Concise Oxford Dictionary of Archaeology (259 page)

 
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A natural catastrophe involving a massive flood is reported in a number of historical texts written in the Near East in the 2nd and 3rd millenna
bc
. These include Genesis from the Bible and texts in Ashurbanipal's library in Nineveh. It is not certain that all these floods are the same event; rather they may all relate to difficulties controlling the water systems in the low-lying alluvial plain of southern Mesopotamia.

 
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See
TRIPLE VASE
.

 
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Underfloor arch in a hypocaust allowing hot air to pass from furnace to room, or from one heated room to another.

 
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Open-ended, box-shaped tile built into the thickness of the walls of a room heated by hypocaust.

 
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A method for roughly determining the age of human or animal bones, and for comparing the relative ages of two bones recovered from the same context. The technique works on the basis that fluorine percolating through deposits in groundwater slowly replaces the calcium in buried bones. The exact rate of replacement depends on the amount of fluorine present and is thus neither a universal standard nor even the same across a single site. The replacement is, however, irreversible, so that bones of very different date from the same general area can be distinguished. This technique led to confirmation that
PILTDOWN
man was a modern forgery.

 
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A general term applied to a wide range of chipped stone points found in the New World which are united in being of symmetrical outline, carefully manufactured, and finished with the removal of a single long parallel sided flake or flute from one or both sides. Fluted points are well represented by Folsom and Clovis points from North America.