Marble from quarries on the island of Paros, Greece, which is white in color, close-grained, and peculiarly suitable for sculpture: it was widely used by the leading sculptors throughout the Mediterranean world.
British soldier who was one of the first people to visit and make a scientific record of the great Maya sites. Inspired by travelers' accounts of the ruins, he visited Guatemala and the neighboring republics, and by 1894 had made seven expeditions. He made photographs, casts, plans, and drawings ...
A lionheaded deity with cult centers at Musawwarat el-Sufra and Naqa in Sudan.
A term meaning 'all Greek', referring to regional sanctuaries which attracted dedications from within the Greek world.
An axhead of flint or other stone, commonly used for Neolithic types
Any specific interval of time in the archaeological record, such as the Upper Paleolithic period. This term is often confusingly used interchangeably with phase and stage. A period is a true time division of the history of a large region (such as the Valley of Mexico or southern China) and does n...
Site in western Molokai, Hawaii, with large midden deposits and stone structures from a fishing community, dated to 1750 AD.
Middle Palaeolithic cave in the Greater Caucasus of Georgia with two main cultural layers. Tools are scrapers and points and the newer assemblage has Levallois technique tools and blades.
The art of working metals. Various techniques include annealing, repoussé, cire perdue, cold-working, casting, forging, carburization, quenching, tempering, soldering, smelting, welding, and creation of alloys.
In pottery decoration, the roughening of the surface of a pot which may or may not have an applied slip. The roughening may be achieved using fingers, fingernails, twigs, etc., and though it may be pure decoration, in most cases it is probably a device to prevent a greasy pot slipping through the...
The melting and fusion of glassy minerals within clay during the high-temperature firing of pottery (above 1000 C), resulting in loss of porosity. It occurs when clay particles fuse together as glass - a process starting between 800-900 degrees C and completed at about 1200 degrees C.
Arabic term for building out of mud, especially mud mixed with straw that is applied to the top of the wall and allowed to dry before a further course is added.
The study of bones; a branch of anatomy dealing with bones.
A humanistic approach relying on ideational factors to explain archaeological findings, interpreting the past rather than testing hypotheses with scientific methods. The postprocessual paradigm sees change as arising from individuals' interactions within a symbolic or competitive system.
A Late Eneolithic (Copper Age) culture, a regional variant of the Baden group (southwestern Hungary), in southeast and central Europe in the 3rd millennium BC. Although some settlement sites are known, the majority of Pécel sites are cemeteries with cremation and inhumation burial.
A tool used for digging where the blade is at right angles to the handle.
The region containing the statistical population to be sampled, determined by the research question
A Copper Age tell in northeastern Bulgaria, dated to the mid-4th millennium BC, with many occupation levels. Eight levels have 10-15 complete houses densely packed within a triple palisade. Poljanica resembles a Roman fort in outward appearance and the name is also applied to the Early and Middle...
A lake in northeastern Irian Jaya, northern New Guinea, known for a range of tools and weapons of bronze and brass found in burial mounds. These artifacts are undated, but could represent a metallurgical industry established by Indonesian traders in recent centuries. New Guinea has no other ancie...
The site of one of the largest of the Maltese temple complexes, in southwest Malta. It contains three separate temples, constructed over a considerable period of time. The buildings have numerous altars of various shapes and a variety of niches and recesses. Many of the stones have pitted decorat...
Cave with Neolithic and Chalcolithic deposits in the Pyrenees Orientales, France. The cave is located halfway up a rock face and its Neolithic assemblage has simple globular vessels with tubular lug handles that fall between Early Neolithic cardial ware and Middle Neolithic Chasséen. The layer is...
A large late prehistoric or early historic moated site between Non Chai and Ban Chiang Hian in Khorat, Thailand.
Site in Upper Nubia, the successor to Kurru as the main royal pyramid cemetery of the Napatan kings of the mid-7th to early-3rd centuries BC. It is about 25 km southwest of the fourth Nile cataract and a few kilometers to the northeast of Napata (a principal political center of Kush/Cush). The la...
A movement which began in America in the 1960s, aimed at making archaeology more scientific, now more often called processual archaeology. It was suggested that explanations be based on carefully designed models of human behavior and emphasized the importance of understanding underlying cultural ...
A flake having no cortex.
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