ANTA01H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Biological Anthropology, Carbon-12, C4 Carbon Fixation
Document Summary
Anta01 week 3 september 27, 2012. Methods of studying the past: archaeology and biological anthropology. How: theoretical approaches and environments and diet. Who: burial context and osteological methods of identifying age at death , sex, health, disease, behavior. Archaeological sites : where people lived or carried out activities. Features : non portable remains graves or walls. Morphological features: sources of water, clay, iron ore, firewood wtc. Inform us on where to look and where not to look. Careful excavation: spatial contexts /associations, provenience (relationship between 3 dimensional space that each artefact has, assemblage (relationship between all of the artefacts/ecofacts in an area) Relative dating methods: stratigraphy, seriation, self dating, self dating, cross dating. Most dates are averaged over spans of many years: 1 000 000 years ago really means something like between about 900 000 and 1. Deposit of sediment, lowest is the oldest, highest is the more recent.
