ANTH 110 Study Guide - Spring 2018, Comprehensive Midterm Notes - Bone, Sediment, Cultural Anthropology
ANTH 110
MIDTERM EXAM
STUDY GUIDE
Fall 2018
ANTH 110 Week One Lecture Notes: What is Archaeology?
● Symbols and what they mean or have meant something key to remember
● What it isn’t: Political (or attempts to not be empirically impossible), or anything to do
with dinosaurs
○ In England Saxon burials the definitively tied English to Germans historically
found around WWII
○ Not about recovering/possessing valuable objects, which is a major conflict of
interest. For instance golden idols are without value without context.
○ Rorschach test, instead empirical observations and finding out what kinds of
questions about the past can be answered in the first place
○ Awl: used for inscribing, sometimes metal
● Archaeology: The scientific study of the material remains of past cultures.
○ The body of theory method and technique that guides the systematic recovery
and analysis (scientific study) of the traces of past human behaviour
○ Subdiscipline of Cultural Anthropology
■ As a subfield of cultural anthropology, archaeology gives a central role o
the culture concept
● Types of Archaeology
○ Prehistoric Archaeology: Studies people through patterns of observed material
remains (based solely on the remains they left behind very little material culture)
○ Historic Archaeology: Studies people who produced written records (earliest like
Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, Central America, etc.)
○ Classical Archaeology: Interest in classical societies like Rome and Greece,
especially objects of art and architecture
○ Epigraphy: Epigraphers study ancient written texts with specific concern for the
archaeological context from which texts emerge
○ Ethnoarchaeology: The study of modern cultures to derive archaeological
correlates of behavior
○ Public Archaeology: Branch of archaeology concerned with recovery and
preservation of cultural resources as mandated by the National Historic
Preservation Act. Pure applied archaeology to the real, current, world. (Also
called Cultural Resource Management or CRM)
○ Nautical Archaeology: Study of underwater cultural remains; a field often
associated with treasure hunting
● Data: Comes down to how we interpret data
○ Historical records include statements, opinions, and judgments biased by the
experiences of writers
○ Archaeological data while mute, this data can be biased by the experiences of
archaeologists
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Anth. 110 Week Two Lecture Notes: Goals of Archaeology
● Bioarchaeology, can be referring to the study of bodies found in the archaeological
record, recovery of them and them in context of where they’re found more archaeology
and study of bodies themselves more biological anthropology
● Functionally, archaeology and cultural anthropology study the same things but one’s in
the past and everyone’s dead, the other with the currently living.
● Culture (from standpoint of cultural anthropology) -- Socially acquired traditions of
thought and behavior… shared values, ideals, and beliefs used to interpret experience
and generate behavior.
○ What does culture give you? What do you get?
■ Set of skills to survive? How to know how to interact with each other,
allows you to put other people's behavior into context, at least partially for
yourself.
■ Creating a set of norms to move through life and the world
○ Culture isn’t really linked a definitive place with a definitive group of people, at
least not to any great degree with the advent of globalization
● Culture is relative to each individual: It creates agency for each individual within a culture
as something created by human beings
○ Each of our perceptions of culture is generated by our own perspective which is
always going to be at least a little bit unique as the sum of our own experiences.
○ From birth mothers have great impact on children, this is true as we’re primates
(apes more specifically which involves the mother nourishing the child for an
extended period of time)
○ Culture can be most easily found at the community level, as that’s where an
individual interacts with and within the most groups on a day to day basis as well
as being fluid, dynamic, and subject to change.
● Culture in regards to archaeology must by necessity be considered somewhat differently
due to the fact that everyone’s dead. Thus can be identified through style as it’s through
this that members of a culture express themselves within it.
○ Style includes imagery, materials, methodology, patterns, etc. Helps indicate
association within the same culture. Basically what’s leftover from people
interacting and what’s mainly looked at in archaeology.
○ In some ways, this way of looking at culture is broader as it involves materials
rather than just ideas and thus has more options for interpretation as we must try
to extrapolate ideas from material rather than having them expressed to us.
○ A lot of the issue of interpretations and landing on a single one idea of culture
from material has to do with scale as there’s so much extrapolation from very
little (basically has to go large rather than small by necessity) that leads to issues
with delineation within that.
■ Physical proximity is a factor that must be considered but doesn’t allow
the ability to see differences between cultures that may be distinct without
a written record.
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Symbols and what they mean or have meant something key to remember. What it isn"t: political (or attempts to not be empirically impossible), or anything to do with dinosaurs. In england saxon burials the definitively tied english to germans historically found around wwii. Not about recovering/possessing valuable objects, which is a major conflict of interest. For instance golden idols are without value without context. Rorschach test, instead empirical observations and finding out what kinds of questions about the past can be answered in the first place. Archaeology: the scientific study of the material remains of past cultures. The body of theory method and technique that guides the systematic recovery and analysis (scientific study) of the traces of past human behaviour. As a subfield of cultural anthropology, archaeology gives a central role o the culture concept. Prehistoric archaeology: studies people through patterns of observed material remains (based solely on the remains they left behind very little material culture)
