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- Michigan
- Michigan State University
- Anthropology
- Anthropology 101
- Dunham
- Final Exam Arch
Rachel G.
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Bio Archaeology
The study of human biological component evidence in the archaeology record.
Bio Archaeology
Examines the health and workload of ancient populations.
Determining Sex
Pelvis and the scull
Scaiatic notch
narrow notch (Men) wide notch (women) on rear side of the pelvis
first bone to decay
Cribera Orbitalia
A symptom of iron deficiency anemia in which the bone of the upper eye sockets take on a spongey apperance
Determining Sex
- tend to be more robust then female skulls.
- have heavier brow ridges over the eye
- have more rugged muscle attachments
- squarer chins and eye orbits
- Narrower notches then females
Archaeologist can usually tell just by the feel
Best methods for determining age of a juvenile
- Tooth crown eruption
- bone fusion
Determining age of an adult
- Bone wear (after age 30 bones begin to wear down)
- Degree of tooth wear and loss. (caution is required because the rate of the tooth wear is strong related to diet)
Pubic Symphysis
Where two halves of the pelvis meet in the groin area.
determine age
Epiphyses
The end bones that fuse together to the main shaft or portion of bone at various ages. Most bones are fused by age 25; this fact can be used to age skeletons of younger individuals.
Paleopathology
•the study of ancient disease, disorders, and trauma
(Stillwater people)
Paleopathology at Stillwater
Looked for non specific indicators of stress, particularly those caused by nutrition defects and/or nonspecific infectious diseases
Porotic Hyperostosis
A symptom of iron deficiency anemia in which the scull takes on a porous appearance
Harris Line
Thin line of bone (X-ray)
horizontal lines near near the ends of long bones indicating episodes of physological stress
Growth Arrest Features
•These features will note whengrowth stopped during an individuals life, often due to malnutrition or disease
•Harris lines
•Enamel hypoplasias
Enamel hypoplasis
horizontal linear defects in tooth enamel indicating episodes of physiological stress
more permanent then harris lines
Focused on these for the Stillwater Case
Conclusions for Stillwater
•Larson found signs of irondeficiency anemia among the skeletal remains from Stillwater Marsh.
•Two-thirds of the individualsexperienced hypoplasias that occurred between the ages of3 and 4.
Conclusion from disease and trauma at Stillwater
Children of Stillwater Marsh had seen some hard times, but conditions were by no means as bad as they might have been.
Fluctuations in the food supply from the marsh - subject to the local climate - most likely caused periods of malnutrition for young children
Workload at Stillwater
- Every single adult skeleton in theStillwater
collection had osteoarthritis in at least one joint.
–Differencein osteoarthritis locations between men and women
- The femur cross sections andpatterns in osteoarthritis indicated that the people living at Stillwater Marshwalked a great deal to make a successful living.
Osteoarthritis
Disorder in which the cartilagebetween joints wears away, often because of overuse of the joint, resulting inosteophytes and eburnation
Signs of Osteoarthritis
•Osteophytes, bones develop a distinct “lipping”of bone at the point of articulation. Appears as bony growth
•Eburnation, epiphyses of long bones are wornsmooth, causing them to take on a varnish-like appearance
Roles of men and women
Because of the osteoarthritis it was evident that men did more walking. Women most likely had it in their back because of two factors: child rearing and food processing.
Paleodemography
The study of ancient demographic patterns and trends
Paleodemography reconstructs
parameters such aslife expectancy at birth, the age profile of a population, and patterns in theages of death.
Mortality Profile
Charts that depict the various ages at death of a burial population
The Stillwater Mortality Profile
- Mortality of newborns and toddlers is very high among hunting andgathering populations
- The female morality profile shows an increase in deaths in the earlychild-bearing years; common for foraging populations
- Few individuals are assigned to the 46-50 and 50+ age category.
Reconstructing Diet from Human Bone
•Cavities indicate a starchy diet (Becausetheir diet was low in simple carbohydrates, only 3 percent of Stillwaterskeletons had cavities)
•Ancient diets can also bereconstructed by analyzing the carbon and nitrogen stable isotopes preserved inhuman bone.
Stable Isotopes
•Human bones reflect the isotopicratios of plants ingested during life.
•We reconstruct the dietaryimportance of plants by measuring the ratio of carbon and nitrogen isotopes in bonecollagen.
Molecular Archaeology
the use of genetic information (DNA) in ancient human remains to reconstruct the past
Stillwater Hunter-Gatherer’s,How did they live?
•Stillwater people lived relativelyhealthy lives, free of serious disease and trauma
•Extreme hard work and lots ofwalking with periods of malnutrition
mtDNA or Mitochondondrial DNA
DNA found in the mitochondria of cells; it is inherited only from the mother and appears to mutate at a rate of 2-4 percent per 1 million years
Conclusion from mtDNA
•Explains why Native Americans inCanada and southern South America are genetically similar.
•Differences in Asian and NativeAmerican populations must generally postdate the time when they separated atthe Bering Strait.
•It is possible that all NativeAmericans came from a small number of Asian founding families.
molecular clock
•calculates the time sincedivergence of two related populations using the presumed rate of mutation in mtDNA and the genetic differences between thetwo populations.
What could a bioarchaeologist look at to determine the age at death of a mature human skeleton (>30 years old)
patterns of wear on the pubic symphysis
The best bone for determining stature from human skeletal material is
the femur
The ratios of _____ and _____ in bone can indicate the dietary importance of various kinds of plants and animals
carbon; nitrogen isotopes
social organization
rules and structures that govern relations within a group of interacting peopl
Political Organization
A society's formal and informal institutions that regulate a populations collective acts
If you live in a society in which two or more local groups are organized under a single highly ranked individual, you live in a...
chiefdom
Material culture reflects
symbolic meaning as well as functional behaviors
means that archaeological patterning can be extremely difficult to find
Sex
referes to inherited, biological differences between males and females
(male or female)
Gender
refers to culturally constructed ideas about sex diffrences
(Can be more then two genders)
ex) men who choose to live like women
Gender Roles
the culturally prescribed behavior associated with men and women; roles can vary from society to society
Gender ideology
the culturally prescribed values assigned to the task and status of men and women; values can vary from culture to culture
(example of atlatls, or spear throwers)
Problem with Webb's argument
grounded in assumption & by no means logical.
Webb could not imagine women as hunter, he searched for another explanation for the inclusions of atlatls in women's graves.
Because archaeologist lack an established method for objectively deriving this sort of information from material remains
most investigators are focused to rely on ethnographic analogy or historical documents, with all their limitations
Can archaeologist reconstruct the activities conducted by males and females in the past?
Modern archaeologist find it difficult to say much about gender roles in the past, let alone move beyond such relatively mundane activites to an understanding of gender ideology. Doing so may be limited to those instances in which a close, historically linked analogy is available.
Kinship
The socially recognized network of relationships through which individuals are related to one another by ties of descent (real or imagined) and marriage
social groupings
are reflected "on the ground" in terms of house space and placement
Clan
A set of lineages that claims to share a distant, often-mythical ancestor
Status
The rights, duties, privileges, powers, liabilities, and immunities that accrue to a recognized and named social position
Ascribed Status
Rights, duties and obligations that accrue to a person by virtue of his or her parentage; inherited.
Achieved Status
Right, duties and obligations that accrue to a person by virtue of what he or she has accomplished in life
egalitarian society
is a society in which people generally have equal access to critical, life-sustaining resources.
contains roughly as many valued positions as there are persons capable of filling them.
recognizes status on the basis of gender and age.
contains roughly as many valued positions as there are persons capable of filling them.
recognizes status on the basis of gender and age.
ranked society
A social system in which positions of status are limited, and thus where not everyone of talent may achieve high status or prestige
The fact that material culture reflects symbolic meanings as well as functional behaviors means
it can be difficult to interpret archaeological patterning and to infer social and political organization from artifacts.
Death and Social Status
ethnographic data shows that societies that have important social distinctions among living individuals also have material distinctions among death
Ne-con-ne-pe-wah-se site
Typical family
-mother & father, their children & grandparents
possibly the father’s unmarried adultsiblings
· social and economic roles were assignedaccording to gender and age.
Egalitarian Society
down-the-line trade
an exchange system in which goods are traded outward from a source area from group to group, resulting in a steady decline in the item's abundance in archaeological sites farther from the source
energy dispersive X-ray
An analytical technique that uses obsidian's trace elements to "fingerprint" an artifact and trace it to its geological source.
direct acquisition
a form of trade where a person or group goes to the source area of an item to produce the raw material directly or to trade it for it's finished product
Hopewell individuals might have acquired obsidian through down the line trade, it's shiny black surface serving to remind people of
the important social ties some individuals had to high-ranking persons in other Hopewell communities
cognitive archaeology
the study of all those aspects of ancient culture that are a product of the human mind
Archaeology of the mind
more postprocessual because such an approach will necessarily be concerned with recovering meaning
Symbol
an object or act (verbal or nonverbal) that, by cultural convention, stands for something else with which it has no necessary connection.
Symbols have no
no necessary connection to their culturally assigned meaning, they can be used in different ways
Religion
a specific set of beliefs about one's relation to the supernatural
a society's mechanism for relating supernatural phenomena to the every day world
Ritual
a secession of discrete behaviors that must be performed in a particular order under practical circumstances.
Rituals are...
behavioral acts that often entail material cultures and therefor can be represented in the archaeological record
Peace Pipe Conclusions
the peace pipe rituals served to mediate interctions over a vast area of eastern North America. By promoting a common set of symbols - perhaps linked to some common religious ideas.
-reduced regional differences
-promoted contact and communication between groups
The difference between a symbol and a sign
a sign has a connection to what it signifies, while a symbol does not
Finely carved Hopewell effigy pipes have been interpreted as ritual artifacts. Robert L. Hall argued from ethnographic analogy in the late 1970s that these pipes
resented ritual weapons (atlatls).
functioned as peace pipes functioned historically.
helped maintain relationships between communities, reducing regional differences and promoting contact and communication.
functioned as peace pipes functioned historically.
helped maintain relationships between communities, reducing regional differences and promoting contact and communication.
The occurrence of the Upper Paleolithic in Europe is marked by the appearance of
complex technology of stone, bone, and antler as well as art.
Chavin
Upland people using symbols from lowland areas
Ethnographic link
Low lands
Sacred knowledge
Medicinal plants
Power of the forest
(cosmology)
Cosmology
the study of the orgin, large scale structure
Oracle
A shrine in which a deity reveals hidden knowledge or purpose
(Chavin Cosmology)
iconography
art forms or writing systems that symbolically represent ideas about religion or cosmology
art-for-art's-sake interpretation
stressed what humans could accomplish in the leisure time that technology could bring.
-the animals had no particular meaning; they were just artistic expressions of the things people saw around them
problem with art-for-art's-skae
fails to explain why the artist chose the remote location
Sympathetic magic
rituals in which doing something to an image of an object produces the same desired effect on the real object
- like controls like
Problems with sympathetic magic
if the art represents sympathetic hunting magic then it was not very successful
interpretations assumes that the animals are literal and they they have no symbolic meaning
structuralism
The paradigm that holds that human culture is the expression of unconscious modes of thought and reasoning, notably binary opposition
- jump to symbol to meaning
Problems with structuralism (oppositions)
- circular reasoning
- not held up as more caves were discovered
- drew upon his own culture rather from the ancient people's culture
- one thing did not stand for "male" or "female"
Totems
a natural object, often an animal ,from which a lineage or clan believed itself to be descended and/or with which lineage or clan members have a special relations
(cannot access if this idea was right for the upper Paleolithic people)
Shamans and the upper paleolithic
- firmly grounded in middle level theory
- is evidence of shamanic traces
- elements of uniformitarianism
Shaman
one who has the power to contact the spirit world through trance, possession, or visions.
On the basis of this ability, the shaman invokes, manipulates, or coerces the power of the spirits for socially recognized end - both good or ill
According to the Shaman theory the wall art is a result of
what they saw in their visions
The Cave of Lascaux
- located in Europe
- discovered by schoolboys in 1940
- farther you go into the cave the more abstract the images get
Lewis-Williams argues that
the art reflects humanity's effort to come to grips with the perception that their quotidian life was not all that made up their existence
what is the meaning of life
historical archaeology
the study of human behavior through material remains whose interpretations is in some way affected by written history
Why do historical archaeology
Documentary sources can be selective and biased toward the interests of particular cultural, political, or ethnic groups
In early days of historical archaeology
excavations in historical periods sites merely supplemented the "known" documentary view of the past
modern historical archaeology often has a
- postprocessual slant to it
historical archaeologist commonly have access to texts, ethnohistoric data, and oral traditions
Three themes in historical archaeology
- hidden history
- Correcting inaccuracies
- reexamining history
Hidden History
seeks to rectify an injustice by documenting the experience of minority of subjugated populations whose lack of access to literacy often left their voice out of traditional historical texts
Correcting inaccuracies
seeks to set historical records of events straight in cases where records may be biased
Reexamine history
seeks to determine whether our explanations of the past, or whether national "stories" of how a nation came to be, are accurate or whether the story masks the processes that led to and propagate inequalities
How does modern historical Americanist archaeology differ from its prehistoric counterpart
Historical archaeologists tend not to study large-scale processes; the high degree of temporal resolution in historic sites often leads investigators to focus on specific events or individuals.
Because historical archaeology deals with the relatively recent past, and all the cultural, political, and ethical challenges therein, it is often emotionally charged.
Bioarchaeological analysis of the burials from the African Burial Ground site in New York City showed that
half of the population died before reaching the age of 12, with another peak in mortality between the ages of 15 and 20
most early plantation archaeologists
was aimed at archaeological reconstruction, and prior to the 1980s, few restored plantations addressed the issue of slavery explicitly
today the field of african american archaeology...
is a growing industry, helping undercover information about aspect of life on which the documentary sources are often silent.
in the 1960's, historical archaeology began to focus on
historically disenfranchised groups in our own culture, seeking to uncover the history of african americans, asian americans, native americans during the historic period and hispanic americans
historical archaeology has been grounds for
postprocessual interests, because texts can provide data with which to place archaeological remains in context
What was archaeological investigation of the battlefield at Little Bighorn able to conclude about the nature of the battle?
Virtually no evidence of formal tactics such as skirmish lines, supporting Indian accounts of chaos and hand-to-hand fighting.
Archaeologist believe that Custard...
was caught off gaurd
A major goal of critical theory
social change
Blakey’s analysis of some 400 individuals from the burial ground concluded
The remains showed signs of human brutality.
Analysis of the remains showed mortality occurred between the ages of 15-20, and half of the population died before they reached the age of 12.
Enlarged muscle attachments on both men and women demonstrated continual demands on their physical labor.
How does Leone explain the appearance and popularity of formal Georgian gardens in wealthy Annapolis homes during the mid 18th century?
he gardens expressed the Enlightenment idea of the power of reason over nature, and that nature controlled by culture was more desirable and attractive than nature alone.
According to Leone, which of the following aspects of Annapolis reflect an upper-class Anglo-American show of power
- The layout of the city itself
- The formal gardens of wealthy households.
- Use of optical illusions in landscape architecture to manipulate view and control perspective.
Changes in material culture between medieval mindset and those with a Georgian worldview
the changes made in material culture signal a shift to a culture that focused on the individual rather then the group, and on the control of nature
culture was to nature as order was to chaos.
Clovis and the First Americans?
People came to the Americas via a land bridge in Asia
- Clovis points – time marker, approx. 14,000 years ago
- Clovis people were through to be the first and only migration
Two major problemswith the interpretation that the Clovis people were the first Americans:
Some archaeological sites may predate Clovis(ex. Monte Verde)
Egalitarian groupgraves
sex and age of the individual
Ranked group graves
status, rank, occupation, etc
The garbage project
Tuscon, AZ an urban community whose population was slightlyover 360,000, Archaeology was used to explore 9 landfills across the US
started by William Rathje
paper takes up 40-50% of volume in landfills
people drank more beer then they admitted to drinking
cultural resource management (CRM)
A professional field that conducts activities; including archeology, related to compliances with legislation aimed at conserving cultural resources
Forensic archaeology
the application of archaeological and bioarchaeological
-teaching police force how to do basic archaeology in order to find a criminal
Antiquities Act 1906
- requires federal permits before excavating or collecting artifacts on federal land
- establishes a permitting process
- gave the president the authority to create national monuments
Cultural Resources
physical features both natural and artificial, associated with human activity, including sites, structures, and objects possessing significance in history, architecture, or human development.
-unique and nonrenewable
National historic preservation act (NHPA) 1966
- the national register of historic places
- the advisory council on historic preservation
- state historic preservation office
- a process to mitigate the impact of development
Archaeological resource prevention act (ARPA) 1979
- prohibits the excavation or removal of artifacts from federal property without a permit
- prohibits sale, exchange, or transport of artifacts acquired illegally
- increased penalties for violations of the act over those of the antiquities act
1990 Native American grave protection and repatriation act
- mandated inventory of institutions' human skeletal remains
- required that institutions consult with tribes
- gave native americans a large role in dispassion of artifacts and skeletal remains
cultural affiliation
in NAGPRA, a relationship of shared group identify which can be reasonably traced historically or prehistorically between present day Indian tribes
Nazi archaeology
Idea of who controls the past & who gets to decide? =absolute power = bad
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