Glossary Entries between Skateholm and Spiro Mounds

Skraelings
The Skraelings is what the Norse settlers of Greenland and North America called the people who resided in those places and competed with the Vikings for their living.

Slash and Burn
Slash and burn--also known as swidden or shifting agriculture--is a form of growing crops that involves the rotation of several plots of land.

Slavery
In the last 100 years or so, archaeology shifted from a focus on past rulers and other elite persons to the study of less-fortunate people, including the relationship between slaves and their masters.

Slavic Cultures
The Slavic culture is the collective name given to several nomadic tribes of Poland and Moldavia between the 6th and 11th centuries AD

Smakkerup Huse (Denmark)
Smakkerup Huse is a European Mesolithic Ertebølle site located at the headwaters of a former fjord called the Saltbaek Vig on the island of Zealand, Denmark.

Snaketown (USA)
The archaeological site of Snaketown belongs to the Hohokam culture of the American southwest, and is located on the Gila River in the Sonoran Desert of central Arizona.

Soan Valley Tradition
The archaeological sites in the Siwalik region of Pakistan and India called the Soan Valley Tradition date to the Lower Paleolithic (circa 500,000-125,000 years ago), and are roughly equivalent to the Acheulian period.

Sobiejuchy (Poland)
Sobiejuchy is a small urnfield cemetery and lakeside village site in central Poland, occupied between about 750-500 BC

Social Evolutionism
The several theories known broadly as Social Evolutionism were born out of ideas created during the 18th century Enlightenment, and reworked in the mid-19th century.

Social Inequality and Ranking
The study of ranking and social inequality in archaeology is based on the anthropological and economic studies of Elman Service and Morton Fried.

Soil Resistivity
The geophysical prospection technique of investigating archaeological sites called soil resistivity was first used for archaeology by Richard Atkinson in the mid-1940s.

Songo Mnara (Tanzania)
Songo Mnara is an island off the coast of Tanzania, and the archaeological ruins of a stonehouse community closely associated with the Swahili culture.

Son Vi Culture
The Son Vi culture is the name given to the Upper Paleolithic lithic tradition of highland Vietnam.

Song Dynasty
The Song Dynasty in China was established in 960 AD, after the fall of the Tang Dynasty and fifty years of chaos.

Sonoran Agricultural Complex
The Sonoran Agricultural Complex is the general name given to the suite of crops grown in the American southwest and documented in sites such as Bat Cave beginning about 4,000-3,500 BP.

Songhai Empire
The Songhai Empire was established in western subsaharan Africa by Sonni 'Ali Ber in AD 1464.

Soninke Society
The Soninké were (and are) traders of west Africa with an oral history tradition dating back nearly 1000 years.

Sonota Complex
The Sonota Complex (also called Besant-Sonota) is the name archaeologists have given to Woodland bison hunters in the American Great Plains in Canada and the United States

Sourcing in Archaeology
One avenue of archaeological investigations is called sourcing, identifying the location where a particular resource occurs naturally, in figuring out how it got where you found it.

Southern Dispersal Route
The Southern Dispersal Route refers to a theory concerning an early migration of modern human beings from southern Africa to the east along the coastlines of Africa, Arabia and India to Australia and Melanesia between about 70,000 and 45,000 years ago.

Southeastern Ceremonial Complex
The Southeastern Ceremonial Complex (also known as the Southern Cult) is the name given to a broad, regional similarity of artifacts, iconography, ceremonies and mythology of the Mississippian period between about AD 1000 and 1600.

Sparta (Greece)
Sparta was one of several city states that arose in Greece during the Classical period (others include Athens, Corinth, and Thebes)

Spatial Analysis
The study of spatial analysis in archaeology concerns examining the pattern of archaeological artifacts or sites as they appear in relation to one another.

Sphinx (Egypt)
The ancient Egyptian sculpture called The Sphinx is located on the Giza plateau, and was probably carved at the request of the 4th dynasty pharaoh Khafre (or Cheops).

Spirit Cave (Thailand)
The Spirit Cave is a group of inter-connecting caverns in a karst topography region of northern Thailand, with a substantial Hoabinhian occupation.

Spiro Mounds (USA)
The archaeological site of Spiro Mounds is a Caddoan tradition site, located in the Arkansas Valley of eastern Oklahoma, in the southern plains region of the United States.

Solutrean-Clovis Connection
The Solutrean-Clovis connection is a theory suggesting that the original human colonizers of the North American continent were direct descendants of Upper Paleolithic hunter-gatherers from the Iberian peninsula of Europe.

Skateholm (Sweden)
Skateholm is a group of nine sites located on an ancient lagoon in the Scania region of southern Sweden

Skhul Cave (Israel)
Skhul Cave is an important Neanderthal site located on Mount Carmel is modern-day ISrael.

What is a Spit?
A spit is what some archaeologists call an arbitrary excavation level.