Glossary: S Terms

A storage pit is what archaeologists call the remains of an ancient pit which was excavated by ancient people for storage of goods or materials.

Stone boiling is an ancient way of getting your soup hot.

A stone hoe is a tool used to dig in the earth, and is primarily associated with prehistoric farming societies who have no access to metals.

Stallings Island is the type site of the Stallings culture, a Late Archaic culture of the Middle Savannah River Valley of South Carolina and Georgia in the American Southeast, dated between 5000 and 3000 years ago.

The early Mesolithic archaeological site of Star Carr is probably one of the best known sites in England, occupied intermittently for about 300 years, beginning about 10,700 years ago.

Starch grains, tiny granules that operate within plants as the main mechanism for food storage, have become an important tool archaeologists use to identify the diets of past peoples.

Statistics are used in archaeology to help us see patterns in the data we might not otherwise identify.

Statue-menhirs are a kind of megalithic standing stone consisting of a carved human or human-like statue of life or larger size.

Stentinello culture is the name given to a Neolithic site and related sites in the Calabria region of Italy, Sicily and Malta, dated to the 5th and 4th millennia BC.

The Step Pyramid of Djoser was one of the earliest of the pyramids built in Egypt, during the Old Kingdom's 3rd Dynasty about 2800 BC.

Steppe societies is what archaeologists use to refer to the pastoral nomads of central Asia.

The ancient early man site of Sterkfontein is a cave in a dolomite hill of the Blaaubank River Valley, about 10 kilometers northwest of Krugersdorp, South Africa.

The Stone Age is the name first given by Danish museum director Christian Jurgensen Thomsen to the earliest period of artifacts in his museum (the others were Bronze and Iron Ages).

Stonehenge is a megalithic rock monument of 150 enormous stones set in a purposeful circular pattern, located on the Salisbury Plain of southern England, the main portion of it built about 2000 BC.

In archaeology, the study of stratigraphy involves looking at the geological and archaeological layers that make up an archaeological deposit to better understand the processes that created the site.

Structuralism, which started out as a theory of language, ended up impacting most of the social and historical scieces including archaeology during the latter half of the twentieth century.

Subsistence, to an archaeologist anyway, refers to the suite of behaviors that humans use to feed themselves.

Archaeologists use the term 'subsurface testing' to mean exploration of an archaeological site using shovels or mechanical equipment.

The Sui Dynasty (AD 581-618) of China, is best known for putting the pieces of China back together again, after the fall of the Han Dynasty.

Sumer was one of two Early Dynastic period communities in southern Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers (the other was Akkad).

Sunda is the name given to the amalgamated Pleistocene-age continent made up of Southeast Asia and Indonesian Islands.

Sunflower (Helianthus spp.) is a plant native to the American continents. Prehistoric use of sunflower included ornamental and ceremonial use, as well as for food and flavoring.

The Sungir archaeological site is an enormous Upper Paleolithic archaeological settlement and cemetery located outside of Vladimir, Russia

The Susquehanna Tradition is a Late Archaic period (ca. 5,900 to 3,200 years ago) cultural group of the northeastern United States and including Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.

The archaeological site of Sutton Hoo consists of a group of at least fourteen burial mounds, located in southeastern Suffolk, England, one of which is an Anglo-Saxon period ship burial with some of the richest burial goods ever found in the UK.

Swartkrans is a Lower Paleolithic cave site in South Africa, discovered in 1948 by Robert Broom and excavated by C.K. Brain in the 1960s.

Sweet Track is the name given to the earliest known trackway in northern Europe, built, according to tree ring analysis of the wood, in the winter or early spring of 3807 or 3806 BC.

Swifterbant is the name of the type sites of the Swifterbant culture, a Late Mesolithic and Neolithic culture located in the Netherlands.

The Syalakh Culture is the name archaeologists have given to an Early Neolithic (6500-5200 BP) culture of Siberia

Sylvester Manor is the name of the ruins of a plantation established in 1651 for provisioning two sugar plantations in Barbados

A synagogue is, of course, a religious structure that can be identified with the Jewish faith; the earliest synagogues probably developed during the Byzantine period of the 6th century BC.

Systematic flaking is the collective term used by archaeologists to refer to a suite of characteristics found in a pile of broken pieces of stone (called lithics), that we have agreed are evidence that the stone was broken by either a human or one of our closest relatives

Steenbokfontein Cave is the name of a Later Stone Age rockshelter with a megamidden deposit, and some of the oldest rock art known from South Africa. The cave is located on Eland's Bay on the West Cape region of South Africa, and it is one of the few coastal caves which were visited by humans regularly between 3000 and 2000 BP

Archaeology of North American Subarctic. Subarctic Prehistory. Paleoindian, Archaic, Subarctic. Refer to this page to learn more about the Prehistory of the Subarctic.

Refer to this page to learn more about Squash Domestication, Domestication and Spread of Squash (Cucurbita Pepo). History of domestication and spread of the squash