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Download the Archaeology Lab Book:

About the Archaeology Lab Exercise Book

My undergraduate introduction to archaeology class is designed to familiarize beginning students with the practical aspects of archaeology, the conceptual tools that archaeologists use and the methods of proceeding in a discipline that charts its own course among the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences. Over the years, I have taught the class in four different universities, and at three different levels (100, 200, and 300). I have taught it as a three lecture a week course, a two lecture and one lab session a week course, and as a three hour evening class once a week. I have had a number of teaching assistants who have helped assemble these lab exercises. Liz Dinsmore was my teaching assistant at Arizona State University for ASB 330, Principles of Archaeology (the first time I taught the course, the first complete course for which I was responsible, and Liz's first time as a TA). Liz and I put most of these labs together for a group of about 130 students. I've modified them somewhat over the years, and other TAs have helped. But Liz and I did the lion's share of the work. When the lab setups say "we" or "us," they refer to Liz and me.

"Archaeology is a subject that holds great natural appeal for students and we were confident that our use of assigned reading materials, lectures and slides would easily stimulate discussion among the students and encourage them to take other classes in archaeology. We were wrong. After the first few classes it was clear that students were not interacting well with us, with each other or with the materials. While the subject was of some interest to the students, it seemed that the principles and applied concepts we taught had little meaning unless the students were forced to struggle with them on their own. We decided that to make the most of the course, we would need to give the students a "hands-on" opportunity to work with some of the concepts they learned in the lectures. This led us to create our own series of in-class exercises which the students would complete by working in small groups during class and writing follow-up reports on their own outside of class." 

"Since our introduction class had no pre-requisites, we could not assume that the students would be familiar with any of the methods and techniques of archaeological problem solving. We wanted to cover seven basic topical areas as well as exercise the students' skills in basic problem solving methods. The exercises involve the use of deductive and inductive reasoning, logic, pattern recognition, creativity, the ability to approach a problem from different angles and the interpretation of form, time and space. As is true of most problems, we found that these are all solved best using a cooperative strategy that takes advantage of the different skills which students bring to the classroom.  Several of the exercises pose a problem for which there is a "correct" answer; others offer no single right answer but encourage creativity and different viewpoints to show how archaeology is often not an exact science but an interpretive one." 

The topics covered are sampling strategies, research design, seriation, stratigraphy, settlement patterns, classification and ceramics analysis. Most labs were designed to work with simple materials. The sampling lab and settlement pattern analysis lab use a version of the map shown here, but with different sites and site data for each. Our seriation lab was initially set up to use M&Ms instead of pottery. We sorted about 15 pounds of candy into baggies, with 15 pieces per bag, and eight bags to a group. I had worked out a simple seriation before hand, and then randomly assigned colors and site numbers to the cells in the table. So we had to put just the right numbers of candies of different colors into the proper baggies.  Just in case you've never thought about it, there are far fewer green, blue and orange M&Ms in a bag than there are browns, reds, or yellows. So we usually ended up with about 5 pounds of extra reds, yellows, and browns! We tried to schedule this lab at Halloween, so we could get rid of the excess candy, and it was always fun to see who would eat the M&Ms during the lab, before counting them! When I moved to Cyprus, though, M&Ms were not available in large bags, so I made "sherds" on art board of various colors. The version in the book is the one from Cyprus, using the six "sherd" types shown.

The exercises are all designed to be small group projects. The students break into groups of six to eight, work together in class and write up the report on their own time. We encouraged the students to keep a lab notebook which they used to keep notes during the group work. Three or four written reports formed a set, so they handed in two sets of reports, and each set of reports counted as one test grade. We grade the reports by looking at all the reports for each exercise at one time, and we group them in the same way the students were grouped during class.

Organization of the Lab Book

Each exercise is prefaced by an introductory section that outlines the purpose of the exercise, the setup and materials required, the procedure, and our results and comments on what improvements can be made. Following each introduction is a copy of the assignment used for the exercises. Generally, we made one copy of the assignment sheet for each student in the class and distributed other related materials on the day of the exercise. We supplied 8.5 by 11 inch copies of all the maps for each student, but withheld them until the end of the lab session. During the in-class part of the work, students used 11 by 17 inch copies of maps; we did this to encourage them to work together. 

Our first class had over one hundred students, so the "materials" and "setup" sections of each exercise reflect what is required for a class of this size. A reference page of suggested reading assignments concludes this booklet. These works are cited in each introductory section where appropriate. 

Downloading the lab book:

The Lab book is called "Archlabs.pdf". It is in .pdf format, and can be viewed from your Web browser if you have Adobe Acrobat Reader installed. If you have the reader, you can save the file to your disk. If you don't have Adobe Acrobat Reader, you can download it from Adobe for free.

Download Archlabs.pdf 
 

Download Data from the Predynastic Cemetery, N7000, at Naga-ed-Dêr

About the Cemetery N7000 Data:

The data tables from which all of the analysis variables in my dissertation (Savage 1995) are drawn are included in the N7000.zip file. These include counts of ceramics by ware type for the 143 graves that comprise the seriation study (TableA1.txt), vital data for each numbered grave (TableA2.txt), and for each burial (TableA3.txt). Also included are lists of artifacts, separated by general artifact class. The artifact classes are:

• Animal Bone (TableA4.txt)
• Beads (TableA5.txt)
• Ceramics (TableA6.txt)
• Chipped Stone (TableA7.txt)
• Groundstone (TableA8.txt)
• Ivory (TableA9.txt)
• Metal (TableA10.txt)
• Minerals and Pigments (TableA11.txt)
• Organic Material (TableA12.txt)
• Palettes (TableA13.txt)
• Shell (TableA14.txt)
• Stones and Pebbles (TableA15.txt)

I also include a listing of Unresolved Artifacts (TableA16.txt), which list artifacts of all different types, whose various information sources could not be resolved. 

Table A1, which contains the ceramics data for the 143 graves used in the seriation study, is presented in burial order, sorted by distance from the origin of the eigenvector plot (discussed in Savage, 1995:Chapter 3 and Savage, 1997), and shown in the "C-14 Dating Project" section of my Web Page. The ceramics are listed in columns, in the order produced by the correspondence analysis. The table reproduces the sorted matrix from the CA. I also include the grid square in which the center point of the grave is located, which references the cemetery maps in my dissertation or in Savage (1997). 

Basic Grave Data (Table A2), includes one entry for each numbered grave. Where a grave with one number was clearly expanded with later burials, I have indicated the separation with a ".1," ".2," etc. appended to the grave number (e.g. 7011.1 and 7011.2). The table includes a separate line for each. Data included are the grave number, grid square, spatial cluster and time phase, the number of individuals interred, the grave shape (Circular, Irregular, Oval, Semi-rectangular, Rectangular, or Unknown), the long axis azimuth of the grave, a short description of any grave architecture, codes for ceramics, palettes, and other artifacts, and a comments field. The codes for ceramics, palettes, and other artifacts allow a quick cross-reference to the artifact tables. 

Table A3 contains information specific to each burial. These data are referenced by the grave number and burial letter, which are the designations provided in Lythgoe and Dunham (1965). Also included are the U.C.L.M.A. number (for skeletal material accessioned at the Hearst Museum), age and sex assignments (see Savage, 1995:Chapter 4), a field that lists who made the age and sex assignment, the body position, disturbance location (see Savage, 1995:Chapter 5), codes for upper and lower mats (see Savage, 1995:Chapter 6), codes for ceramics, palettes, and other artifacts (which are recorded by in situ assignment by individual), and a comments field. There is one entry in Table A3 for each of the individuals noted in Table A2, in the Number of Burials field (if Table A2 indicates three bodies in a grave, there will be three entries for that grave in Table A3). 

The various artifact tables contain fields pertinent to their individual classes, but some fields are common to all. First, I report the grave number and, where known, the burial designation. I follow with the U.C.L.M.A. card number, which is the accession number assigned to the artifact at the Hearst Museum; this number is followed by the original Item Number assigned by Lythgoe in Lythgoe and Dunham (1965). At this point some adjustments were sometimes necessary, since not all items listed in Lythgoe and Dunham have item numbers. I have assigned item numbers to those that do not, taking up the sequence at the point where it ends in Lythgoe and Dunham. In doing so, I have followed the following conventions: 

1. When an item was found in the grave fill I have assigned it a Roman numeral in the same manner that Lythgoe did.
2. When an item was found inside another I appended a decimal point and a number to the same item number as that in which it was found (e.g. an animal scapula found in pot 7304-1 in grave 7304 was given the item number 7304-1.1)
3. When multiple items are listed together under the same item number in Lythgoe and Dunham, I have broken them out by appending an "a," "b," "c," etc. to the original item number.

All of these adjustments are listed in the Adjusted Item Number field. The count of the number of pieces is given, but this number does not necessarily refer to the actual number of original objects (except with beads), but rather, to the number of fragments. In some cases, I have included a number in parentheses, which indicates the actual number of items. Otherwise, except for beads, each entry represents one item, even though it may be in many pieces. I include a brief description of the location in which the item was found in the grave, a record status field, dimensions where appropriate, an illustration field that refers to photographs published in Lythgoe and Dunham (1965), and a comments field. Record statuses reported include:

Ok

All the item numbers, U.C.L.M.A. card numbers, descriptions, and measurements match up.

NC

There was apparently no catalog card assigned for the item in the Hearst Museum.

MC

The card is missing from the Hearst Museum catalog (several hundred catalog cards have been missing from the middle of the sequence for many years). 

CN

The item received neither a card number in the Hearst Museum nor an item number in Lythgoe and Dunham, but is described (and sometimes illustrated) in the 1965 publication.

NM

The item could not be matched up--there is too great a discrepancy between the item's description on the catalog card and any description in Lythgoe and Dunham to make a positive identification of the item.

A word of caution should be observed with the ceramics. These are hand-made vessels, so no two are exactly alike, and they are not perfectly symmetrical. Measurements such as height, rim diameter, and maximum diameter were frequently listed on the catalog cards, and they are often listed in Lythgoe and Dunham also. However, the measurements do not always agree, but they are usually close (depending on where one measures diameter or height of an asymmetrical vessel). In addition, the descriptions on the cards do not follow the conventional ware types used by Egyptologists (see Savage, 1995:Chapter 3). The card descriptions frequently do not agree with those in Lythgoe and Dunham either, probably because the cards were filled out (in the 1920s and 1930s) by individuals who were not familiar with Predynastic pottery designations or Lythgoe's abbreviations. It has sometimes been difficult, and sometimes impossible, to determine what was really being described on the catalog cards. In matching the card numbers to the item numbers in the 1965 publication, I have frequently had to resort to an understanding of how the cards usually describe ceramics of a particular type. For example, "Red pot, Black rim," is a description of a B-Ware (Black-topped Red Ware) vessel, which was designated BkT by Lythgoe. I have matched the descriptions along with measurements in both sources consulted, where possible. In addition, I had the benefit of Reneé Friedman's (1981) experience with the collection. She resolved many of the discrepancies between cards, item numbers, and objects, and developed the ceramic counts I used. 

About the Zip file:

The tables are compressed in the n7000.zip file. They are provided in comma-delimited ASCII text, and each field (alphanumeric and numeric) is enclosed in quotation marks as well. This method should allow just about any spreadsheet or database program to read the tables. The first line of each table is the table title. The second line contains field names, comma delimited and enclosed in quotation marks just like the data. Following the field names line, one or several lines of explanations are included. These were footnotes to the tables in my dissertation, but I have moved them up front and enclosed them in quotation marks here. The actual table data will always begin with a grave number in the 7000 series, so you can load the tables into any plain text editor and delete all the rows down to the first that starts with a "7000" number. For spreadsheets or databases, you can use some of the header information to help format your charts or tables. 

You may use the data as you see fit. If you find any problems, or are able to resolve any of the items listed in the last table, I'd appreciate it if you contacted me. I would also appreciate it if you referenced my dissertation (Savage, 1995) as the source of the data. It's given below. 

References cited:

Friedman, Reneé

Spatial Distribution in a Predynastic Cemetery: Naga-ed-Dêr N7000. M.A. Thesis, Department of Near Eastern Studies, University of California, Berkeley. (1981).

Lythgoe, Albert M. (edited by Dows Dunham)

The Predynastic Cemetery, N 7000. Naga-ed-Dêr, Part IV. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles. (1965).

Savage, Stephen H.

Descent Group Competition and Economic Strategies in Predynastic Egypt. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 16:226-268. (1997).

Savage, Stephen H.

Descent, Power, and Competition in Predynastic Egypt: Mortuary Evidence from Cemetery N7000 at Naga-ed-Dêr. Ph.D. dissertation, Arizona State University. University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, Michigan. (1995).

Download n7000.Zip

The AutoCAD File:

All the cemetery maps from my dissertaion were created in AutoCAD 10. There are a variety of layers, including the grid, graves, grave numbers, and hatching for many different attributes such as age, sex, number of grave goods, etc.  An AutoCAD 10 file can be converted to more recent versions of AutoCAD, or read into ArcGIS and converted to shapefile format, so keeping the maps in this now rather primitive format actually ensures that it is still useable.

A word about the coordinates in the file: the point of origin for the drawings is the lower left corner of the paper map included in Lythgoe and Dunham's volume.  Since there were no geographic coordinates on their map, it was not possible to georeference the drawing.

Download ACAD Files