Categories - Archaeologs

Ancient Pottery

Sacred Ceremonies

Ancient Languages

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Brown Forest Soil

The type of soil which develops under mature deciduous woodland. Variants of the Brown Forest soil are thought to have covered most of the British Isles and temperate Europe under the great forests which existed during the middle of the present interglacial ( see Atlantic). The soil type is chara...

Brown Forest Soil

archaeologsOthers

Brorup Interstadial

An interstadial of the Weichselian cold stage. It has been dated by radiocarbon to between 63,000 and 61,000 bp, but this is at the extreme range of the technique (see radiocarbon dating) and it may be earlier.

Brorup Interstadial

archaeologsOthers

Brook Street

See Winchester.

Brook Street

archaeologsOthers

Bronzes (China)

See ritual vessels (China), bells (China), mirrors, drums (China).

Bronzes (China)

archaeologsOthers

Bronze Age

Second age of the Three Age System, defined by the use of bronze as the main material for making tools. The term is still widely used in West Asiatic and European prehistory. The dates of the Bronze Age vary from area to area, but in general terms it belongs to the 3rd and 2nd millennia bc in Wes...

Broken K Pueblo

Single-storey masonry pueblo located 18 km east of Snowflake, Arizona. Along with William Longacre’s Carter Ranch excavations and James Deetz’s Arikara study, it is one of the exemplary models of the practice of new archaeology. Using pollen evidence, James N. Hill was able to isolate the functio...

Broken K Pueblo

archaeologsOthers

Broken Hill

A mine at Kabwe in central Zambia, exploited from the early years of the present century. Mining operations have exposed a long series of stone industries extending from the Acheulian to the Charaman. Particular interest attaches to a cave, now completely quarried away, from which abundant faunal...

Broederstroom

An extensive Early Iron Age village site west of Pretoria, South Africa, which has yielded an unusually complete picture of village life in the mid- 1st millennium ad. Remains of 13 circular houses, spread over an area of some two hectares, have been investigated. Iron-smelting is attested, as is...

Broch

A type of circular building found in north Scotland and the Isles from around the turn of the Christian era. Brochs were built of drystone walling, up to c4 metres thick; the brochs themselves may be up to 12 metres in diameter. They contained many chambers and stone stairways leading up to tiers...

Broadbeach

A burial ground in coastal dunes south of Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. Excavations indicated that during the last 1300 years about 200 individuals may have been buried there. There were wide variations in burial practices, possibly related to age, sex and status; they included primary, second...

Brno

[German: Brunn]. The capital of Moravia, the central province of Czechoslovakia. Important Palaeolithic and geological sites surround the town, and are illustrated in a fine regional museum. Several interesting Palaeolithic discoveries have been found in the confines of the town. The most importa...

Britannia

Name given by the Romans to the imperial province of Britain, occupied from 43 to 410, and comprising England, Wales and (for much of the 2nd century) lowland Scotland. In 197 the province was divided into two, c300 into four, and in 369 into five smaller provinces.

Bristlecone Pine

See dendrochronology.

Brick

A shaped clay block, used in building, or the material from which such blocks are made. The brick clay may be hardened by baking in a kiln, in which case it may be termed terracotta. In drier climates, such baking is not so necessary and bricks may be dried in the sun; such bricks may be called m...

Breuil

(1877-1961). French Catholic priest who made major contributions to Palaeolithic archaeology and especially to the study of the Upper Palaeolithic cave art of France and northern Spain. He made detailed studies of nearly all the known decorated caves and to this day many of the illustrations of c...

Breuil

archaeologsOthers

Breccia

Sediment composed of angular fragments of gravel.

EnglishArchitectural

Breadfruit

The breadfruit tree (Artocarpus altilis) provides a large, starchy fruit which requires cooking before it can be eaten. The tree was probably first brought into cultivation in a region extending from the Philippines to New Guinea, and attained its greatest economic importance in the Polynesian Is...

Bratthalio

See Greenland.

Bratthalio

archaeologsOthers

Brassempouy

The Grotte du Pape near Brassempouy in the Landes, southwest France, had a long series of early Upper Palaeolithic deposits, but the early excavations by Piette do not enable the exact sequence to be reconstructed. The site is famous for a series of carved ivories, broken statuettes of the ‘venus...

Brane

Cemetery of the Early Bronze Age Nitra group in southwest Slovakia. 308 graves have been excavated by J.Vladdr, mostly simple rectangular pits, sometimes with a wooden lining, containing inhumation burials. An interesting study of the grave goods by Susan Shennan suggests that certain burials sta...

Brane

archaeologsOthers

Brak

A tell site of c30 hectares on the Khabur River in northeast Syria overlooking an important river crossing. Material from the Halaf and Ubaid periods indicates a long history, but the site is best known for its sequence of rich temples of the late Uruk and Jemdet Nasr periods, when it was clearly...

EnglishPlace Names, Architectural

Brak

archaeologsPlace Names, Architectural

Bradford-On-Avon

St Lawrence Church in Bradford-on-Avon in Somerset, is possibly the finest and best-preserved Aanglo-saxon church in England. The church is a small chapel, with a tall nave and chancel flanked by two side-porticos. There is some controversy as to its date, but it is likely that the major part of ...

Brachycephalic

Broad headed, having a cephalic index of 80 to 84.9.

Bp

Years before present. The ‘present’ referred to is the year ad 1950, the latest that the atmosphere was sufficiently uncontaminated to act as a standard for radiocarbon dating. The lower case ‘bp’-represents uncalibrated radiocarbon years; the capitals bp denote a calibrated radiocarbon date,or a...

Bp

archaeologsOthers

Boyne Culture

The term used for the passage graves of the Boyne Valley in Ireland, dated to the 4th millennium bc. They are notable for their size, the architectural expertise shown in their construction, and their decoration. The area must have been a centre of some importance, as five henges have been found,...

Boyne Culture

archaeologsOthers

Box Flue

[Latin tubulus’, box tile]. A term denoting the hollow box-shaped terracotta tiles which were joined together to form passages in the walls and roofing of Roman imperial buildings, especially baths, to carry furnace-heated hot air up from the hollow hypocaust floors.

Bowl Barrow

archaeologsOthers

Bouqras

A 7th-millennium bc Pre-pottery Neolithic B village site near the River Euphrates in Syria. The first occupation phase had two levels with rectangular mud-brick houses. The next four levels had more solid mud-brick houses, some with plastered floors, benches and pillars. The animal economy was ba...

EnglishPlace Names

Bouleuterion

Council-house for the meetings of the Greek city council ( boule). Probably not originally distinctive in architecture, it seems to be one of a range of straightforward rectangular civic buildings. The internal space was probably undivided, except by a number of columns to hold up the roof struct...

Boulder Clay

Type of till. The term is sometimes (erroneously) used to mean all kinds of till.

Boudicca

[inaccurately Boadicea]. Queen of the Iceni, a British tribe inhabiting a large area of East Anglia. Under a special client-king agreement (dependent sovereignty), their King Prasutagus was permitted to continue ruling after the Romans began to occupy Britain in AD 43. Upon his death (c60), Rome ...

EnglishPublic Figures

Boucher De Perthes

(1788-1868). customs officer from Abbeville in northern France who collected stone tools of the type now known as hand axes from the gravels of the River Somme in the 1830s, 1840s and 1850s. His claims that these objects were indeed the tools of ancient man and that they occurred in association w...

Boucher De Perthes

archaeologsOthers

Bouar

A numerous series of megalithic monuments in a restricted area of the Central African Republic, consisting of settings of standing stones associated with tumuli. Dating evidence derived from such excavations as have yet taken place is hard to interpret, but it is possible that some of the monumen...

Botta

(1802-70). French consular agent in Iraq from 1840 to 1843 who conducted excavations on the Mesopotamian sites of Kuyunjik (Nineveh) and Khorsa-bad. These were the earliest excavations in Mesopotamia and were conducted without any kind of scientific method, with the sole object of unearthing, and...

Botta

archaeologsOthers

Bosumpra

A cave site near Abetifi in southern Ghana which yielded one of the first scientifically excavated assemblages of a West African Neolithic industry. More recent investigations have provided a radiocarbon chronology, showing that the site’s occupation began around the middle of the 4th millennium ...

Bossed Bone Plaque

Objects of unknown function made of bone and carved with a row of adjacent round bosses; incised decoration may occur on the background and sometimes on the bosses themselves. Bossed bone plaques have been found in the eastern and central Mediterranean at Troy, Lerna, Altamura in southern Italy, ...

EnglishTools, Artifacts

Bosing

Method of detecting buried features of archaeological sites. The fill of pits and ditches, or hollow chambers, may resonate if the ground is struck with a heavy implement. Bosing has been successful in finding sites (particularly tomb chambers), but it is not as objective as other geophysical met...

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