Absolute date A date arrived at through independent means, usually from laboratory-based calculation and calibration
aDNA Ancient deoxyribonucleic acid, a molecule that carries genetic information to enable organisms to reproduce
Adze A cutting tool like an axe, but with an asymmetrical blade
Alignment Posts or stones laid out in a row on a particular orientation
Ancestor A deceased relative, often from generations back
Antler The horn growth of a deer, often cut and used to make tools such as an antler-pick, with the tines used to prise out rock
Arc Part of a circuit; a curving line of pits, post-holes, etc.
Ard A hoe-like stone hafted to be used as a hand-plough
Arrowhead A small projectile-point, usually (but not always) in flint
Artefact Any humanly made object
Assemblage A group of artefacts associated by common characteristics (style, context, material, chronology)
Aurochs Bos primigenius, post-Pleistocene wild cattle
Avenue A double line of stones; a paved way defined within ditches
Awl A small pointed tool used to pierce holes; similarly a ‘borer’
Axehead A (mostly) symmetrically bladed stone or flint tool; in contrast, an ‘axe’ is such a tool plus its shaft (handle)
Backfilling The deliberate infilling of a ditch or pit after it has been opened
Bank (Earthen): a linear or curving mound
Barrow An earthen raised long mound, often over chambers (q.v.) or (round barrow) over a burial (q.v.)
Bayesian analysis The calculation of probability of selected absolute dates (q.v.) falling in a particular span, depending on site context
Beaker A distinctive kind of beaker-like pot
Beam-slot A slot in the ground that has carried a foundation for a wall
Belt-slider An artefact most often made from Whitby jet (q.v.) with an elongated perforation, assumed to be a belt fitting
Blade A thin (usually flint) flake used as a cutting tool
Bridewealth The money or goods paid or received as marriage-gifts
Burial Usually, the insertion of a body or ashes into the ground
Burnish(ed/ing) The rubbing of pottery with stone to produce a bright sheen
Cairn A pile of stones, often over a barrow (q.v.)
Causation What caused something to happen, and why
Causewayed enclosure A place defined by enclosing arcs or circuits of ditches and banks interrupted by undug causeways
Cavetto (decoration) A concave moulding on a pot, usually at neck or shoulder
Ceremonial Highly structured or ritualized activity; a ‘ceremonial monument’ would be one designed for staging ceremonies
Chamber An enclosed space lined with timber or stone, and having an entrance (sometimes connected by a passage) and a roof
Chert A flint-like, but opaque, rock
Circuit A linked-together circle or oval of bank, ditch, or posts
Cist A stone-lined and -roofed, sealed, small-scale chamber
Commemoration Lit. ‘remembering together’; the celebration of an event with resonances from the past
Conchoidal fracture The smooth, rounded surface resulting from breakage by percussion, in flint and some other stones
Consanguinity Blood relationship; descent from the same ancestor as another person
Context (in archaeology): place. ‘In context’ = ‘in situ’. A discrete stratigraphic entity, often within a sequence such as of pits
Coppicing The pruning of the boles or trunks of trees to multiply their stems to use e.g. as poles
Cordon An incised or applied decorative band around a pot
Cove A boxlike setting of three or four large upright stones
Cremation Act of burning of a dead body, often on a pyre; cremated remains are often (incorrectly) referred to as ‘a cremation’
Cultural drift The process whereby cultural practices or traits spread, or are transformed incrementally
Culture, a A set of linked traits thought to represent common ethnicity or shared practices
Culture history A form of archaeology widely practised in the 1920s to 1960s, which identified assemblages of artefacts with (ethnic) groups of people
Cup-mark Ground or pecked cup-shaped recesses in stone
Curation The practice of deliberately retaining items from the past
Cursus (monument) From the Latin for a course, a journey or a procession; a linear monument comprising parallel banks, ditches, pits, or posts
Daub A mix of mud, straw, and often dung: used to create a wall on a post and wattle (woven rod) frame
Debris e.g. ‘occupation debris’, the detritus from living
Decommission(ed) Take(n) out of use; dismantle(d)
Dedicatory A kind of offering, made in order to inaugurate use of a structure or the placing of offerings in the ground
Dendrochronology Dating by means of matching sampled wood against the growth-ring series (‘master chronology’) for a region
Deposit The product of deposition: the accumulation, layering, and modification of traces of former activity or soil formation
Deposition The placing of material into or onto the ground, either casually or deliberately (in an orderly or structured way)
Descent The calculation of relatedness of successive generations that (claim to) trace a common ancestry
Diagnostic Typical or characteristic of a particular activity or time
Difference Distinct dissimilarity; the recognition that human groups exhibit contrasts in cultural attitudes and practices
Discoidal (knife) Disc-shaped flint tool made by removal of small flakes from both sides, then grinding/polishing of its edges
Ditch A linear hollow dug and then often deliberately infilled
Dolmen An Early Neolithic stone-built structure comprising two or more upright megaliths supporting a large capstone
Domesticate/s (-d) Species of animal kept for their products; made reliant upon human control, selectively bred for human purposes
Dynamics Forces and processes that drive forward change
Enclosure A contained area, defined either by earthen banks, ditches, walls, or fences, with entrances at one or more points
Enlightenment, The The eighteenth-century period when ideas on rationality, duality of mind and matter, and utility were developed
Entanglement A process whereby human beings become ever more enmeshed in complex interactions with the material world
Excarnation The exposure of corpses to the elements and carrion-feeders to deflesh the bones for further manipulation
Excavation The practice of interrogating physical traces of human activity to understand former sequences of action, involving the removal of deposits of soil and sediment and recording the observed relationships carefully
Expedient technology Tools that require a low investment of effort in their manufacture, and that may be relatively disposable
Fabric A material that comprises a mix of substances, as with a textile or the components that together form pottery
Façade An elaborated frontal feature, for instance for an entrance to a monument (q.v.)
Facet A flat surface forming one side of an object such as a stone axe
Feast (e.g. diacritical) An event where food is consumed, often prodigiously; diacritically: where the feasting reveals social differences
Flint A glassy substance formed under pressure deposited as nodules in layers within chalk during the Cretaceous period of geology (about 146 to 65 million years ago)
Funerary Pertaining to death and burial
Gabbro A rock found chiefly on the Lizard Peninsula in Cornwall and used as a tempering agent in Neolithic pottery
Gallery A side-chamber or tunnel dug or built outwards from a shaft or a passage (q.v.)
Genealogy The tracing of descent and mapping of ancestry; in social science the term can also mean the tracking of a particular phenomenon and its changes through time
Generation Span of time within which population replacement can occur (e.g. 20 years)
Ground and polished The process of grinding and then smoothing the surface of a roughout of an object such as an axehead
Group VI (e.g. axe) One of the ‘grouped’ rock sources defined by the Implement Petrology Group: this from the English Lake District
Haft The wooden handle or shaft that held (in the Neolithic in Britain) a stone axehead or flint arrowhead in place
Hall An elongated rectangular building, usually timber, larger in size than might be expected of a domestic residence
Hearth A patch of burnt ashy ground representing a fire, assumed to have been used for cooking or an other domestic activity
Henge A circular or oval earthwork with a central level area surrounded successively by a ditch and then a bank
Hermeneutics The originally German tradition of interpreting things and texts, initially applied to scripture and historical documents
Hominin Those forms of primate directly ancestral to humans
House-society Societies organized around the key principle of co-residential kin groups associated with lineage founders
Hunter-forager Hunter-gatherers, hunter-collectors; peoples defined by use of wild food dietary staples rather than farming
Inclusion(s) Organic or inorganic fluxing agents used in pottery-making
Inhumation (interment) The burial of fleshed bodies in graves
Interpretive The practice of interpretation is central to all aspects of this at root inferential discipline: all archaeology is interpretive
Invested lineage A human kin group distinguished by the collective ownership of wealth and resources, and shared investment in facilities
Isotopic analyses; lead, strontium Analyses of human and animal teeth that can determine the likely region in which an organism spent its early life
Jadeitite A form of jade (green translucent stone) quarried from the European Alpine regions
Jet (e.g. belt-slider) A soft, black, rock-like substance from Whitby in Yorkshire, a form of lignite; in Neolithic Britain, used also for beads
Knapping The practice of flaking flint or stone from a nodule or core
Lineage (e.g. invested) Descent-line in human groups; an ‘invested lineage’ is one with a deliberate corporate holding of shared resources
Linearbandkeramik German(-language) term for a form of Early Neolithic Continental pottery decorated by incised linear bands
Lipids (residue) Organic fats and oils absorbed into (especially) Neolithic pots give insights into what substances were held in them
Macehead A perforated artefact in stone or antler that may be highly decorated or have its exterior faceted
Materiality The manifestation of human culture, materially; the shaping of ideas and social relations through material forms
Matrix (soil) The composition of archaeological contexts (q.v.) in terms of their soil and deposit characteristics
Megalithic Lit. ‘large stone’ construction
Michelsberg A cultural complex of north-central continental Europe, the later part of which overlapped the British Early Neolithic
Microlith Lit. ‘small stone’ technology, comprising the use of flint or stone in composite artefacts such as arrows hafted in wood
Midden The accumulation of discarded remains (e.g. of food) forming as heaps of material rotted down as soil
Migration (e.g. chain-) The movement of communities or individuals, often causing displacement of yet others in a chain-like reaction
Mnemonic (device) The creation or use of an object or a monument (q.v.) to facilitate the sustaining of collective memory
Monolith A single upright stone
Monument A created assembly of structures, often of large proportions
Mortuary structure A building created to contain human remains
Motif A repeated decorative device used to embellish artefacts
Mummification The act of preservation of the outward form of a deceased individual, usually bound at point of rigor mortis
Objectivist A belief that the external, phenomenal world has a fixed and unproblematic character, which is decisive in matters of debate
Ossuary A container for storing the bones of the dead
Outwork An earthwork associated with, but built outwards from, a more closely defined monument
Package (cultural) A grouping of material items or traits, regarded as having been habitually in use (and exported) together
Palisade A row of timber posts making a wall or fence
Passage A lined and roofed path linking an entrance and a chamber
Passage tomb (or grave) A megalithic funerary monument in which a chamber beneath a mound or cairn is accessed via a passage
Pavement A deliberately and usually carefully laid surface
Pecked Decorative stone-working involving striking a surface repeatedly to ‘peck out’ a shape either in negative or relief
Period An artificially defined elapsed length of time, or a particular named span, e.g. ‘Neolithic period’
Periodicity The tendency to be periodic, that is, to recur at intervals; often connected to particular subsistence or ritual practices
Peristalith An arrangement of upright stones surrounding or containing a mound or barrow
Phase A further artificial subdivision of a period of elapsed time, most often expressed as ‘Early’, ‘Middle’, and ‘Late’
Pick A flint or stone implement, often with a tranchet (q.v.) edge
Pit A hole dug in the ground and then infilled
Pleistocene The geological epoch lasting from 2.5 million to 11.5 thousand years ago, featuring the most recent glaciations
Polissoir A stone used to grind and polish axeheads or tool edges
Porcellanite A hard, dense, dark siliceous rock, quarried for axeheads in the Neolithic from sources in Antrim and Rathlin Island
Portal A holed entrance-stone into a chambered tomb; a kind of dolmen (q.v.) with an apparent entrance ‘door’
Post(-hole) The location of a decayed (or burned, or deliberately withdrawn) timber post
Post-defined Any former timber structure, whose earth-fast components mark out the shape of the monument they formed part of
Practice(s) Way(s) of doing things, often habitually
Pragmatic An approach to investigation that sees itself as straightforward and realistic, based on practical issues and immediate problems rather than theoretical considerations
Prestige-goods Objects prized for the prestige they confer on their owner
Progenitor A person who originated a descent-group or practice
Rampart (Usually) a linear earth and timber bank used defensively
Recut A hole dug into a pre-existing pit or ditch, then filled
Retouch Secondary flaking of a flint or stone object along its edge
Revetment A wooden, stone, or turf wall retaining a bank
Ring-ditch Circular ditched monument with ditch around a central area
Ritual A non-utilitarian practice or ceremony; most practices (however mundane or habitual) involve a degree of ritual
Roughout The shaping out of a material form prior to its refinement
Sapwood The most recent active growth-ring of a plant or tree
Sarsen (stone) Boulders of silicified sandstone, occurring naturally on the chalk downlands of southern England
Scraper (Usually) a flint artefact, used to scrape rather than cut
Secondary products Milk, wool, textiles, and traction: aspects of domesticated animals exploited in a subsidiary way to their meat products
Sedentism The practice of settled occupation of the land
Segmented Of ditches and banks, earthworks dug discontinuously; of society, divided into kin-groups
Shouldered (carinated) Earthen pots or bowls with a sharp change in mid-profile
Silting The gradual natural infilling of a pit or ditch
Skeuomorph(ic) The transformation (or translation) of an object usually made in one material into another, for (social) effect
Social world The shared community environment in which people live, and which enfolds individuals in social obligations
Stable isotopes Lit., isotopes that do not decay; in the archaeological context generally refers to ratios of carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen from human and animal bones, which relate to aspects of an organism’s diet during life
Stake(-hole) Similar to a post-hole (q.v.), but of smaller diameter
Strontium isotope Strontium (Sr) is an isotope found in human bone that can (with caveats) be used to infer where individuals originated
Struck flint Artefacts or by-products of knapping from cores or pebbles
Tenon (and mortice) Mutually fitting locating holes and slots, usually in timbers
Terminal (e.g. ditch) The butt-ends of individual lengths of ditch or bank
Thermoluminescence The property of some materials that have accumulated energy over a long period of luminescing when heated, which can be used as a basis for dating ceramics and hearths
Timber/stone circle Uprights arranged in circular or oval formations, sometimes in a concentric manner with more than one circuit
Tor enclosure The stone-built equivalent of a causewayed enclosure, but enclosing the summit of a natural granite outcrop
Trackway A carefully constructed (often timber) causeway
Tradition A set of related practices followed in time-honoured fashion
Tranchet (e.g. axehead) An axehead or arrowhead (usually flint) made by the removal of a flake to create a chisel-shaped cutting edge
Transformation Either rapid or gradual change which nonetheless alters fundamentally a prior state or set of relationships
Transition A process or period of change
Trapezoidal Kite-shaped, with reference to an artefact or monument
Tree-throw (hole) Hollow created by the overturning of the root-plate of a tree
Trilithon An arrangement of two upright stones capped by a third forming a lintel, as exemplified at Stonehenge
Turf-built A mound or revetment created by cutting and laying turf
Upright Stone or timber vertical member of a structure
Variability The variable nature or quality of an entity
Ware Term used to denote significantly different forms of pottery
Worked stone Stone modified to create an artefact