| material culture | Tangible, surviving evidence of human activities.
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| archaeological record | The body of information about the past that has survived to the present.
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| artifacts | The objects and materials that people have made and used.
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| sites | Accumulations of artifacts and features, representing the places where people lived or carried out certain activities.
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| regions | Large geographic areas, containing a number of archaeological sites, that have been physically or conceptually modified.
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| scale | (1) Different levels of discovery, analysis, and interpretation in archaeology; or (2) the size of a map relative to the area it portrays.
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| attributes | Detailed characteristics of archaeological materials and information.
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| hominin | Early human ancestor, fossil form (replaces the term hominid).
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| context | Place and association among the archaeological materials and the situation in which they occur.
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| primary context | The original position of an object in its place of discard or deposition; in place (Latin: in situ).
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| in situ | The original position of an object in its place of discard or deposition; in place; primary context.
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| provenience | The place of discovery or origin. Where an item is from (a.k.a. provenance in classical archaeology).
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| ecofacts | Unmodified, natural items found in archaeological contexts, often plant or animal material.
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| flora | Generic term for the archaeological remains of plants; the general class of plants.
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| fauna | Generic term for the archaeological remains of animals; the general class of animals.
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| features | The permanent facilities and structures that people construct in or on the earth.
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| midden | Any substantial accumulation of garbage or waste at a locus of human activity; archaeological deposits of trash and/or shells that accumulate in heaps and mounds. A shell midden is a specific type of midden composed largely of mollusk shells.
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| inhumation | Burial of all or part of a corpse; contrast with cremation.
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| cremation | The incinerated remains of a human body.
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| cenotaph | An empty grave, without a body.
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| activity area | Location of specific tasks or behaviors within a site.
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| assemblage | A related set of different things.
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| industry | One object or artifact type that appears in a number of assemblages.
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| component | An assemblage from a single layer, living floor, or occupation horizon; a set of materials in contemporary use by the same group of people.
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| multicomponent | A mixture of different episodes or periods of activity.
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| single component | The remains of a single episode of human activities.
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| occupation horizon | The layer or stratum that accumulates during an episode of human habitation and activity.
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| living floor | The actual places where people lived and carried out their activities.
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| tradition | The continuity of similar artifacts and design through time.
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| horizon | Layer or assemblage associated with geological strata or archaeological contents—usage includes a soil horizon, a cultural horizon; the geographic extent of similar artifacts and design in space.
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| phase | A particular period in time and space where an assemblage occurs.
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| open-air sites | Sites on land and uncovered, in contrast to sites in caves or rockshelters.
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| rockshelter | A shallow cave or overhang, defined by having a width greater than its depth.
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| surface sites | Sites visible on the surface of the ground.
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| nonsite (off-site) | The areas between archaeological sites where there are occasional traces of human activity in the form of isolated artifacts, features, or other evidence.
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| residential sites | Places of habitation where people live and carry out the everyday activities that sustain life.
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| camp | A short-term, temporary settlement, usually associated with hunter-gatherers or nomads.
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| hamlet | A small village with just a handful of houses and a small number of inhabitants.
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| village | A small residential unit of permanent houses with a population of less than a few hundred.
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| town | Larger than a village with internal differentiation in size and location of structures and usually containing one or more public buildings.
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| city | An urban agglomeration with a population of 10,000 or more, internal differentiation, and distinct civic or ceremonial areas within its boundaries.
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| extractive sites | Nonresidential localities where some members of the society obtain food or other resources.
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| shell midden | A specialized kind of extractive site, a mound made up of large dumps of shell from mussels, oysters, or other species.
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| rock art | Decoration of rock surface by painting, pecking, or engraving.
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| pictographs | Rock art made by the application of pigment to rock surfaces.
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| petroglyphs | Rock art made by removing the outer surface of a rock by carving or hammering.
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| landscape | A humanly modified or perceived area.
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| mound | (a.k.a. barrows, tumuli) A built pile or heap of earth or stones, resembling a very small hill, usually a burial monument.
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| stela | A stone monument, carved and/or painted with designs and/or inscriptions, common in the Maya region (plural: stelae).
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| tell | An accumulated mound of occupation debris; man-made settlement mounds of earth and trash that accumulate from the decomposition of mudbrick, common in Southwest Asia and Southeast Europe.
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| gravity model | A concept from geography whereby interaction among settlements is based on size, similar to interaction among planets based on gravity. Bigger communities have more interaction and influence on smaller communities.
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| site formation | The processes involved in the creation of archaeological sites.
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| systemic context | The actual use of artifacts and features in the past or present.
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| archaeological context | The buried or surface context in which archaeological remains are found; what survives to the present.
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| cultural transformation | Modification of the archaeological record caused by human activity.
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| natural transformation | Modification of the archaeological record by geological, hydrological, or chemical activity.
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| slopewash | Gradual movement of sediments from higher to lower ground as a natural process of erosion and deposition.
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| taphonomy | The study of what happens to a plant or animal between its death and the time it is found as a fossil or archaeological remain.
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| bioturbation | Disturbance of the archaeological record from plant and animal activities such as root growth or animal digging.
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