DSST General Anthropology flashcards

31 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.

Four-field anthropology

The traditional American division of anthropology into physical (biological) anthropology, cultural anthropology, archaeology, and linguistics, unified by a holistic and comparative study of humanity.

Natural selection

The process by which heritable traits that improve survival and reproduction become more common in a population across generations, producing adaptation to local environments.

Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium

A null model in which allele and genotype frequencies stay constant across generations absent selection, mutation, migration, drift, and nonrandom mating; deviations signal evolutionary forces at work.

Gene flow

The transfer of alleles between populations through migration and interbreeding, which tends to reduce genetic differences among populations and can introduce new variants.

Genetic drift

Random change in allele frequencies due to chance sampling, strongest in small populations; the founder effect and population bottlenecks are common examples.

Bipedalism indicators

Skeletal features signaling habitual upright walking include an anteriorly placed foramen magnum, S-shaped spine, broad short pelvis, valgus knee, and a non-opposable big toe.

Australopithecus afarensis

An early hominin from East Africa dated roughly 3.9 to 2.9 million years ago, represented by the Lucy skeleton; it walked bipedally but retained small brains and climbing adaptations.

Homo erectus

An early Homo species dated from about 1.9 million years ago, associated with Acheulean tools, controlled fire, larger bodies and brains, and the first dispersal out of Africa.

Culture concept

The learned, shared, symbolic, integrated, and adaptive system of knowledge, beliefs, values, norms, and practices transmitted socially rather than genetically within a society.

Ethnocentrism

Judging another culture by the standards of one's own, often treating one's own practices as natural or superior; cultural relativism is the contrasting methodological stance.

Participant observation

A fieldwork method in which the anthropologist lives among a community, takes part in daily activities, and keeps detailed fieldnotes to understand behavior from insiders' perspectives.

Patrilineal descent

A unilineal kinship rule tracing membership and inheritance through the father's line, so children belong to the father's descent group rather than the mother's.

Bridewealth

Goods or wealth transferred from the groom's family to the bride's family as part of marriage, common in pastoral and horticultural societies; it differs from dowry.

Exogamy and endogamy

Exogamy requires marrying outside a defined group such as a clan; endogamy requires marrying within one, as with caste or lineage-based marriage rules.

Shifting cultivation

A horticultural system in which fields are cleared and farmed for a few years, then abandoned to regenerate fertility while the community moves to new plots.

Chiefdom

A ranked, centralized political form with a hereditary chief, redistribution of goods, and unequal access to prestige but without the full bureaucracy of a state.

Rites of passage

Rituals marking transitions between social statuses, typically involving separation, a liminal phase, and incorporation, as analyzed by van Gennep and Victor Turner.

Reciprocity

Exchange of goods or services between social equals, ranging from generalized (no expected return) to balanced (direct return) to negative (attempting to gain at another's expense).

Archaeological context

The provenience, matrix, and associations of an artifact; without recorded context, an object loses most of its interpretive value for reconstructing past behavior.

Law of superposition

The principle that in undisturbed sedimentary deposits, lower layers were deposited earlier than upper layers, providing the basis for relative dating by stratigraphy.

Radiocarbon dating

A radiometric method measuring decay of carbon-14 in organic remains, useful to roughly 50,000 years; results require calibration against tree-ring and other records.

Potassium-argon dating

A radiometric technique dating volcanic rocks and ash from about 100,000 to billions of years, widely used to date early hominin sites in East Africa.

Seriation

A relative dating method ordering artifacts or sites by changing stylistic frequencies over time, assuming styles rise, peak, and decline in a recognizable sequence.

Taphonomy

The study of processes affecting remains after death, including decay, scavenging, and burial, used to distinguish cultural behavior from natural disturbance in assemblages.

Oldowan industry

The earliest recognized stone tool tradition, about 2.6 million years ago, characterized by simple cores and sharp flakes produced by striking one stone against another.

Acheulean industry

A stone tool tradition associated with Homo erectus, distinguished by large bifacial hand axes and cleavers shaped on both faces, dating from about 1.7 million years ago.

Flotation

A recovery technique using water to separate charred plant remains and small artifacts from soil, providing evidence of diet, agriculture, and site formation.

Phoneme

The smallest sound unit that distinguishes meaning in a language, identified through minimal pairs such as the initial sounds of pat and bat in English.

Morpheme

The smallest unit of language carrying meaning or grammatical function, such as the free morpheme dog or the bound plural suffix -s.

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

The claim that language shapes or limits thought; strong determinism is largely rejected, while weaker relativity about color, space, and number has some experimental support.

Pidgin and creole

A pidgin is a simplified contact language with no native speakers; when a generation acquires it natively and it develops full grammar, it becomes a creole.