Others

Nao

Nan Madol

Built in a shallow tidal lagoon off the shore of Ponape, Caroline Islands, Nan Madol is the largest single complex of ancient stonework in Oceania, comprising about 70 hectares of basalt platforms, some of a remarkable crib-like construction using prismatic basalt. The most famous structure is th...

Nam-Viet

An ancient kingdom which comprised parts of present southern China and of northern Vietnam. It came into being in 207 bc, when a Chinese official declared himself king of the southern province of Nan Hai, to which he added the conquered kingdom of Au-Lac; its capital was near present Canton and i...

Namazga-Depe

A large Chalcolithic and Bronze Age settlement in southern Turkmenia (Soviet Central Asia). The Namazga phases I-III are assigned to the Chalcolithic period (6th-5th millennia bc), while Namazga IV and V belong to the Bronze Age and are dated to the 4th-3rd millennia bc. Already a large village o...

Naletale

See Dhlo Dhlo.

Naletale

Nai

A cultural group named after the site of Sohr Damb, near the village of Nai in central Baluchistan, Pakistan, related to the Kulli culture further south. The Nai culture probably belongs to the first half of the 3rd millennium bc and both Nai and Kulli settlements are associated with water-contro...

Nai

Nahal Oren

Cave and open terrace site in the Carmel caves, Israel, occupied from the early Upper Palaeolithic to the Pre-pottery Neolithic B (PPNB). Natufian levels show a strong bias towards the selective hunting, or possibly herding, of gazelle and this continued through to the PPNB levels. Although there...

Nagarakritagama

Name of a Javanese chronicle, started in 1365 by Prapancha but containing information about court life going back to the early 13th century. See alsoSmG- hasAri.

Nagarakritagama

Nachikufan

A term describing the backed microlith industries of northern Zambia, with those of some adjacent regions, formerly regarded as forming a distinct complex, of long duration, divided into three successive phases. These Nachikufan industries, named after a large cave near Mpika, were differentiated...

Nabta Playa

Lake basin near the Egypt/ Sudan border in the desert west of the Nile. Extensive scattered prehistoric occupation is attested from c7000 be. A thousand years later, settlement appears to have become concentrated in larger sites adjacent to the lake shore. Pottery and concave-based arrowheads now...

Musingen

A cemetery of the Early and Middle La Tene Iron Age in the canton of Berne, Switzerland. The 200 or more graves were commonly lined with stone and contained coffins; they were situated on a ridge, and as time passed the cemetery spread from the north end of the ridge to the south. This tomb seque...

Marshall, Sir John

(1876-1958). Director General of Archaeology in India, who excavated at the Harappan civilization site of Mohenjo-Daro in the 1920s. These excavations were published in three fine volumes in 1931, entitled Mohenjodaro and the Indus Civilization, but the excavations themselves were inferior in qua...

Mwanganda

A butchery site in northern Malawi, unfortunately not dated, where numerous scrapers and a few core axes were preserved among the dismembered skeleton of an elephant. The site is of interest as preserving in situ the debris of a single, clearly defined, activity. It has been attributed, on somewh...

Munyama Cave

Located on Buvuma Island in Ugandan waters of Lake Victoria, central Africa, the cave contains an early backed microlith industry extending back to cl3,000 be. Small backed bladelets were the most common implements, with end-scrapers and occasional geometrical backed microliths. Backed microliths...

Munsell Colour Chart

One of several systems used to describe colours accurately. A Munsell chart contains a number of pages, each with many coloured chips glued to it. Colour is assessed by matching with these chips, and is described in standard terms. The colour of any material can in fact be described, but the syst...

Munsell Colour Chart

Municipium

A Roman term of political classification. Originally an Italian town or community in the Republican period, which was granted Roman citizenship without the vote. In the 1st century bc all Italian communities gained this status, with a uniform pattern of local government under four magistrates. La...

Mundigak

Tell site on the Helmand River in southern Afghanistan, occupied in the 4th, 3rd and 2nd millennia bc. In the 3rd millennium bc it was a major urban centre, closely related to the great city of Shahr-I Sokhta, also on the Helmand River, but over the modern border in Iran. Monumental buildings of ...

Mummy Cave

A deeply stratified site located in northwest Wyoming, USA, containing an almost ideal stratigraphy from which a series of radiocarbon dates was taken. 38 distinct cultural levels, each sealed by sterile alluvial deposits, evidence an intermittent occupation from at least 7300 be to ad 1580. Subs...

Multivariate Analysis

A branch of statistics that deals with more than two variables at once. This is important, for example, when comparing series of skull measurements, the results of chemical analysis for a number of elements, or a large number of characteristics recorded about a group of artefacts. In multivariate...

Multivariate Analysis

Multidimensional Scaling

Technique of multivariate analysis. Points or items distributed in a hyperspace, whose dimensions are a large number of variables, can be similarly distributed in a space of fewer dimensions. To do this, the technique ‘keeps in its mind’s eye’ two distributions: one the original, distributed in h...

Multidimensional Scaling

Mullerup

The type locality of the Maglemo-sean culture of northern Europe, situated in the Magie Mose (or Great Bog) in Zealand, Denmark. The Maglemosean in one of the Mesolithic cultures characterized by axes and microblades, or small tools and points made on microblades. It belongs to the early postglac...

Müller

(1846-1934). Danish prehistorian who succeeded Thomsen as Director of the Danish National Museum in 1865. A contemporary of Montelius, he worked in the same tradition, building up detailed typological sequences and cross dating them by reference to the historical calendars of the Near Eastern civ...

Müller

Mudejar

A term used to describe the unique style of art and architecture, part Gothic, part Islamic, which developed in the Iberian peninsula during the Moorish occupation of the 12th-15th centuries. Many of the greatest Mudejar buildings were constructed by Moorish workmen for Christian masters, and wer...

Mucking

The combined settlement and cemetery of Mucking in Essex is one of the largest and most extensively excavated Early Saxon sites in England. Mucking is situated on the high gravel terraces of the Thames estuary, and attention was first drawn to it through a remarkable series of crop marks spotted ...

Mu’A

The main ceremonial and residential centre of the ruling dynasties of Tongatapu, Tonga, held by tradition to have been in use from the 11th century ad. The site, never excavated, has a core area of 400 by 500 metres defended by an earthwork, and contains numerous house platforms and tombs (LANGI).

Mu’A

Mshatta

Although never finished, Mshatta in Jordan is among the most famous early Islamic palaces. It consists of a square enclosure, 147 metres across, with a single gate in the south side. The interior was divided into three parallel strips running from north to south. The lateral strips were never bui...

Mousterian Industries Of North Africa

The earliest post-ACHEULiAN industries in much of North Africa are those designated Mousterian. In many areas the Acheulian appears to have been brought to an end by a period of exceptional aridity when much of North Africa, away from such favoured places as Morocco and south-eastern Libya, was l...

Mousterian Industries Of North Africa

Mousterian

The term Mousterian, based on the site of Le Moustier in the Dordogne, southwest France, was originally applied to the epoch-making middle division of the Palaeolithic. Later it came to be regarded as a culture or group of cultures, but it is now used in many quarters in its old sense, referring ...

Mount Do

An open site near Thanh-hoa in northern Vietnam which has yielded a pebble and flake industry with a few bifaces. Russian and Vietnamese authors have suggested Chellean (early Acheulian) affinities, but these are still disputed.

Mount Carmel

There are several important caves on Mount Carmel near Haifa in Israel. Tabun Cave has a long sequence of deposits of Acheulian and Mousterian type; the latter levels include a skeleton of Neanderthal type. The nearly Skhul Cave has burials of eleven individuals, formerly regarded as N eander- th...

Mould

The earliest moulds for casting metal were made of stone. European early Bronze Age stone moulds consist of one main unit, a depression carved into a flat stone surface. Metal would simply have been poured into this depression to make a casting of the desired shape. Such moulds are often termed o...

Mould

Motya

[modern San Pantaleo]. One of the three principal centres of Carthaginian Sicily (the other two were at Panormus [Palermo] and Soloeis [Soluntum]). The site lay on a tiny island off the extreme west of Sicily, on the north side of the bay of Stagnone. The settlement was founded as a Phoenician co...

Motupore

A site on an offshore island near Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, with an excavated sequence from ad 1100-1700, ancestral to the present Austronesian-speaking Motu inhabitants of the region. The sequence documents the development of the specialized ethnographic Motu trading system, in which potte...

Motte And Bailey

An expedient, quickly erected, medieval fortification consisting of an artificially constructed earthen mound — the motte — with a flattened top, surrounded by a ditch with an adjoining separately defended enclosure, the bailey. Several classic examples of motte and bailey castles are illustrated...

Motte And Bailey

Moraine

A land form, built up directly by the depositional action of ice. There are many forms of moraine. Flat areas of ‘ground moraine’ are deposited underneath the interior of a moving ice-sheet. ‘Hummocky moraine’ results from the down-melting of stagnant ice. ‘End moraines’ accumulate where the ice ...

Mootwingee

A rich rock-art site in a range of hills near Broken Hill, western New South Wales, Australia. Human and animal figures in the Panaramitee style were pecked prolifically on rock surfaces. Human figures are represented frontally as stick men, or more fully rounded and carrying barbed spears and bo...

Monthaillou

This village in the French Pyrenees became famous through the research of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie into the 13th-century Cathar rising. The modem hamlet nestles around the bottom of a knoll, which is crowned by a small castle. Around the edge of the knoll are the distinctive house-platforms on whi...

Monthaillou