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Goals of Archaeology
•Culture History
•Reconstructing Past Lifeways
•Studying Cultural Processes
•Understanding the Archaeological Record
Culture History
• Sites and their contexts in space and time
• Chronology• Description of artifacts-
architecture-associations• Sequences of changes
Reconstructing Past Lifeways
• Reconstruction of past adaptations to environments
• Subsistence practices• Characterize past environments• Descriptive-but links archaeological
material remains to: past food acquisition practices environmental influences on behavior
Studying Cultural Processes
• Seeks to explain why cultural changes occurred
• Global comparisons
• Explanatory approach-not just descriptive
• Introduced rigorous use of scientific methods
Understanding the Archaeological Record
• Formation of the archaeological record
• How to read the natural and cultural processes responsible for preservation and patterning in archaeological sites
• Middle Range Research to link modern, observable events with archaeological patterns
• Uniformitarian principals
Develop Archaeological Theory
• Culture History
• Reconstructing Past Lifeways
• Studying Cultural Processes
• Understanding the Archaeological Record
Clovis point
Thomas Jefferson’s 1787 history of Virginia examined antiquity of Native people
Charles Wilson Peale’s 1801 mastodon excavation, Orange CO., NY
William Henry Holmes
Ales Hrdlicka
Manis Site, WA, ~11,500 BP mammoth rib with embedded bone point
New world migration map based on modern language groups
Bering Strait during a glacial maximum The exposed continental shelf between Asia & North American is called Beringia.)
Bering Land
Bridge
Bison antiquus
Mammuthus primigenius
Price and Feinman p. 133
Pleistocene Extinctions
• 42% of all mollusks
• 41% small mammals
• 50% large mammals
Smilodon spp.
Minimal Biological
Data•DNA
•few skeletal remains
•teeth
Primary Reliance on Evidence of Stone Tools
Faunal Remains
Plant Remains• seeds
• pollen
• phytoliths
Data• geographic
distribution
• temporal patterns
• technological inferences
• food inferences
• climatic & environmental inferences
Modern Language
Groups
New world migration map based on modern language groups
Asian Dentitionshovel-shaped incisors
New World
Dentition
• shovel-shaped incisors
• cusp arrangement on molars
Meadowcroft Rockshelter, PA
• 14,250 BP
• lack of Pleistocene fauna or flora
• contamination with coal?
Pedro Furada, Brazil14,300-48,000 BP
• hearths-cultural or natural burns?
• “dates” from rock art
• “associated” with dated sediments?
• crude stone artifacts
Taima-Taima, Venezuela13,000 BP
Monte Verde, Chile13,000-33,000 BP
•bone
•wood
•plant fibers
•few stone tools
•few organic tools
•ambiguous association with oldest deposits
Old Crow, Alaska12,000-40,000 BP
Dyukati Cave, Siberia
• No clear technological similarity to New world Paleoindian tools
New Yorker
Kennewick Man • ~9000 BP• allegedly has
European features
Kennewick Man
• forensic reconstruction
• differs from modern population’s features in same area
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