Deck 1: The History of Archaeology

Question 1

In North America,the influential anthropologist Julian Steward emphasized the importance of environmental adaptation in cultural change.This approach was termed

A)environmentalism
B)cultural ecology
C)eco-archaeology
D)diffusionism
E)processualism

Answer 1

cultural ecology

Question 2

Who is considered to be the first person to have conducted a scientific excavation of an ancient site?

A)Thomas Jefferson
B)General Pitt-Rivers
C)Sir William Flinders Petrie
D)Willard Libby
E)Charles Darwin

Answer 2

Thomas Jefferson

Question 3

The ecological approach to archaeology developed by Grahame Clark and his contemporaries could not only build up a picture of what prehistoric environments were like,but could also provide information about human activities such as

A)what language people spoke in the past
B)why people believed in certain gods
C)what style of clothing people wore
D)what people ate in the past
E)all of the above

Answer 3

what people ate in the past

Question 4

A late 19^th-century pioneer in organized,precise excavation and total recording methods was

A)Mortimer Wheeler
B)Charles Darwin
C)Gordon Childe
D)General Pitt-Rivers
E)Alfred Kidder

Question 5

"Survival of the fittest",a key mechanism in Darwin's theory of evolution,is also known as

A)natural selection
B)uniformitarianism
C)stratification
D)classification
E)ethnology

Question 6

The travel writing of American lawyer and diplomat John Lloyd Stephens,published in the 1840s,revealed the ruined cities of what civilization for the first time

A)the Ancient Egyptians
B)the Romans
C)the Druids
D)the Maya
E)the Barbarians

Question 7

Marija Gimbutas is considered a pioneer in the field of ______________ because of her emphasis on the importance of women in prehistory

A)androcentrism
B)feminist archaeology
C)cultural relativism
D)the New archaeology
E)cultural-historic archaeology

Question 8

A key breakthrough in the use of scientific methods to date archaeological remains was Willard Libby's 1949 invention of

A)neutron activation analysis
B)dendrochronology
C)radiocarbon dating
D)potassium-argon dating
E)trace-element analysis

Question 9

Proponents of the New Archaeology argued that archaeology should do which of the following?

A)explain rather than describe
B)test hypotheses
C)use scientific approaches
D)design research to answer specific questions
E)all of the above

Question 10

Although it was less applicable in places where bronze or iron were not used,the Three Age System was conceptually significant to the study of the prehistory of

A)North America
B)Europe
C)South America
D)Africa
E)Mesoamerica

Question 11

Influenced by Darwin's ideas about evolution,Edward Tylor and Lewis Henry Morgan argued that human societies evolved through stages,from

A)savagery to barbarism to civilization.
B)barbarism to agriculturalism to civilization
C)australopithecines to Homo erectus to Homo sapiens
D)hunter to gatherer to agriculturalist
E)savagery to peasantry to capitalist

Question 12

Only just a century and a half ago,before the development of modern archaeology,most well-read people in the Western world thought the world had been created

A)in the year 1 AD
B)in the year 1000 AD
C)4.54 billion years ago
D)2 million years ago
E)in 4004 BC

Question 13

Considered a useful starting point for archaeologists who wish to understand the lifestyles of people who lived in the past,the study of living human cultures and communities is called

A)post-processualism
B)evolution
C)ethnography
D)environmental archaeology
E)Marxist archaeology

Question 14

C.J.Thomsen,a Danish scholar,was responsible for classifying artifact collections and,based on those classifications,he created a conceptual scheme known as

A)uniformitarianism
B)the Three Age system
C)cultural ecology
D)processualism
E)none of the above

Question 15

The study of the arrangement of superimposed layers of rocks or soil is called

A)processualism
B)the Three Age system
C)cultural ecology
D)stratigraphy
E)the praxis approach

Question 16

Many 19th century scholars were obsessed with the Moundbuilders,a mythical civilization that supposedly built the mounds and earthworks located in what is now

A)the United States
B)Greece
C)Eastern Europe
D)China
E)South Africa

Question 17

The widespread acceptance in the later 20th century that the material remains of the past should be protected and conserved has inspired the development of

A)public archaeology
B)cultural ecology
C)typology
D)sequence dating
E)dendrochronology

Question 18

After 14 years of work,this scholar was able to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs in 1822

A)Ephraim Squier
B)Gordon Childe
C)Jean-François Champollion
D)General Pitt-Rivers
E)C.J.Thomsen

Question 19

Who formed the first cabinets of curiosities?

A)Sigmund Freud
B)Renaissance princes
C)Sir John Soane
D)the Aztecs
E)none of the above

Question 20

The Rosetta Stone was found to be the key to

A)deciphering Aramaic
B)deciphering ancient Hebrew
C)deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs
D)deciphering Linear A
E)deciphering ancient Greek

Question 21

Whose work at Pecos Ruin,New Mexico was largely responsible for putting the archaeology of the Southwest on the map?

A)Max Uhle
B)Alfred Maudslay
C)Flinders Petrie
D)Leonard Woolley
E)Alfred Kidder

Question 22

"Preventative archaeology," "rescue archaeology," and "cultural resource management" are terms that are used to describe various countries' legal frameworks for public archaeology.

Question 23

A leading thinker on Old World history who was heavily influenced by Marxist ideal,Gordon Childe moved beyond simply describing cultural sequences by seeking to understand

A)the origins of civilization
B)the origins of the Neolithic Revolution
C)the origins of the Urban Revolution
D)all of the above
E)none of the above

Question 24

The central concern of the "classificatory-historical period" of archaeological thought,which lasted until 1960,was

A)the use of scientific dating methods
B)the incorporation of alternative interpretations of the past
C)processualism
D)chronology
E)all of the above

Question 25

The fundamental complaint among proponents of the New Archaeology in the 1960s was that traditional archaeological methods

A)were too focused on science
B)did not incorporate Indigenous or feminist voices
C)relied too heavily on sources such as the Bible
D)did not include enough focus on migration,typology,and classification
E)never seemed to explain anything

Question 26

Contradicting the prevailing wisdom of the time,excavations led by ____________ at Great Zimbabwe (1929)confirmed that the site represented a major culture of African origin

A)Louis Leakey
B)Gertrude Caton-Thompson
C)Harriet Boyd Hawes
D)Kathleen Kenyon
E)none of the above

Question 27

What is androcentrism?

A)male bias
B)the study of females
C)the study of males
D)female bias
E)none of the above

Question 28

"The Speculative Phase" is a term used to describe an archaeological school of thought that sought to employ scientific methods to explain archaeological evidence.

Question 29

Like anthropologist Julian Steward,British archaeologist Grahame Clark broke away from the dependence on artifacts and argued for an ecological approach to how human populations adapted to their environments.

Question 30

During the 18th century,__________ was one of the first archaeological sites to be excavated

A)Çatalhöyük
B)Pompeii
C)Cramborne Chase
D)Tutankhamen's Tomb
E)Pecos Ruin

Question 31

The efforts of marginalized groups in the territory of former European colonies to have more of an influence on the management of their heritage has resulted in the development of

A)the New archaeology
B)speculative archaeology
C)archaeobotany
D)Indigenous archaeologies
E)the cultural-historical approach

Question 32

The site of Çatalhöyük,an early farming site made famous by archaeologist Ian Hodders's use of interpretive archaeology approaches,is located in

A)England
B)Australia
C)Italy
D)Turkey
E)India

Question 33

______________ trained under Mortimer Wheeler,adopted his excavation method,and is best known for excavations at Jericho and Jerusalem

A)Kathleen Kenyon
B)Gertrude Caton-Thompson
C)Anna O.Shepard
D)Mary Leakey
E)none of the above

Question 34

The Moundbuilders,long thought to be a "vanished race," were actually the ancestors of modern Native Americans.

Question 35

Darwin's work on evolution,in particular the mechanism of "natural selection," served as an important catalyst to the concept

A)that humans had emerged as part of the same process.
B)that living things do not really change
C)that human origins were much too early for archaeology to have any relevance
D)none of the above
E)all of the above

Question 36

Scholars began to study and collect the relics of Greece and Rome

A)during the Renaissance
B)after the discovery of radiocarbon dating
C)in the 1960s
D)after World War I
E)after the publication of John Lloyd Stephens's travel accounts

Question 37

One of the weaknesses of the interpretive approach to archaeology is that the actions and thoughts of individuals in the past are not brought into central focus.

Question 38

The Rosetta Stone was discovered during Pitt-Rivers's military expedition to India (1798-1800).

Question 39

Many aspects of archaeology at the start of the new millennium emphasize the importance of the past for the contemporary world.

Question 40

Ian Hodder and his students were some of the first to advance influential arguments for the school of archaeological thought called

A)the New Archaeology
B)ethnology
C)cultural ecology
D)postprocessual archaeology
E)processual archaeology

Question 41

Starting in the 1980s some scholars began to critique what they saw as male bias in the interpretation of the past.What were the key issues behind the development of feminist archaeology?

Question 42

Reflecting many other aspects of modern life in the 1960s,the New Archaeology was more pessimistic than earlier,traditional approaches to archaeology.

Question 43

Darwin's work on evolution did not have a large or immediate impact on archaeologists.

Question 44

Discuss the key concepts that proponents of "the New Archaeology" argued distinguished their analysis from traditional archaeological approaches.

Question 45

Why is the invention of radiocarbon dating considered to be one of the most important archaeological advances of the 20th century?

Question 46

What are the distinctions between postprocessual (or interpretive)archaeologies and the New Archaeology?

Question 47

The New Archaeology is sometimes referred to as processual archaeology.

Question 48

Why was Darwin's work on evolution so important for the development of archaeology?