Concise Oxford Dictionary of Archaeology (6 page)

A patterning of artefacts in a site, indicating that a specific set of tasks or operations took place there, for example flint-knapping.

 
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A set of artefacts that reveals the activities of an individual.

 
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Industrial stage of the British early Bronze Age named after a hoard of bronze tools and weapons found at Acton Park, Clywd in
c.
1875 ad. Dating to the period around 1500 bc, the traditions of this stage fit within Colin Burgess's
BEDD BRANWEN PERIOD
. The metalwork includes palstaves, half-flanged axes, socket-looped spearheads, dirks, rapiers, and daggers. In Scotland the Caverton Phase and the Auchterhouse Phase are concurrent with the Acton Park Tradition.

 
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Anno Domini. The Christian era in the Gregorian calendar, starting from the year ad 1 as the calculated and back-projected year in which Christ was believed to have been born. Widely used in western societies. The use of lower-case initials is often taken to indicate that the date has been calculated from a radiocarbon determination by subtracting 1950 from the radiocarbon age. The use of upper-case letters denotes a historical date or a calibrated radiocarbon age in calendar years.

 
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The ability of a biological organism to survive within a given environment by changing its behaviour or physical attributes. Extended to include human adaptation to the environment in which communities find themselves and therefore a major explanatory tool in developing archaeological understandings of periods of change.

 
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A group of related native American cultures of the early Woodland period centred on the Ohio area of the USA and dating to the period 1000 bc to 100 bc. Named after the type-site of Adena, these communities lived in small villages, perhaps seasonally, supported by an essentially hunter-gatherer economy with limited small-scale horticultural use of sunflowers, marsh elder, squashes, and gourds. Distinctive material culture includes cord-decorated pottery, engraved stone tablets (‘birdstones’ and ‘boatstones’), and ornamented smoking tubes. Copper bracelets, beads, crescents, axes and other items were imported from areas around Lake Superior. Drawing on earlier prototypes, the most impressive and distinctive Adena constructions after about 500 bc were the burial mounds, of which several types have been found. Important individuals were typically interred in log-lined tombs which were burnt and then covered by a conical earth mound up to 20m high. In other cases corpses were cremated in a clay oven and the remains then buried under a mound. Elaborate grave goods were often placed with the dead. Adena earthworks also included large geometrically shaped ceremonial constructions and circles. One of the best known is the Great Serpent Mound, Ohio. Adena Complex groups were locally ancestral to the
HOPEWELLIAN CULTURE
.

 
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