Glossary: M Terms
Mississippians
Mississippians refers to prehistoric farming people who lived between 1000-1500 AD, in the midwestern and southeastern portion of what is the United States today.
Mitla, Oaxaca (Mexico)
Mitla is an important archaeological site located in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, and an important religious center for the ancient Zapotec people.
El Miron (Spain)
The rockshelter called el Miron located in Cantabria, Spain, has several important prehistoric occupations, including a Neolithic and an Upper Paleolithic sites.
Milliken Site
The Archaic Northwest Coast site of Milliken is located on the Fraser river of British Columbia
Minanha (Belize)
Minanha was the name of a Maya petty kingdom, located on the north Vaca Plateau of west-central Belize.
Miami Circle (USA)
The Miami Circle, also called Brickell Point or the Brickell Site, is a hotly debated archaeological site in downtown Miami, on the Atlantic coast of Florida.
Midden
A midden is the archaeological term for a trash heap. Archaeologists love middens, because they contain the broken remains from all kinds of cultural behaviors, including food stuff and broken crockery; exhausted stone and metal tools; organic matter and sometimes burials.
Mississippian Civilization
The Mississippian civilization was made up of sedentary farmers of the interior rivers in North America
Middle Awash
The Middle Awash is part of the very rich archaeological region in Ethiopia called the Afar Triangle
Minoan Culture Timeline and Description
The Minoan civilization (Minoan culture) is what archaeologists call the early part of the prehistoric Bronze Age of Greece.
Mixtec Culture
Mixtec Culture refers, in general terms, to the people who lived in the Mixteca Alta region of what is now Oaxaca state in Mexico during the Classic (300 AD-800 AD) and Post-Classic (800 AD to the Spanish conquest) periods.
Misericordia (Portugal)
Misericordia is a vitrified fort in Portugal, which was used in a recent innovative study to test the utility of archaeomagnetic dating techniques on such sites.
Mitrou (Greece)
Mitrou is a Bronze Age and early Iron Age archaeological site located on a small tidal islet in the North Euboean Gulf of Greece
Mladec Cave (Czech Republic)
The cave site of Mladec in the Czech Republic contains modern human remains, Mladec-type projectile points and other artifacts in a European site that would otherwise be assigned to the Aurignacian period of Europe; except that it lacks typical Aurignacian artifacts.
Mochlos (Greece)
Mochlos is an island located off the north shore of Crete, with important Greek Bronze Age occupations
Mohenjo-daro (Pakistan)
Mohenjo-daro (also spelled Mohanjo-Daro and translated as "Mound of Mohan"; or Moenjo-daro "Mound of the Dead") is an important Indus civilization site, located in the Sindh province of Pakistan in the floodplain of the Indus River
The Moche
The Moche culture is the archaeological name of a South American farming and fishing society, who lived along the arid coast of what is now Peru between 100 and 800 AD
Mojiaoshan (China)
The archaeological site of Mojiaoshan is part of a Liangzhu complex site at Yuhang in Zhejiang Province, China.
Monte Alban (Mexico)
Monte Alban was the capital city of the Zapotec civilization of central Mexico, located in the state of Oaxaca, and occupied between 500 BC and 700 AD.
Montanissell Cave
Montanissell Cave is a Middle Bronze Age burial site, located in the Catalonian region of Spain
Molodova I (Ukraine)
The Middle and Upper Paleolithic site of Molodova is located on the Dniester River in the Chernovtsy province of the Ukraine.
Monden-tsujibatake (Japan)
The archaeological site of Monden-tsujibatake is a Yayoi period village and urnfield cemetery located in Fukuoka Prefecture, Japan
Monte Verde (Chile)
Monte Verde is Southern Chile's addition to the problem of when was the earliest settlement of the American continent.
Monte Grande (Italy)
The Monte Grande site is a Castelluccio culture site, located in the Agrigento region and consisting of an Early Bronze Age sanctuary and a sulfur extraction and processing site.
Montanist Communities
The Montanist communities, also known as the Phrygians, were an early Christian sect of the second century AD in Asia minor.
Monte Loreto (Italy)
The copper mines in the valleys and side walls of Monte Loreto in the Liguria region of Italy are some of the earliest known copper mines in the Iberian peninsula.
Mounds
Mounds are a type of monumental architecture built primarily of earth, although they do occasionally have stone or wood foundations.
Mound Builder Myth
The moundbuilder myth was one of the earliest mythologies of the New World believed by the European settlers of the 17th and 18th centuries.
Monteoru Culture
The Monteoru Culture is the name given to the Early Bronze Age culture of Romania and Bulgaria, between about 2000 and 2500 BC.
Mongooses
Mongooses are native to Africa and Asia, but a small group of them are to be found in the southwestern Iberian peninsula. This article discusses how they got there and who brought them.
Mounds
A mound is the generic name used by archaeologists to describe a man-made heap of earth, which may or may not contain a burial. Recent work has identified the structural complexity and
Monumental Architecture
Monumental architecture, at an archaeological site, refers to large man-made structures of stone or earth.
Mousterian
The Mousterian industry is an ancient Middle Stone Age method of making stone tools, associated with our hominid relatives the Neanderthals in Europe and both Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis in Africa.
Muisca Culture
The Muisca culture were people who lived in the Andes Mountains of central Columbia from about AD 1000-1550.
Mount Carmel (Israel)
The Mount Carmel region near the modern town of Haifa, Israel contains several of the most famous Neanderthal sites in the middle east
Moundville
Moundville was a regional polity of the Mississippian civilization, located on the Black Warrior River in the southeastern part of the American state of Alabama.
Mount Albion Complex
The Mount Albion Complex is a form of Archaic lifestyle (hunting and gathering) that took place in high altitudes of the Rocky Mountains and Great Basin of North America.
Multi-Regional Hypothesis
The Multi-Regional Hypothesis argues that our earliest hominid ancestors radiated out from Africa and Homo sapiens evolved from several different groups of Homo erectus in several places throughout the world.
Mumba Rockshelter (Tanzania)
The Mumba Rockshelter is a Middle Stone Age and Later Stone Age site located in the Rift Valley of Tanzania in eastern Africa, near the eastern shore of Lake Eyasi.
Munsa (Uganda)
Munsa is an African Iron Age village, located in southeastern Uganda/
Murray Springs (USA)
The Murray Springs site is located in the San Pedro Valley of Arizona, and it is an early Clovis site where buffalo were butchered about 11,000 years ago.
Mycenae (Greece)
The archaeological site of Mycenae, located on the steep slopes of the island of Euboea in Greece, was part of the Aegean cultures of the Argolid.
My Son (Vietnam)
The World Heritage archaeological site of My Son was a Cham dynasty capital, between the 4th and 12th centuries AD.