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Author: Michael J. O'Brien
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 030647168X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 262
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Book Description
It is difficult for today's students of archaeology to imagine an era when chronometric dating methods were unavailable. However, even a casual perusal of the large body of literature that arose during the first half of the twentieth century reveals a battery of clever methods used to determine the relative ages of archaeological phenomena, often with considerable precision. Stratigraphic excavation is perhaps the best known of the various relative-dating methods used by prehistorians. Although there are several techniques of using artifacts from superposed strata to measure time, these are rarely if ever differentiated. Rather, common practice is to categorize them under the heading `stratigraphic excavation'. This text distinguishes among the several techniques and argues that stratigraphic excavation tends to result in discontinuous measures of time - a point little appreciated by modern archaeologists. Although not as well known as stratigraphic excavation, two other methods of relative dating have figured important in Americanist archaeology: seriation and the use of index fossils. The latter (like stratigraphic excavation) measures time discontinuously, while the former - in various guises - measures time continuously. Perhaps no other method used in archaeology is as misunderstood as seriation, and the authors provide detailed descriptions and examples of each of its three different techniques. Each method and technique of relative dating is placed in historical perspective, with particular focus on developments in North America, an approach that allows a more complete understanding of the methods described, both in terms of analytical technique and disciplinary history. This text will appeal to all archaeologists, from graduate students to seasoned professionals, who want to learn more about the backbone of archaeological dating.
Author: Michael J. O'Brien
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 030647168X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 262
Get Book Here
Book Description
It is difficult for today's students of archaeology to imagine an era when chronometric dating methods were unavailable. However, even a casual perusal of the large body of literature that arose during the first half of the twentieth century reveals a battery of clever methods used to determine the relative ages of archaeological phenomena, often with considerable precision. Stratigraphic excavation is perhaps the best known of the various relative-dating methods used by prehistorians. Although there are several techniques of using artifacts from superposed strata to measure time, these are rarely if ever differentiated. Rather, common practice is to categorize them under the heading `stratigraphic excavation'. This text distinguishes among the several techniques and argues that stratigraphic excavation tends to result in discontinuous measures of time - a point little appreciated by modern archaeologists. Although not as well known as stratigraphic excavation, two other methods of relative dating have figured important in Americanist archaeology: seriation and the use of index fossils. The latter (like stratigraphic excavation) measures time discontinuously, while the former - in various guises - measures time continuously. Perhaps no other method used in archaeology is as misunderstood as seriation, and the authors provide detailed descriptions and examples of each of its three different techniques. Each method and technique of relative dating is placed in historical perspective, with particular focus on developments in North America, an approach that allows a more complete understanding of the methods described, both in terms of analytical technique and disciplinary history. This text will appeal to all archaeologists, from graduate students to seasoned professionals, who want to learn more about the backbone of archaeological dating.
Author: Michael B Schiffer
Publisher: Academic Press
ISBN: 1483214796
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 443
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Book Description
Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory, Volume 1 presents the progressive explorations in methods and theory in archeology. This book discusses the strategy for appraising significance, which is needed to maximize the preservation and wise use of cultural resources. Organized into 10 chapters, this volume begins with an overview of planning for the best long-term use of cultural resources, which is the essence of conservation archeology. This text then examines importance of the concept in cultural ecological studies. Other chapters consider the methods used in determining the density, size, and growth rate of human populations. This book discusses as well the use of demographic variables in archeological explanation. The final chapter deals with the decisions that must be made in designing a survey and to identify the alternative consequences for data recovery of various strategies. This book is a valuable resource for archeologists and planners.
Author: Debra Meyers
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 9780739110928
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312
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Book Description
In Colonial Chesapeake: New Perspectives leading scholars offer interdisciplinary revisionist essays on the political, cultural and social history of early Maryland and Virginia, calling special attention to the importance of power relations, reproductive politics, and identity politics in the shaping of the area. Using primary documents, which are included with the essays, this collection suggests that the multicultural Chesapeake created significant cultural, intellectual, and social norms that shaped the diverse world of the American people. This anthology uses these perspectives to represent the multitude of experiences in the region, and in doing so captures the essence of race, class, and ethnic and gender diversity that made up life in early Chesapeake Maryland and Virginia. Students and scholars in American history, as well as anthropology, will find this book essential in understanding the political history of the colonial Chesapeake area.
Author: David L. Clarke
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317606183
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1090
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Book Description
This major study reflects the increasing significance of careful model formation and testing in those academic subjects that are struggling from intuitive and aesthetic obscurantism toward a more disciplined and integrated approach to their fields of study. The twenty-six original contributions represent the carefully selected work of progressive archaeologists around the world, covering the use of models on archaeological material of all kinds and from all periods from Palaeolithic to Medieval. Their common theme is archaeological generalisation by means of explicit model building, testing, modification and reapplication. The contributors seek to show that it is the use of certain models in particular ways that defines archaeology as the practice of one discipline, with a set of general tenets that are as applicable in Peru as in Persia, Australia as Alaska, Sweden as Scotland, on material from the second millennium B.C. to the second millennium A.D. They assert that careful model formulation within archaeology and the cautious exchange and testing of models within and beyond the discipline provides the only route to the formation of the common, internationally valid body of theory which defines a vigorous and coherent discipline and distinguishes it from being a collection of merely regionally applicable special cases.
Author: Juan A. Barcelo
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1482226820
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 524
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Book Description
Although many archaeologists have a good understanding of the basics in computer science, statistics, geostatistics, modeling, and data mining, more literature is needed about the advanced analysis in these areas. This book aids archaeologists in learning more advanced tools and methods while also helping mathematicians, statisticians, and computer
Author: Michael J. O'Brien
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 0306474689
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 481
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Book Description
Anthropology, and by extension archaeology, has had a long-standing interest in evolution in one or several of its various guises. Pick up any lengthy treatise on humankind written in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the chances are good that the word evolution will appear somewhere in the text. If for some reason the word itself is absent, the odds are excellent that at least the concept of change over time will have a central role in the discussion. After one of the preeminent (and often vilified) social scientists of the nineteenth century, Herbert Spencer, popularized the term in the 1850s, evolution became more or less a household word, usually being used synonymously with change, albeit change over extended periods of time. Later, through the writings of Edward Burnett Tylor, Lewis Henry Morgan, and others, the notion of evolution as it applies to stages of social and political development assumed a prominent position in anthropological disc- sions. To those with only a passing knowledge of American anthropology, it often appears that evolutionism in the early twentieth century went into a decline at the hands of Franz Boas and those of similar outlook, often termed particularists. However, it was not evolutionism that was under attack but rather comparativism— an approach that used the ethnographic present as a key to understanding how and why past peoples lived the way they did (Boas 1896).
Author: J. E. Doran
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674554559
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 406
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Book Description
This book is for students and practitioners of archaeology. It offers an introductory survey of all the applications of mathematical and statistical techniques to their work. These applications are increasingly concerned with computerized data classification and quantification, and their effect is to reduce the level of uncertainty in the interpretation of the evidence that time and chance have left. Any archaeologist wanting to find out what these new methods have to offer has hitherto been forced to search for information in the specialist handbooks, conference proceedings, and review articles of his own, and very often of other, disciplines. This book brings the information conveniently together, so far as it pertains to archaeology, and permits an assessment of its relevance and quality. Those who have been daunted by the specialist knowledge apparently demanded will now be able to acquire a thorough grasp of principles and practices. Only an elementary knowledge of mathematics is presumed throughout. Part 1 provides a brief introduction to basic concepts in archaeology and mathematics. Part 2 relates the standard archaeological techniques and procedures to mathematics; it concentrates on numerical approaches best suited to archaeological practices. Part 3 examines various automatic seriation techniques and discusses further work that is coming to play an essential part in the development of archaeology.
Author: Teresa D. Hurt
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313001324
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241
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Book Description
The topics of style and function within evolutionary archaeology have been the subject of great debate in the field of archaeology in general over the past two decades. Evolutionary archaeologists have a unique perspective on these concepts-one that has sometimes been misunderstood by archaeologists working within other theoretical perspectives. The dichotomy between style and function was first formulated in the late 1970s by Robert Dunnell and remains axiomatic within the theoretical perspective of evolutionary archaeology. The original definitions of style and function were grounded in biological evolutionary concepts regarding neutral variation versus variation that is subject to natural selection. Several chapters expand upon these concepts, and explore how Darwinian evolutionary theory may be used to understand the archaeological record. Other chapters demonstrate this application through empirical case studies. Dunnell provides a foreword introducing and re-examining his original thesis. This volume is the only text devoted to the topic of style and function within the literature of evolutionary archaeology. It provides not only theoretical discussions and augmentation, but also significant historical background regarding the development of the style/function distinction within archaeology. Moreover, it presents several case studies that provide examples of how evolutionary style and function may be applied to the prehistoric record.
Author: Rani T. Alexander
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
ISBN: 0826359744
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Book Description
This book offers a new account of human interaction and culture change for Mesoamerica that connects the present to the past. Social histories that assess the cultural upheavals between the Spanish invasion of Mesoamerica and the ethnographic present overlook the archaeological record, with its unique capacity to link local practices to global processes. To fill this gap, the authors weigh the material manifestations of the colonial and postcolonial trajectory in light of local, regional, and global historical processes that have unfolded over the last five hundred years. Research on a suite of issues—economic history, production of commodities, agrarian change, resistance, religious shifts, and sociocultural identity—demonstrates that the often shocking patterns observed today are historically contingent and culturally mediated, and therefore explainable. This book belongs to a new wave of scholarship that renders the past immediately relevant to the present, which Alexander and Kepecs see as one of archaeology’s most crucial goals.
Author: Paul Healy
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
ISBN: 0889207844
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 413
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Book Description
Central America before the Spanish Conquest has often been considered by North American archaeologists as a “backwater” of peripheral importance located between the advanced ancient civilizations of South America and Mesoamerica (Mexican–Maya country). Recent archaeological research has revealed that this area played a much more significant role in New World cultural history than was previously thought. Healy’s study examines the archaeological record of one subarea of Southern Central America, the Rivas region of Pacific Nicaragua. The work gives a detailed analysis of excavations and of artifacts recovered at seven significant prehistoric sites. A critical pioneering effort, the monograph documents cultural changes occurring over a 2,000–year time period—changes in technology, material culture, settlement, subsistence, and socio–political organization.
