Exam 11: Come Tell Me How You Lived

Most animal bones found in archaeological sites are

When prime-age animals are underrepresented relative to their abundance in living populations, but young and old are overrepresented, the age profile is called

In many societies, game meat formed far fewer meals than this type of food, which is often completely invisible in archaeological sites:

This, rather than human culture, was probably responsible for most long-term shifts in abundance of animal species during the Great Ice Age:

How do zooarchaeologists use taphonomic studies to compare the proportions of different species from one site with those from another? Use the concepts of NISP and MNI in your answer.

Early in the twentieth century, the paleornithologist Hildegarde Howard studied the remains of prehistoric waterbirds near San Francisco Bay and found that the Indians of the time

From where do most plant remains come? What did Richard MacNeish discover about maize (corn) and its "evolution" from remains in Mexico's Tehuacán Valley?

This may have begun when a growing human population needed a regular food supply to support a greater density of people per square mile.

Observing recently dead carcasses as they are gradually transformed into fossils and studying fossil remains with the knowledge gained from these observations are two related forms of research involved in what discipline?

Scientists who recover, identify, and study ancient vegetable remains and assess the relationships between people and plants are called

Macrobotanical remains are

What is the original wild ancestor of Tehuacán maize?

Minute particles of silica from plant cells absorbed through a plant's roots are called

Define these two concepts: catastrophic age profile and attritional age profile. How do zooarchaeologists use them to determine hunting patterns and subsistence?

What do the bones of the Ice Man tell us about food availability during Bronze Age Europe? What do the the stomach contents of Tollund Man tell us about the use of wild and domesticated foods? Finally, how do we interpret the contents of coprolites from inhabitants of Lovelock Cave, Nevada? Did people once eat foods that we do not consider edible today? Why?

A count of the number of individuals necessary to account for all of the identifiable bones is called

The ultimate aim in studying prehistoric food remains is not only to establish how people obtained their food but also to reconstruct their actual

What insights does rock art give us into subsistence activities of ancient peoples, especially foragers?

Richard Klein has used the height of tooth crowns to study the age of mammals taken by Stone Age hunters at the Klasies River and Nelson's Bay caves in South Africa. He has identified two "mortality distributions" that apply to prehistoric and living animal populations. Which of the following would be a normal distribution?

How did ancient peoples use animal stomachs?