Anthropology Exam 2
Terms
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- Human communication by means of shared symbols
- Language
- Consonant that makes use of “clicks,†like in Ashanti
- Implosive consonant
- The archaeology of a society that has written records
- Historical archaeology
- The time needed for one-half of a given amount of a radioactive substance to decay
- Half-life
- The innate capacity of humans to speak grammatically correctly
- Generative grammar
- A subfield of anthropology applied to legal matters. Usually involved in the identification of skeletal remains and the assessment of time and cause of death.
- Forensic anthropology
- The process of making stone tools
- Flint knapping
- Like our consonants
- Explosive consonant
- The process of understanding ancient skills and technologies by reproducing them.
- Experimental archaeology
- A method employed by archaeologists commonly known as “digging.†It takes into account both time and space, i.e., how far down something was uncovered in relation to other artifacts
- Excavation
- The study of the meanings of words, especially as they relate to folk taxonomy
- Ethnosemantics
- Interpreting archaeological data through the observation of analogous activities in existing societies.
- Ethnographic analogy
- Restricting marriage to members of the same culturally defined group
- Endogamy
- Natural or human-made casts of the inside of a skull; the cast reflects the surface of the brain and allows us to study the brains of even extinct species.
- Endocasts
- Here, the two levels of human language: units of sound and units of meaning that those units of sound are combined to create
- Duality
- The ability to communicate about things and ideas not immediate in space or time
- Displacement
- The movement of cultural ideas and artifacts among societies. Cultural borrowing
- Diffusion
- The study of the structure of language in general and of the specific variations among languages
- Descriptive linguistics
- The result of pidgin languages passed down to the next generation; a formal language with larger vocabulary, more complex grammar, and more consistency than its original pidgin language.
- Creole
- What starts or stops the flow of sound created by a vowel
- Consonant
- Concentric circles created in rock from the shockwaves caused by flint knapping. They may be studied to determine where the blow struck and in what direction.
- Conchoidal shells
- Words that are similar in two or more languages as a result of common descent
- Cognates
- Communication systems of all nonhumans, where there may be communication through meaningful signs, but all meanings are specific. Thus, there is a finite amount of things that may be communicated
- Closed communication system
- A geographic continuum in the variation of a trait. A gradual change in the variation over a geographic area.
- Cline
- A radiometric dating technique using the decay rate of a radioactive form of carbon found in organic remains
- Carbon dating
- a puff of air released from the mouth after saying a consonant
- Aspiration
- Here, the fact that the features of human languages bear no direct relation to their meanings but are agreed-on symbols
- Arbitrary
- Dating that gives a specific age, year, or range of years for an object or site.
- Absolute dating