Others

Conchopata

A site dating to the Early Middle Horizon, located in the Ayacucho Valley near Huari, Peru, and probably the site of a religious shrine. Large beaker-shaped urns, intentionally smashed and concentrated in only a few locations, appear to have votive or some other ceremonial significance. The polyc...

Conca D’Oro

A Copper Age culture in northwest Sicily, which takes its name from the area around Palermo. A number of cemeteries of rock-cut tombs of the a forno or ovenshaped type have been investigated. They were used for collective burial, and the associated grave goods include pottery vessels and stone an...

Conca D’Oro

Computers

Machines which can be programmed to calculate and compare, store and manipulate information. They consist of four main components: (1) a central processing unit, in which program instructions are interpreted and calculations carried out; (2) storage units, where information may be held temporaril...

Computers

Combe Grenal

A site near Domme on the Dordogne River, southwest France. With some 64 archaeological levels, the large rock shelter and small cave have the largest number of culture levels of any Palaeolithic site known to date. The 55 Mousterian levels have formed the basis for the analysis of the Mousterian ...

Combe Grenal

Colt Hoare

(1758-1838). British antiquary who excavated a large number of barrows mostly on Salisbury plain. His excavation techniques were relatively good for his time, but due to the undeveloped state of the study he was unable to date any of the material he found.

Colt Hoare

Colour-Coated Wares

Many kinds of pottery in the Greek and Roman periods were given an extra surface coating, usually slightly glossy and most often red. Recent research suggests that the coating was made from fine clay particles suspended in water with a peptizing agent added; iron oxide produced the red, and illit...

Colour-Coated Wares

Colosseum

Ancient and modem nick-name for the Flavian Amphitheatre in Rome, construction of which began under the reign of the emperor Vespasian (ad 69-79). The name apparently derived from an adjacent colossal statue. See amphitheatre.

Cologne

[Roman Colonia Agrippinensis]. City on the left bank of the Rhine, West Germany. In about ad 50 a Roman colonia was founded here by the emperor Claudius at the prompting of his wife Agrippina who, Tacitus tells us, was connected with the area by birth. Formerly, from 38 bc, there had been a modes...

Cd-Loa

Capital of the kingdom of Au-Lac which existed from 258 to 207 bc. Situated about 20 km northwest of Hanoi in northern Vietnam, it comprised three walls more than 4 km long which surrounded the city in a spiral; hence the nick-name of ‘Conch-City’. When Vietnam became independent from China in th...

Cd-Loa

Colluvial

Resulting from soil erosion. Colluvial deposits accumulate at the bottom of slopes, where soils above have lost their structure and are being eroded. This is frequently caused by man’s clearance of forest, ploughing and cultivation. Typically, colluvial material has gathered in the dry valleys of...

Collared Urn

Special type of urn used in the British Early Bronze Age. Previously called an ‘overhanging rim urn’, the collared urn has a developed rim which may be straight, convex or slightly concave in profile. Decoration is normally confined either to the rim alone or to the upper half of the vessel. Coll...

Collagen

The major organic component of bone. It is the best part of bone for radiocarbon dating and can be extracted by dissolving the mineral component of bone with an acid. Very old bone may need a large sample to produce enough collagen for a date,

Collagen

Coleóptera

An order of the class Insecta, comprising the beetles.

Coleóptera

Coldstream Cave

Cave near Humansdorp on the southern Cape coast of South Africa. Particular interest attaches to a painted stone from a grave associated with a microlithic industry of Wilton type. The stone, some 300 mm across, depicts three human figures in polychrome, one of which appears to be holding a palet...

Coldstream Cave

Colchester

[Roman Camulodunum]. A city in southeast England, some 80 km northeast of London, formerly an Iron Age Celtic settlement (oppidum) surrounded by dykes. It was the capital of the tribal chieftain, Cunobelinus, who seems to have been known to the Romans as King of the Britons. This local importance...

Coka

[Csdka]. A tell settlement of the later Neolithic period, located in the middle Tisa Valley in the Yugoslav Banat and dated to the late 5th to early 4th millennium be. Totally excavated by F. Mora in the first decade of this century, the site has two main chronological phases: a mixed SzAKALHAT-E...

Coka

Coinage

Western Asia. The earliest true coins were minted in the kingdom of Lydia in Asia Minor in the 7th century bc and were made of the gold-silver alloy electrum. In the 6th century the legendary King Kroisos (Croesus) introduced coinage of pure silver and, to a lesser extent, gold. The coins were in...

Cohuna

The site of the discovery in 1925 of a cranium with morphologically robust features, excavated from a swamp close to Murray River, Victoria, southern Australia. The age of the specimen is unknown, but it closely resembles the nearby Kow Swamp skulls, which have dates of 11,000-7000 be.

Cohuna

Coedès

(1886-1969). A French scholar who has been hailed by his colleagues as the unchallenged dean of Southeast Asian classicial scholarship. Coedès spent most of his career in French Indochina and Siam. He is best known for his major work of synthesis The Indianized States of Southeast Asia, first pub...

Coedès

Cody

A late Plano tool assemblage which probably represents the last of the plains-based hunting groups. First identified at the Homer site in Cody, Wyoming, USA, it is characterized by finely-worked lanceolate blades and projectile points (e.g. Eden and Scottsbluff) and by the unique asymmetrical Cod...

Cody

Codex

(1) An early Christian gospel book, in the form of a handwritten manuscript, produced in one of the monastic establishments of the Post-Roman era.. (2) A type of Mesoamerican document, made of folded strips of bark or deer skin, on which various aspects of life are recorded. The information, in h...

Coconut

Cocos nucífera was probably being cultivated by AuSTRONESiAN-speakers in Island Southeast Asia by 3000 bc, although early history is obscure owing to the absence of a wild ancestral form. The palm was undoubtedly spread by Austronesians through the Pacific, perhaps eventually to the Pacific coast...

Code

A province on the Pacific coast of Panama where deep rectangular tombs — especially at the type site of Sitio Conte—have yielded grave goods evidencing a rich ceramic and metallurgical tradition. The extremely fine polychrome pottery is characterized by decoration of intricate geometric patterns ...

Code

Cochise

A manifestation of the Desert Tradition, the locus of which was an area spanning the common borders of southwestern New Mexico and southeastern Arizona, USA. Its origins are obscure but a largely Archaic lifestyle is indicated throughout its three-stage sequence. Evidence from Bat Cave, however, ...

Coatepantli

Precinct wall elaborately decorated with a serpent motif and used principally as a means of demarcation separating ceremonial buildings from other civic architecture in Mesoamerica. It is associated especially with Late Post-Classic cultures such as the Toltec and the Aztec and was employed at bo...

Coatepantli

Cluster Analysis

Technique of multivariate analysis, which compares the distances between points, objects or items, distributed in a hyperspace whose dimensions are measurements or scores for a number of variables. Cluster analysis results are normally plotted as a ‘dendrogram’, a tree-like representation of the ...

Cloisonne

A technique used in Anglo-Saxon England and by other Germanic metalsmiths as a means of decorating polychrome jewellery and metalwork with inlaid stones of glass. The cloison (or cell) into which the jewel was set is fabricated from bands of thin metal attached to a base plate, and these were oft...

Cloisonne

Cloggs Cave

Limestone cave in the lower Snowy River valley, northeastern Victoria, Australia, with human occupation deposits which included ochre and hearths and are dated from about 16,000 to 7000 be. Stone tools belonging to the Australian Core Tool and Scraper tradition showed usewear interpreted as resul...

Cleland Hills

PANARAMiTEE-style rockart site 320 km west of Alice Springs in central Australia. In addition to the usual Panarami-tee motifs, there are 16 deeply engraved and weathered heart-shaped ‘faces’ with concentric circle ‘eyes’.

Cleaver

A large flake tool of the Palaeolithic period. The butt end is often worked into the approximate shape of a hand axe butt, but the other end always has a wide axe-like cutting edge. In the typical African form, much of the flake surface is left unretouched. On some hand axes the tip is flaked int...

Clay Tablets

The main writing material employed by the scribes of the early civiliza- tions of Western Asia. Signs were inscribed or, more usually, impressed on the soft clay, which was then dried in the sun. See also cuneiform.

Clay Tablets

Clay

Strictly, the word clay describes the size of the particles which go to make up a sediment, soil or similar material. Clay particles are those that are less than 0.002 mm (BS 1377) in diameter (see particle size). Thus a clay is a sediment consisting largely of claysized particles; strictly used,...