Glossary: L Terms
La Mojarra (Mexico)
La Mojarra is an archaeological site in the state of Veracruz, Mexico, occupied from the late Formative period until at least the early Postclassic (ca. 300 BC-AD 1000).
La Tène Culture
The La Tene culture is what archaeologists call the barbarians of central Europe, who for several centuries terrorized the Greek and Roman civilizations during the European Iron Age.
La Tene (Switzerland)
The archaeological site of La Tène is located on the edge of Lake Neuchâtel, Switzerland; it is the type site for the Iron Age (450-50 BC) culture for which it is named.
Lachish (Israel)
The archaeological site of Lachish (also called Tel el-Duweir) is located approximately 40 kilometers south of Jerusalem.
Laetoli (Tanzania)
Laetoli is the name of an archaeological site in Tanzania, where three Australopithecus left their footprints, 3.6 million years ago.
Lagar Velho (Portugal)
The Lagar Velho cave (or Abrigo do Lagar Veldho) is a rockshelter in Portugal, where a 30,000 year old child burial was discovered with both Neanderthal and early modern human characteristics.
Lake Dwellings
Lake dwellings are what archaeologists call ancient houses set on wooden pilings erected on Alpine lake shores of Europe.
Lake Mungo (Australia)
Lake Mungo is the name of several archaeological sites, located in 13 inter-connected dry lake basins, located in western New South Wales, Australia.
Landnám
Landnám is the Old Norse word (roughly translated as "land take") which refers to the Viking style of land management practices, widely believed to have led to the environmental degradation of Iceland and Greenland.
Landscape Archaeology
Landscape archaeology is the study of people in their landscape: and the 21st century holistic science is the result of decades of theoretical squabbling.
Lapita Cultural Complex
The Lapita culture is the name given to the founding cultural group who settled Melanesia and the Pacific islands between 3600 and 3200 years ago.
Lascaux Cave (France)
A wonderful paleolithic art gallery, Lascaux Cave was discovered by a couple of schoolboys scrambling around the French Dordogne valley in 1940, and most likely painted between 15,000-17,000 years ago.
Last Glacial Maximum
The Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) refers to that period in earth's history when the glaciers were at their thickest and the sea levels at their lowest.
Laussel Venus
The Laussel Venus is a venus figurine holding an object that might be a bison horn core, or a crescent moon, depending on what we think, some 20,000 years or more after it was made.
Levisa Site, Cuba
Levisa is an important Archaic site located within a prehistoric rock shelter on Cuba.
Liang Bua Cave, Indonesia
Liang Bua Cave is the site where the possible new hominin species called Flores Man was found. Here's a description of the site and findings to date.
Lepenski Vir (Serbia)
Probably the best-known site in Serbia is Lepenski Vir, a series of Mesolithic villages located on a high sandy terrace of the Danube River
Lead Ore (Pb)
Lead (Pb) is a metallic ore that was first used during the Upper Paleolithic as inclusions in a 15,000 year old burial.
Lefkandi (Greece)
Lefkandi is an archaeological site and cemetery near the modern village of Eretria on the island of Euboea,
Lene Hara Cave (Indonesia)
Lene Hara Cave is a pre-Lapita site on the island of East Timor in the Indonesian archipelago, with occupations dated as old as 34,600 years ago.
Levallois Technique
Levallois is the name archaeologists have given to a distinctive flint knapping technique, which makes up part of the ancient Acheulean and Mousterian artifact assemblages.
Liangzhu Culture
Liangzhu is the name of a culture of the Late Neolithic Age in China (33200-2200 BC), found at more than 100 sites throughout Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces near Hangzhou Bay and the Lake Tai region of the lower reaches of the Yangtze river
Lidar (Light Detection and Ranging)
Lidar is a type of aircraft-based remote sensing, using laser-driven pulses of light and multispectral cameras to scan and process digital information about a landscape
Library of Ashurbanipal
The Library of Ashurbanipal is a collection of clay tablets written during the Mesopotamian king Ashurbanipal's reign between about 668-627 BC.
Linear A
Linear A is the first written language of the Minoan people on the island of Crete used during the Proto-palatial period (1900-1700 BC). We do not yet know how to read it.
Lindow Man (UK)
The Lindow Man bog body refers to mummified Iron Age human remains of a man recovered from a peat bog called Lindow Moss near Manchester in Cheshire county, England.
Linearbandkeramik Culture (LBK)
The Linearbandkeramik Culture (LBK) is the name given by German archaeologist F. Klopfleisch in 1884 to the first true farming communities in central Europe.
Lithics and Lithic Analysis
Archaeologists use the (slightly ungrammatical) term 'lithics' to refer to artifacts made of stone.
Linear B
Linear B is the name of the ancient script used by the Mycenean culture, inscribed on (or possibly inadvertently fired into) clay tablets on the Mycenanean site of Knossos and likely first used around 1350 BC
Little Egypt (Georgia)
The archaeological site of Little Egypt is believed to represent the ruins of Coosa, the capital of the Coosa Mississippian polity. If so, it was visited by the Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto in 1539.
Llangorse Crannog (Wales)
The archaeological site of Llangors Crannóg is located near Llangors Lake, within the Brecon Beacons National Park in Powys, Wales.
Lokalalei (Kenya)
The Lower Paleolithic archaeological sites called Lokalalei are located in the Lake Turkana region of Kenya, and are dated between 2.3 and 2.4 million years old.
Llamas
Llamas is a species of camelid which is native to South America, domesticated about 6,000-7,000 years ago in the Andean highlands.
Moundbuilder Myth
The lost race or moundbuilder myth is one created by incoming European settlers of the North American continent who could not, or did not want to, believe that the mounds had been built by the Native American peoples they were displacing.
Llullaillaco (Argentiina)
Llullaillaco is an Incan burial site on the summit of Mt. Llullaillaco, representative of the capacocha ceremony of child sacrifices.
Longphort
A longphort (plural longphuirt) is the name of a permanent stronghold constructed by the Vikings on the shores of Ireland.
Lower Paleolithic (Early Stone Age)
The Lower Paleolithic period (2.7 million to 200,000 years ago) is the first archaeology, that is to say, that period when the first evidence of what scientists consider human behaviors occurred.
Longshan Culture Timeline and Description
The Longshan culture is a Neolithic and Chalcolithic culture (ca 3000-1900 BC) of the Yellow River Valley of Shandong, Henan, Shanxi, Shaanxi, and Inner Mongolia provinces of China.
Lucy (AL 333, Hadar Region, Ethiopia)
Lucy is the name of the nearly complete skeleton of an Australopithecus afarensis, found in 1974 at AL 333, a site in the Hadar archaeological region on the Afar Triangle of Ethiopia.
Lucy (Hominid at AL 288, Ethiopia)
Lucy is the nearly complete skeleton of the early hominid creature called Australopithecus afarensis, whose discovery in 1974 reconfigured what paleontologists knew about human evolution.
Luna (Italy)
The ruins of the Etruscan, Roman and post-Roman trading port of Luna are located on the coast of northern Italy.
Luminescence Dating
Although the best known form of luminescence dating is thermoluminescence (or TL), there are several scientific methods which can specify the date of certain artifacts or soil sediments by measuring the amount of light energy they have trapped in their crystals.
Lustreware
Lustreware is the name of a pottery style created and expanded on by the 9th-13th century potters of the Islamic Civilization.
Lyon's Bluff (Mississippi USA)
The Lyon's Bluff site (Smithsonian designation 22OK520) is a Mississippian period mound and village site located in northeastern Oktibbeha County, Mississippi.