. is any discrete, usually non-portable, evidence of a specific human activity.
3. is usually better excavated and studied in the laboratory than under less-controlled field conditions.
4. always intrudes into deeper cultural deposits from an earlier component.
5. can include remains such as a pit or a human burial.
6. may be as small as a postmold or as large as a house pattern.
7. is recorded in the ground in its exact three-dimensional location.
G. An archaeological site in Florida. . .
1. of late prehistoric age might (rarely) produce artifacts of cold-hammered copper.
2. will often produce lithic debitage.
3. can include a shipwreck or a shell mound.
4. on private land is always well protected by state historic preservation law.
5. will usually yield wooden tool fragments, since Florida has always been forested.
6. will always have coprolites.
7. on state land is protected, though it might still be looted.
8. is often a midden.
9. might have shell tools in places where stone was less available to prehistoric peoples.
10. can often be dated by the potassium-argon method.
PART 2: ESSAYS. Choose one of the following questions, and write an organized essay of at least one or two paragraphs. Use information from movies, lectures, and readings, and give concrete examples (20 points).
1. Explain how archaeologists do culture history, culture process, and postprocessual archaeology. Can you do them all in one research project?
2. List, classify, and explain the archaeological site formation processes and their different effects. Do all of them damage past cultural remains?