Concise Oxford Dictionary of Archaeology (207 page)

Georg Hegel's philosophy of change through the resolution of opposites. In this the central tendency or thesis is opposed by its opposite or antithesis. When the tensions are resolved as a synthesis this in turn becomes the thesis which generates a new antithesis, and so on. Thus dialectics provides an interpretation of change which emphasizes the clash of opposing influences or groups as the motor of social transformation.

 
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A sediment or soil comprising a matrix of sand, silt, and clay particles in which there are clasts of larger material. Defined in this way, diamictons include many deposits formerly classified as tills, and include also many alluvial and colluvial deposits.

 
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Single-celled algae, different species of which live in different kinds of water. They secrete silicious skeletons that are morphologically distinct to species.
Diatom analysis
involves sampling sediments from deep-sea cores or lake sediments and then analysing the species representation at different levels to provide a picture of the changing environment.

 
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The spread of ideas, items of material culture, or cultural traits from one culture or society to another. Diffusion does not necessarily imply a movement of people, for ideas can move through trade and other forms of contact. What it does imply is that ideas and inventions tend to radiate out from one source area into surrounding regions. Prior to radiocarbon dating there was a general assumption that, within the Old World, most of the main developments and key innovations took place in the Near East, the Middle East, Egypt, and the Mycenaean world of Greece and the Aegean, and ideas spread out from there. Taken at its extreme, in what is sometimes known as
hyper-diffusionism
, major inventions happened only once, and a few key areas provided the inspiration for most major technical and social developments later imparted to the rest of the world: such things as agriculture, writing, urban settlement, metallurgy, and so on. It is now recognized, however, that many things were independently developed under different social conditions at different times. Moreover, radiocarbon dating has shown that the movement of ideas is far more complicated than originally thought and that it is inappropriate to think in terms of simple one-way movements outwards from supposedly ‘higher civilizations’.

 
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A straight stick, the end of which is often hardened by charring, which can be used to lever and dig out edible roots and plants or to break up the earth prior to planting.

 
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View of early prehistory current in the 18th and 19th centuries
ad
which denied the antiquity of man witnessed by the discovery of fossil hominid remains and instead believed that the creation story set out in the Bible was literally true and that Noah's Flood and other events recorded in the Bible were facts of prehistory. According to these theories, fossilized human remains were the remains of those who perished in the Great Flood.

 
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