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 TaphonomyC-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