IMPORTANt
- Field Dressing and Splitting – The process of removing excess stone with chisels and wedges before transport to minimize weight and reduce costs.
- Technological Lag – The phenomenon where new inventions (like bronze) spread slowly and unevenly across different regions, meaning older technologies often survive alongside new ones because they remain cheaper or more convenient.
- Diachronic – Examining one specific location over multiple time periods to trace the chronological development of technologies (e.g., Franchthi Cave).
- Synchronic – Examining different places at the exact same time period to compare technological capabilities (e.g., early Bronze Age underground cities in Turkey vs. stone-age conditions in Crete).
CORE CONCEPTS
- Techne: An art or skill, such as woodworking, sculpting, or minting, that requires specialized training, tools, and techniques.
- Taxonomy: The principles of scientific classification used to organize and describe objects or concepts with shared characteristics (e.g., defining various items simply as “containers”).
- Pulverizing: Beating soft rocks like gypsum into dust using harder stones to create water-resistant plaster or column bases.
- Cutting: A technique restricted to wood and soft stones like soapstone or sandstone, indicating the material lacks the structural strength required for multi-story buildings.
- Abrading and Burnishing: Using a lubricant and a spatula or polished stone to sharpen tools (abrading) or polish surfaces to make them water-tight and aesthetically pleasing (burnishing).
- Coring: Drilling hollows for items like perfume flasks using a specialized sequence of tools including a bow, torque shaft, oil, and sand.
- Flaking: Striking stone to create arrowheads, which was highly inefficient, prone to breakage, and expensive compared to using snares or nets for hunting.
- Open Pit Firing: An early method of making earthenware by firing clay upside-down over coals and branches; the uneven heat and high breakage rate made these pots relatively expensive prestige items.
- Levigating and Slip: The process of repeatedly washing clay to remove impurities (levigating) to create a highly refined liquid clay (slip) that is painted on pots for a waterproof, glossy finish.
- Bulla and Accounting Tokens: Early clay envelopes from Sumer used to hold specifically shaped tokens representing commodities or day-wage labor in trade and taxation.
- Writing Systems: Evolved from early accounting methods and included cuneiform (wedge-shaped syllabary), hieroglyphics, pictograms, and alphabets, allowing for cultural memory, parody, and the recording of laws.
- Boustrophedon: An early style of Greek writing where alternating lines read left-to-right, then right-to-left, mimicking the path of an ox plowing a field.
- Mohs Hardness Scale: A scale from 1 to 10 used by archaeologists to determine the hardness of a stone to understand the capabilities of early tools.
- Munsell Chart: A standardized color chart used to objectively describe soil colors and inclusion densities in archaeological finds regardless of lighting conditions.
THEORIES & FRAMEWORKS
- Six Basic Machines: A mathematical framework identifying the inclined plane, wedge, worm gear, lever, wheel, and pulley as fundamental mechanisms, each carrying specific side requirements, physical risks, and structural strategies.
- Stratigraphic Deposition: The archaeological principle that older materials are found at lower, undisturbed levels of the earth; however, when a mound degrades, its newest materials will slide down and deposit at the very bottom of adjacent trenches.
SCHOLARS
- Aristotle: Established early taxonomy across disciplines including epistemology, geology, physics, and biology based on student notes.
- Theophrastus: Successor to Aristotle who systematically categorized plants, sensation, physics, stones, and human characters.
- Pappus of Alexandria: Fourth-century AD mathematician who defined the six traditional basic machines and their mechanical implications.
- Hesiod: Greek agricultural writer who authored the farming calendar “Works and Days” out of financial necessity after being cheated out of his inheritance.
- Cato the Elder: Roman general and writer notorious for his penny-pinching and callous manual “On Farming”.
- Varro: Roman author of a systematic, detailed manual on agriculture.
- Columella: Roman writer who advanced agricultural knowledge and authored the earliest surviving book dedicated to trees.
- Pliny the Elder: Roman admiral who compiled 35 books of natural history with extensive information on herbal medicines.
- Homer: Greek epic poet whose works provide incidental but valuable details about early farming, resources, and banquets.
- Vergil: Roman poet who included agricultural themes in works like the “Georgics” and pastoral “Eclogues”.
- Plutarch: Greek essayist and priest whose extensive writings (“Moralia” and “Lives”) occasionally touch upon agricultural and religious intersections.