A single object that is found without association to any other artifact or feature; typically lost during travel or moved by a relic hunter. Any unassociated archaeological remains.
A Bronze Age culture that succeeded the Andronovo culture in southern Siberia in the late 2nd millennium BC. The three main, basically successive, yet often overlapping cultures were the Afanasyevskaya, Andronovo, and Karasuk. The Karasuk culture developed when a gradual change was made from sett...
A ruminant (cud-chewing) mammal of the genus Ovis, usually stockier than its relative the goat. Sheep were first domesticated from wild species of sheep by at least 5000 BC, and their remains have been found at numerous sites of early human habitation in the Middle East, Europe, and Central Asia....
The surviving physical remains of past human activities, which are sought, recovered, analyzed, preserved, and described by archaeologists in an attempt to reconstruct the past.
A bowl or other kind of vessel, whether of pottery, metal, or some other material, shaped to the form of an inverted bell.
Hard-fired ware with a black finish, made from the 10th-11th centuries until the 13th century at Paffrath, near Cologne, Germany. The best-known products of this center are the so-called handled ladles - small cooking pots or bowls with a curved handle.
A late Middle Pleistocene site in northern Tanzania with faunal remains including archaic Homo sapiens and extinct mammal species as well as artifacts.
A city of northern Bulgaria, located on a major crossing-point of the Danube, which began as a fortified Roman harbor called Sexantaprista (Sixty Ships) in the 1st century BC. It was destroyed by barbarians in the 7th century. The Ottomans built a new town Roustchouk which subsequently bore the n...
Any theory that traces the origin of the state to warfare or intragroup conflicts.
A school of anthropological thought associated with the work of Franz Boas and his students (including Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and A.L. Kroeber), whose studies of culture emphasized the integrated way of life distinctive of a people. It is a detailed descriptive approach to anthropology des...
A site and Neolithic culture on the southwestern coast of Taiwan, dating to 2400-1800 BC.
Site in Hebei Province, China, of the Royal Cemetery of the Late Shang, with seven shaft tombs with wooden-chamber burials and human sacrifices. There are also over 2000 small pit-graves with human sacrifices. The hierarchy of burials at this and other cemeteries in the area reflected the social ...
A city of the Central African Republic where, about 2500 years ago, farming people set up numerous series of megalithic monuments consisting of standing stones - which weighed several tons - associated with tumuli. The cooperation necessary to make and position these monuments suggests that they ...
A mining area and village in Zaire on the Kasai River where Early Iron Age pottery vessels of Urewe type were found in an undated context and without further archaeological associations. The discovery has been used as evidence for an early spread of Early Iron Age industries along the southern fr...
The present-day floor of the Chukchi and Bering Seas, which emerged as dry land during Late Pleistocene glacial advances. It is the only route for faunal exchange between Eurasia and North America as it united Siberia and Alaska. It seems to have been breached only in the past 2.5 million years, ...
An organic or inorganic coloring material.
An inventory of archaeological data in which an artifact is labeled with a reference number and described in detail. The catalog number is the unique number assigned to each individual item - or group of items - in an archaeological collection.
Mountain range of southwest Iran from the Sirvan River (Diyala) to Shiraz, where a number of archaeological sites are located: Jarmo, Ali Kosh, Tepe Ganj Dareh, Tepe Guran, Tepe Sarab, and Zawi Chemi Shangi-Dar.
A six-sided pebble or piece of stone which has been totally or partly reshaped by chipping of the surface in a number of directions; it resembles a ball. It was first created in pre-Acheulian and Acheulian and Middle Paleolithic times and used as percussion tools, throwing weapons, and nuclei for...
An Interstadial of the Weichselian cold stage, dated by radiocarbon to c 58,000 bp, but it may be earlier. The beginning of the Weichsel has been placed at about 70,000 years ago.
A ritually and historically important calendar used throughout Mesoamerica in which the solar calendar of 365 days ran in parallel with a sacred 260-day ritual calendar of named days. The calendar round is a 52-year cycle, since both calendars begin on the same day only once every 52 years. Coeff...
A Neolithic site in the Vale of Kashmir with phases of occupation dating from c 3050 BC to the 3rd-4th centuries AD. Deep pit dwellings are associated with ground stone axes, bone tools, and coarse gray burnished pottery. These characteristics plus the absence of blades, use of pierced rectangula...
River valley in Cape Province, South Africa, with more than 14,000 Stone Age sites. The ceramic sequence dates to the millennium prior to European settlers. There is information about the Stone Age Smithfield hunter-gatherers from this area.
Type site and culture of the late 4th to early 3rd millennium in eastern Kansu, eastern Tsinghai, and northern Szechwan, China. Majiayao is regarded as the earliest stage of the western or Gansu branch of the Yanshao Neolithic. Majiayao pottery designs, perhaps the finest known from the Chinese N...
A stone industry of flakes in Luzon, Philippines, thought to be early Holocene.
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