DSST General Anthropology key terms

The habit of judging another culture by the standards of one's own, often treating one's own ways as normal and others as strange or inferior.

The principle that a culture's beliefs and practices should be understood in their own context rather than ranked against outsiders' values.

An approach that treats a culture or species as an integrated whole, studying its parts together rather than in isolation.

The lifelong process by which people learn the language, norms, and skills of their own society, largely without formal instruction.

A fieldwork method in which the researcher lives among a community, joining daily activities while systematically recording observations.

A written account of a particular culture, usually based on long-term fieldwork, describing its practices and the meanings people attach to them.

The system of socially recognized relationships based on descent, marriage, or both, which shapes rights, obligations, and group membership.

A rule tracing group membership through only one parent's line, either the mother's (matrilineal) or the father's (patrilineal).

A marriage rule requiring a person to marry outside a defined group, such as a clan or lineage, which links separate families.

A subsistence strategy based on tending herds of animals, often with seasonal movement to find pasture and water.

Small-scale farming using hand tools and simple techniques, typically on garden plots that are worked for a few seasons.

The main way a society obtains food, such as foraging, herding, farming, or industrial production, which shapes much of its social life.

A theoretical approach holding that a society's technology and environment strongly shape its economy and social structure, with ideas following from those conditions.

The study of layered deposits, where lower layers are generally older than upper ones, used to establish relative chronological order.

The principle that in undisturbed sedimentary layers, material deposited first lies beneath material deposited later.

Estimating the age of a find in comparison with other finds or layers, establishing older or younger without giving a calendar date.

A method that measures the decay of carbon-14 in once-living material to estimate its age, useful for remains up to roughly 50,000 years old.

The time required for half of a radioactive isotope in a sample to decay, the basis for calculating radiometric ages.

Any object made or modified by humans, such as a tool or pot, which archaeologists use as evidence of past behavior.

A nonportable element of an archaeological site, such as a hearth, pit, or posthole, that shows where human activity occurred.

The controlled digging and recording of a site, removing deposits in measured units so that the position of each find is documented.

The study of what happens to remains after death or discard, including decay, scavenging, and burial, before they are recovered.

Preserved remains or traces of an organism, usually mineralized in rock, that provide direct evidence of past life.

Walking upright on two legs, a defining trait of the human lineage visible in the shape of the pelvis and the position of the foramen magnum.

A member of the evolutionary lineage that includes modern humans and their extinct upright-walking relatives, distinguished from other apes.

The process by which traits improving survival and reproduction become more common in a population over generations.

A trait or behavior that helps an organism cope with its environment and that arose through evolutionary processes.

The movement of genes between populations through migration and interbreeding, which tends to reduce differences among them.

Random change in gene frequencies from one generation to the next, especially strong in small populations.

The view that racial categories are defined by social convention rather than by clear biological boundaries, since human genetic variation is largely continuous.

The smallest unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a language, such as the difference between /p/ and /b/.

The smallest meaningful unit of language, such as a root or an affix like the plural -s.

The rules governing how words are combined into phrases and sentences in a language.

The study of the sound system of a language, including which sounds contrast and how they pattern together.

The complete set of rules, including sound, word formation, and sentence structure, that speakers of a language follow.

The proposal that the language a person speaks influences how they perceive and categorize experience, often called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

Alternating between two or more languages or language varieties within a conversation, often depending on setting or interlocutor.