Anthropology Exam 1 Flash Cards

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Title: Anthropology Exam 1
Description: anthropology
Number of Cards: 205
Save Count: 1
Author: kmack9925
Created: 2012-02-08
Tags: anthropology
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    • Question
    • Answer
    • Side 3
    • anthropological linguistics
    • The anthropological study of languages.
    • anthropology
    • A discipline that studies humans, focusing on the study of differences and similarities, both biological and cultural, in human populations.
    • applied (practicing) anthropology
    • The branch of anthropology that concerns itself with applying anthropological knowledge to achieve practical goals, usually in the service of an agency outside the traditional academic setting.
    • biological (physical) anthropology
    • The study of humans as biological organisms, dealing with the emergence and evolution of humans and with contemporary biological variations among human populations.
    • cross-cultural researcher
    • An ethnologist who uses ethnographic data about many societies to test possible explanations of cultural variation to discover general patterns about cultural traits - what is universal, what is variable, etc.
    • cultural anthropology
    • The study of cultural variation and universals in the past and present.
    • descriptive (structural) linguistics
    • The study of how languages are constructed
    • ethnographer
    • A person who spends some time living with, interviewing, and observing a group of people to describe their customs.
    • ethnography
    • A description of a society's customary behaviors and ideas.
    • ethnohistorian
    • An ethnologist who uses historical documents to study how a particular culture has changed over time.
    • ethnology
    • The study of how and why recent cultures differ and are similar.
    • fossils
    • The hardened remains or impressions of plants and animals that lived in the past.
    • historical archaeology
    • A specialty within archaeology that studies the material remains of recent peoples who left written records.
    • historical linguistics
    • The study of how languages change over time.
    • holistic
    • Refers to an approach that studies many aspects of a multifaceted system.
    • Homo sapiens
    • All living people belong to this one biological species, which means that all human populations on earth can successfully interbreed.
    • human paleontology/paleoanthropology
    • The study of the emergence of humans and their later physical evolution.
    • human variation
    • The study of how and why contemporary human populations vary biologically.
    • prehistory
    • The time before written records.
    • Primate
    • A member of the mammalian order divided into the two suborders of prosimians and anthropoids.
    • sociolinguistics
    • The study of cultural and subcultural patterns of speaking in different social contexts.
    • behavioral ecology
    • Typically tries to understand contemporary human behavior using evolutionary principles.
    • cultural ecology
    • The analysis of the relationship between a culture and its environment.
    • dual-inheritance theory
    • In contrast to other evolutionary ecological perspectives, this theory gives much more importance to culture as apart of the evolutionary process, referring to both genes and culture playing different, but nonetheless important and interactive, roles in transmitting traits to future generations.
    • ethnoscience
    • An approach that attempts to derive rules of thought from the logical analysis of ethnographic data.
    • eugenics
    • Selectively breeding humans with desirable characteristics and preventing those with undesirable ones from having offspring.
    • evolutionary psychology
    • A type of ecological approach that is particularly interested in universal human psychology, arguing that human psychology was primarily adapted to the environment that characterized most of human history - the hunting-gathering way of life.
    • functionalism
    • The theoretical orientation that looks for the part that some aspect of culture or social life plays in maintaining a cultural system.
    • general evolution
    • The notion that higher forms of culture arise from and generally supersede lower forms.
    • genus
    • A group of related species.
    • group selection
    • Natural selection of group characteristics.
    • hermeneutics
    • The study of meaning.
    • individual selection
    • Natural selection of individual characteristics.
    • political economy
    • The study of how external forces,particularly powerful state societies, explain the way a society changes and adapts.
    • sociobiology
    • Systematic study of the biological causes of human behavior.
    • specific evolution
    • The particular sequence of change and adaption of a society in a given environment.
    • structuralism
    • The theoretical orientation that human culture is a surface representation of the underlying structure of the human mind.
    • theoretical orientation
    • A general attitude about how phenomena are to be explained.
    • absolute/chronometric dating
    • A method of dating fossils in which the actual age of a deposit or specimen is measured.
    • 40Ar-39Ar dating
    • Used in conjunction with potassium-argon dating, this method gets around the problem of needing different rock samples to estimate potassium and argon.
    • artifact
    • Any object made by a human.
    • context
    • The relationships between and among artifacts, ecofacts, fossils, and features.
    • culture history
    • A history of the cultures that lived in a given area over time; building these was a primary goal of archaeological research
    • ecofacts
    • Natural items that humans have used; things such as the remains of animals eaten by humans or plant pollens found on archaeological sites are examples of ecofacts.
    • excavation
    • The careful removal of the aracheological deposits
    • falsification
    • Showing that a theory seems to be wrong by finding that implications or predictions derivable from it are not consistent with objectively collected data.
    • features
    • Artifacts of human manufacture that cannot be removed from an archaeological site, i.e. hearths, storage pits, buildings
    • fieldwork
    • Firsthand experience with people being studied and the usual means by which anthropological information is obtained.
    • half-life
    • The time it takes for half of the atoms of a radioactive substance to decay into atoms of a different substance.
    • indicator artifacts
    • Items that changed relatively rapidly and which, thus, can be used to indicate the relative age of associated items.
    • laws
    • ASsociations or relationships that almost all scientists accept.
    • lithics
    • The technical name for tools made from stone.
    • measure
    • To describe how something compares with other things on some scale of variation.
    • operational definition
    • A description of the procedure that is followed in measuring a variable.
    • participant-observation
    • Living among the people being studied - observing, questioning, and, when possible, taking part in the important events of the group.
    • potassium-argon (K-Ar) dating
    • A chronometric dating method that uses the rate of decay of a radioactive form of potassium into argon to date samples from 5,000 years old to 3 billion years old.
    • probability value
    • The likelihood that an observed result could have occurred by chance.
    • radiocarbon/carbon-14 dating
    • A dating method that uses the decay of carbon-14 to date organic remains; reliable for dating once-living matter up to 50,000 years old
    • random sample
    • A sample in which all cases selected have had an equal chance to be included.
    • relative dating
    • A method of dating fossils that determines the age of a specimen or deposit relative to a known specimen or deposit
    • sampling universe
    • The list of cases to be sampled from.
    • sites
    • Locations where the material remains of human activity have been preserved in a way that archaeologists or paleoanthropologists can recover them.
    • statistical association
    • A relationship or correlation between two or more variables that is unlikely to be due to chance.
    • statistically significant
    • REfers to a result that would occur very rarely by chance
    • stratified
    • An archaeological deposit that contains successive layers or strata
    • stratigraphy
    • The study of how different rock formations and fossils are laid down in successive layers or strata
    • theoretical construct
    • Something that cannot be observed or verified directly.
    • adaptive customs
    • Cultural traits that enhance survival and reproductive successes in a particular environment
    • allele
    • One member of a pair of genes.
    • balancing selection
    • A type of selection that occurs when a heterozygous combination of alleles is positively favored even though a homozygous combination is disfavored.
    • chromosomes
    • Paired rod-shaped structures within a cell nucleus containing the genes that transmit traits from one generation to the next.
    • cline
    • The gradually increasing or decreasing frequency of a gene from one end of a region to another.
    • crossing-over
    • Exchanges of sections of chromosomes from one chromosome to another.
    • directional selection
    • A type of natural selection that increases the frequency of a trait (the trait is said to be positively favored, or adaptive).
    • DNA
    • A long, two-stranded molecule in the genes that directs the makeup of an organism according to the instruction sin its genetic code.