Concise Oxford Dictionary of Archaeology (483 page)

Nyerup , Rasmus
(1759–1829)
[Bi].

Secretary of the Danish Royal Committee for the Preservation and Collection of National Antiquities, the purpose of which was the establishment of the Danish National Museum of Antiquities.
[Not.: O. Klindt-Jensen , 1975,
A history of Scandinavian archaeology
. London: Thames & Hudson. 46–8]

 
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Generally, any place consecrated to nymphs, especially natural places such as a spring, river, mountain, or tree. In classical times it often took the form of an elaborately decorated semi-circular fountain-house with niches in the walls containing sculpture.

 
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Oakley , Kenneth Page
(1911–81)
[Bi].

British anthropologist and specialist in the Palaeolithic period. Born in Amersham he was educated at Halloner's Grammar School and University College, London, where he studied geology both at undergraduate and postgraduate level. In 1934 he took a post with the Geological Survey but this was short-lived because a year later he was appointed to an assistant keepership at the British Museum (Natural History). Here he spent the rest of his working life except for a brief period back in the Geological Survey on war service. From the late 1930s he began working on Palaeolithic and Pleistocene sites in the Thames Valley. Early hominid fossils fascinated him and soon after the war he spent much time developing ways of dating early remains. This later led to considerable involvement with radiocarbon dating. Amongst his best-known publications are
Man the tool-maker
(1949, London: British Museum (Natural History)), and
Frameworks for dating fossil man
(1964, London). He was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1953 and a Fellow of the British Academy in 1957.
[Obit.:
The Times,
5 November 1981]

 
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A wooden pole with a blade at one end that is used to propel a boat along through leverage against the water. Oars differ from paddles in being secured to the side of the boat itself and being used in pairs. In northern Europe they probably appear in the later Bronze Age to judge from representations on model boats and rock art.

 
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Localized fertile areas within a desert.

 
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A general theory explaining the development of agriculture and the Neolithic way of life that was first put forward by Pumpelly in 1908, reiterated by Newberry in 1924, and popularized by Gordon
CHILDE
, in the 1920s. Simply stated, the argument runs that as the climate got warmer and drier in the early post-glacial period people, plants, and animals became concentrated in relatively few and increasingly restricted fertile areas. The symbiosis that developed included the ‘domestication’ of plants and animals through the manipulation of their production and reproduction. The model has largely been abandoned, however, because there is little evidence of major desiccation in the required period.

 
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