Concise Oxford Dictionary of Archaeology (321 page)

Hoskins , William George
(1908–92)
[Bi].

Renowned British local historian who did much to integrate archaeology with local studies and the understanding of the landscape. Born and brought up in Exeter, he was educated at Hele's School and the University College of the South West (now Exeter University). Youthful explorations of Devon and especially the Exe Valley started his interest in landscapes which he took with him to Bradford Technical College where he taught for a short time and where he saw the contrasting landscape of Yorkshire. In 1931 he was appointed assistant lecturer in commerce at University College, Leicester (now Leicester University). During WW2 he worked at the Board of Trade, and immediately after the war Leicester established a full department of local history with Hoskins as its head. In 1951 he moved to Oxford as a reader in economic history. He greatly disliked being at Oxford, although it was while there that he published his best-known book
The making of the English landscape
(1955, London: Hodder and Stoughton) at the head of a series he edited dealing with the landscape history of English counties. In 1965 he returned to Leicester University as Hatton Professor of English History, retiring in 1968. In his later years he developed a keep interest in popularizing his particular brand of landscape history, and between 1976 and 1978 made a number of programmes for television which made him a household name.
[Obit.:
The Times
, 15 January 1992]

 
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Archaic Stage, coastally adapted communities of the San Francisco Bay area of the American west coast between ad 600 and recent times. These groups lived in small villages, exploiting the coastal marshlands for fish and shellfish, while also using a wide range of edible plants, especially acorns. Small side-notched points were probably arrow tips; barbed bone spears were used in fishing. Burials were usually by cremation, any grave goods, mainly ornaments and beads, being burnt too. Hotchkiss communities are regarded as ancestral to the Wintum, Miwok, and Yokuts who occupied central California at the time of European contact.

 
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A term used to describe the kind of hole made through a piece of stone or similarly hard material where drilling has started on two opposite faces and continued from both sides until they meet in the middle.

 
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An arbitrary archaeological unit defining artefact patterns reflecting the activities that take place in and around a house, usually assumed to be the products of one household.

 
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A flat area created on sloping ground to form the foundation on which a structure of some kind, often a dwelling, is built. Such platforms are usually made by a combination of cutting back into the slope at the back and making a terrace in the front.

 
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A group of deposits representing a geo-stratigraphic stage within the
PLEISTOCENE
series of the British
QUATERNARY SYSTEM
, named after the site of Hoxne, Suffolk, and dating to the period 300000 to 200000 years ago. The Hoxnian is usually interpreted as an interglacial warm period, some Hoxnian deposits being stratified above
ANGLIAN
glacial deposits and below
WOLSTONIAN
glacial deposits. However, there is some evidence that the Hoxnian material may represent more than one interglacial.
CLACTONIAN
and
ACHEULIAN
flintwork is found in Hoxnian gravels, and at Swanscombe, Kent, part of the skull of a
Homo erectus
has been found.