Anthropology 3
Midterm Essay Questions
Stuart T. Smith

For the midterm project in Anthropology 3, you will be writing two 4-page papers. Choose one project/question from Section I (below) and one project/question from Section II (below).

Section I:

For this essay, you will pick one of the two hypothetical excavation projects listed below. Remember to write on only one of the following sites.

Based on the map that you have been given, design an excavation strategy for understanding this particular site. You will need to find information about what time period the site was used, the different occupations/phases of the site, and the subsistence strategy (what was farmed, herded, or hunted) of the people who occupied the site. Your excavation strategies should include what type of data you will need to seek, where on the site you wish to excavate, what methods you will use, and how you will analyze the archaeological data. Remember, you are not to come up with actual dates and lists of artifacts found. Instead you need to show how you would find this type of information and what methods and strategies you would employ in the process.

1. Kotosh

You are part of a large archaeological team that has just finished survey in a large valley on the eastern slopes of the Andes in Peru leading into the Huallaga, a major tributary of the Amazon.   You're survey encountered a relatively small number of sites, but one site may prove fruitful in developing a better understanding of lifeways in this region.   Your first step was to produce a highly detailed map of the site.   The site itself is situated approximately 200 m from the edge of the Higueras River on the valley floodplain.   The site appears to consist of two large mounds (Mound A and Mound B), each about 10 m high.   Visible on the surface are architectural remains (outlined in red on your map) that appear to consist of medium sized rooms with limited access.   You also notice a cut that has been dug through Mound A by an unknown source.   In the sides of the cut, you see evidence of earlier architectural remains buried below the surface, as well as ceramics and faunal remains eroding out.   Within the visible rooms on the surface, there appears to be a stone concentration in the center and clusters of what appear to be high quality ceramics situated near the room walls.   Within one of the stone clusters, you see evidence of charcoal and botanical remains.   Due to the high quality of the architecture and the ceramic remains, you are beginning to believe that this site may have held a certain ritual significance to its inhabitants.  

2. Tombos

You have just completed a survey in Sudanese Nubia's Dongola Reach.   At the end of the survey you found what appears to be an ancient Egyptian colonial cemetery, the southernmost ever discovered.   You decide that excavation will give you a unique opportunity to investigate how the Egyptian empire was organized and what connections they had to the local Nubians.   Your survey crew has produced a detailed topographic map indicating several surface collection points, a group of circular stone features called tumuli, and the distribution of funerary cones on the surface.   Funerary cones were made of pottery and stamped with the name and titles of the deceased written in hieroglyphs.   They were set into plaster in a frieze above the entrance to the tombs of Egyptian noblemen.   Your team recovered fragments of Egyptian pottery and human bone from the surface collection points.   In addition, you also found a few small fragments from painted Egyptian style wooden coffins.   Finally, you know that the tumuli match a typically Nubian type of tomb superstructure, but there was very little material on the surface and so you're unsure of the exact date.  

Section II

For this assignment, you will be required to write a four-page paper in which you evaluate a site report. To do this, you should begin by carefully reading the report, paying special attention to certain issues. First, identify the research objectives of the project. What questions were the investigators asking? Second, discuss the methods used to reach those objectives. How did the investigators go about collecting the data needed to answer their research questions? Third, discuss the data themselves. What kind of information was collected, and how did the investigators analyze their data? Were the data collected appropriate to the research questions? Finally, decide whether the findings of the project are justified given the methods chosen and the data collected. Try to suggest some methods that the investigators could have used in their project, and show what kind of data they could have collected using these methods.

You may choose one of the following site reports:

Human-Environment Interaction - Chevlon Drainage, Arizona
http://archaeology.la.asu.edu/vm/southwest/chevelon/page1.html

UCSD Nahal Tillah Regional Archaeology Project in Israel
http://weber.ucsd.edu/Depts/Anthro/classes/tlevy/Tillah/index.html

 

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