Artefacts

• Humanly made or modified portable objects (e.g. stone tools, pottery, metal weapons)
• NB pottery tests may give
  • Date for vessel and location
  • Source of clay, so evidence for contact

Decoration

• helps in typology and evidence for religious belief etc
  
• Shape is evidence for use, food, hence cooking and diet

Ecofacts

• Non-artifactual organic and environmental remains

• Eg animal bones and plant remains, soils, sediments
  
  Features

• Non-portable artefacts (e.g. hearths, postholes, storage pits
• Give evidence for complex features or structures

Archaeological sites

• Places where all the above are found together
• Places where significant traces of human activity are identified (e.g. village, town, Stonehenge, scatter of stone tools)

Context

• Situation in which find is made

• Matrix
  • The material surrounding it (the sediment, gravel, sand clay etc)
    
• Provenance
  • i.e. horizontal, vertical position within matrix and association with other remains

    Primary context

• Original, undisturbed

Secondary context

• Shifted material (e.g. by weather, animals etc)
  

• How finds came to be buried and what happened to them after they were buried
  i.e. their Taphonomy

C-transforms (coined by American Michael Schiffer)

• Cultural, deliberate/accidental activities of humans

N-transforms

• Natural e.g volcanic ash, wind-borne sand or soil, animals burrowing, charring of wood or bones
  
  Importance of the differentiation?
• In reconstructing past human activities
• e.g. hunting or scavenging in Africa, in Palaeolithic period