Concise Oxford Dictionary of Archaeology (727 page)

Slice of rock, ceramic, or other material mounted on a microscope slide and then ground and polished to a consistent thickness of 0.03mm so that under a petrological microscope it is possible to identify the minerals using plain or polarized transmitted light and see the basic structure of the material itself. In archaeology petrological examination has been widely used to characterize stone artefacts and ceramic materials which, when comparative raw materials are also available, can lead to the determination of sources.

 
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In Egypt covering the 21st to the 23rd Dynasties,
c.
1070–712 bc.

 
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Greek god. See
TAWERET
.

 
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tholos
(pl.
tholoi
)
[MC].

A building with a circular chamber and a
CORBELLED
vault, often approached by a long passage. In Aegean and classical archaeology such structures are mainly tombs with a beehive-shaped burial chamber, often built into a natural hillside, the chamber being approached along a stone-revetted open passage or dromos. In finer examples the inner face of the stonework is dressed, as for example in the Treasury of Atreus at
MYCENAE
where the space above the vault was covered with rubble to form an artificial mound. The term was sometimes applied more loosely to certain
PASSAGE GRAVES
in Atlantic Europe which had corbelled vaults, but this is now rarely used.

 
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Thom , Alexander
(1894–1985)
[Bi].

Scottish engineer and amateur archaeologist who researched widely on the construction of prehistoric stone monuments in northwest Europe. Born in Argyllshire, he graduated in engineering from Glasgow University and after a spell in civil and aeronautical engineering he returned to the university as a lecturer in these subjects in 1921. He joined the Royal Air Force in 1938 and spent the war years developing and operating wind tunnels for testing early Spitfires. In 1945 he was elected Professor of Engineering and Science and Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford, a post he held until his retirement in 1961. His interest in archaeology came after a visit to Callanish in August 1933, and he subsequently made very high-quality plans of more than 400 stone circles and rows, including the extremely large and complicated structures at Carnac in France. In publishing his work he developed the idea that prehistoric people used a standardized measuring stick, the ‘Megalithic yard’, which was 0.83m in length. He also suggested that although stone circles varied greatly in plan, there were regular patterns to their outline and that proto-Pythagorean geometry had been applied. Such views remain controversial, although the quality of his surveys and the detail of his mathematical arguments command wide respect.
[Obit.:
Antiquity
, 60 (1986), 136–7]

 
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Thompson , Sir John Eric Sidney
(1898–1975)
[Bi].

British archaeologist who worked extensively on the Maya of Mesoamerica. Educated at Winchester College, he left to join the army during WW1, fighting in France with the Coldstream Guards. His family had Argentine connections and for some time after the war he worked as a gaucho on a cattle ranch in South America. A growing interest in archaeology took him to Cambridge in 1924 where he studied at Fitzwilliam House (now College). From 1926 through to 1935 he was on the staff of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, during which time he carried out much of his fieldwork. He applied ethnology to his work of interpretation, and excavated a number of sites in British Honduras, including San Jose, Bushilha, and San Antonio near Lubaantun. He was the first to establish a detailed chronology for the Belize Valley and to make a distinction between ceremonial centres and urban areas. Perhaps his greatest work was in advancing the decipherment of Mayan hieroglyphic scripts and in linking the Mayan calendar to the Christian calendar. In 1935 Thompson joined the Carnegie Institution in Washington where he remained until his retirement in 1958.
[Obit.:
American Anthropologist
, 78 (1976), 317–20]