Concise Oxford Dictionary of Archaeology (285 page)

The proposition that the degree of interaction between cultures is directly proportional to their proximity to each other.

 
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A traditional, although now rather obsolete, term for the Mindel/Riss phase of the middle Pleistocene in central Europe; the Elster-Saale or Hoxnian stage in northern Europe and Britain respectively.

 
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Adena Culture ceremonial site in the Ohio Valley, the focus of which is a gigantic earthen mound in the form of a serpent with an egg or frog in its jaw and a tightly coiled tail. Overall, the serpent is 382m long from the tip of the upper jaw to the end of the tail, 6m wide and up to 1.5m high. The serpent itself does not appear to have been a funerary monument, although a burial mound stands nearby.
[Sum.: R. Fletcher
et al
., 1996, Serpent mound: a fort or ancient icon?
Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology
, 21.1, 105–43]

 
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A massive monument extending for more than 6000km from Shanhaiguan on Bohai Bay in the east to Jiayuguan at the edge of the desert in Gansu Province in the west. It is actually composed of a series of sections built by individual Zhou states in the mid 1st millennium
bc
and later; it is neither a continuous wall nor a single wall. In places there are as many as three parallel walls. Most of what is visible today is the Ming wall of the period ad 1368–1644 which links together many of the earlier stretches. Its purpose was to separate the agricultural communities to the south from incursions by the nomadic steppe populations who lived to the north of the wall.
[Sum.: A. Waldron , 1990,
The Great Wall of China
. Cambridge: CUP]

 
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A late Iron Age town of 720ha with impressive stone walls near Masvingo in southeastern Zimbabwe. Shona speakers occupied Zimbabwe Hill from about ad 1000 and later began building the stone walls. Between about ad 1100 and 1500, Great Zimbabwe was the capital of the vast Shona empire that stretched from the Zambezi River to the northern Transvaal of South Africa and eastern Botswana. Between 12000 and 20000 people lived within and around it. Social organization in the Shona was based on distinctions between commoners and a ruling class. The great size of the structures at the Great Zimbabwe was a symbol of the power and wealth of those who lived there. The Shona kings accumulated much wealth and prestige by controlling trade between the southern Africa interior and the East African coast. They also had connections further afield and Chinese stone and glassware have been recovered from the site.
[Sum.: P. S. Garlake , 1973,
Great Zimbabwe
. London: Thames & Hudson]

 
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A piece of leg armour designed to protect the lower leg. It originally covered the shin only, but in medieval Europe there was also a closed greave which protected both the shin and the calf.

 
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