Concise Oxford Dictionary of Archaeology (661 page)

An early name for
PEKIN MAN
, now reclassified as
Homo erectus
.

 
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General term used to refer to a series of late Neolithic communities of the 3rd millennium
bc
living in Scandinavia, northern Germany, and the Low Countries that share the practice of single burial under barrows, the deceased usually being accompanied by a battle-axe, amber beads, and pottery vessels. See
BATTLE-AXE CULTURE
;
CORDED WARE CULTURE
; and
GLOBULAR AMPHORA CULTURE
.

 
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Burial ground of the early Intermediate Period situated in the Lambayeque Valley on the northern coast. The site was first discovered by looters in 1987, and subsequently excavated by Walter Alva.
The burial ground contains an unknown number of tombs belonging to Moche Culture royal and high-status people. One of the most spectacular tombs excavated so far (the tomb of the Lord of Sapán) was that of a warrior-priest buried about ad 290 while in his mid 30s. His body lay in a wooden box with a range of grave goods including a necklace of gold beads, feather ornaments, and fabric banners. His lower face was encased in a gold mask. In his right hand was a gold rattle, while in his left was a copper knife. Round about were the remains of two 20-year-old women (wives or concubines?), two 40-year-old men, and a dog. In the entrance lay the remains a 20-year-old man, dubbed the ‘guardian’, who wore a gilded helmet and carried a copper shield but whose feet had been cut off prior to burial.
[Sum.: W. Alva , 1988, Discovering the New World's richest unlooted tomb.
National Geographic
, 174, 510–50]

 
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Neolithic tell mound in the Plain of Drama, eastern Macedonia, excavated under the direction of Marija Gimbutas and Colin Renfrew in 1968–9 in order to explore the chronological and social relationships between the Aegean and the Balkans. More than 10m of stratified deposits are represented on the site, resolving themselves into six major phases and spanning a period of perhaps 3000 years. The earliest, I–III, roughly correspond to the middle and later Neolithic of Bulgaria (
KARANOVO
III onwards) and date to about 4500 bc. Sitagroi III included material of Gumelnita type. The later levels at Sitagroi (IV, Va, and Vb) correspond to the Bulgarian early Bronze Age (Ezero Phase). Sitagroi IV includes material comparable with that from Troy I. Together the Sitagrio sequence supports the claim for the autonomous development of metalworking in southeast Europe, separate from developments in Anatolia.
[Rep.: C. Renfrew , M. Gimbutas , and E. Elster , 1987,
Excavations at Sitagroi: a prehistoric village in northeast Greece 1
. Los Angeles: University of California Institute of Archaeology]

 
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1
Any place where objects, features, or ecofacts manufactured or modified by human beings are found. A site can range from a living site to a quarry site, and it can be defined in functional and other ways.
2
A term used to define places of archaeological interest. Typically, they are assumed to be places where human activity took place in the past, but the term also refers to places where archaeologists are working in the present (which may not necessarily be the place of activity in the past).

 
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A systematic study of an arbitrarily defined area around a series of known sites so that the main features of such areas can be compared to check for patterning or regularity. Developed by Eric Higgs and Claudio Vita-Finzi during the late 1960s, the purpose of site catchment analysis was to reconstruct something of the economy of archaeological sites. The size of the areas of search may be based on the sources of material found at the site or on notional working areas such as the distance that could be travelled out from the focus during the course of a day's journey.