ANT-309 Elements of Archaeology Lecture 1 Outline January 7, 2008

I.  What is Archaeology

Archaeology: Study of ancient things that are the byproduct of human activities.  Archaeologists try to reconstruct the lifeways of people who lived in the past by studying the things they left behind.

            A Basic Concepts

1. Material Culture: Physical manifestations of culture (shared ideas) in the form of artifacts, sites, and features.

2. Artifacts Any object or material made or used by a human being in the past

3. Features: An artifact that cannot be moved such as a house foundation a hearth

4. Ecofacts: Remains of animals or plants that result from human activities but were not intentionally modified

5. Human Skeletal Remains (Burials, cremations)

6. Sites: Accumulations of artifacts, ecofacts, features and/or human skeletal remains that represent places where people lived, died or carried out certain activities

7. Associations: The occurrence of an item of archaeological data adjacent to another and in or on the same matrix

8. Context: The relationship between an artifact and its setting.

9. Stratigraphy: Layering of deposits

10. Law of Superposition: In a sequence of observable strata, the deepest layers tend to be the oldest