Concise Oxford Dictionary of Archaeology (655 page)

See
SLASH AND BURN AGRICULTURE
.

 
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A burial deposited inside a boat or ship that is taken out of the water and put in a pit in the ground. Such burials are sometimes covered by barrows, as in Mound 1 at
SUTTON HOO
, Suffolk. Ship burials are a distinctive feature of Viking communities in northwest Europe, but are found in other cultures too.

 
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South American farming cultures found in the Rio Ucayali area of Amazonia and tentatively dated to
c.
ad 1500 and later. Characterized by their ceramic assemblages which belong to the Polychrome Horizon Style of Amazonia.

 
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A group of Upper Palaeolithic sites on the terraces of the Yubetsu River in the Hokkaido region of Japan. Excavations in the 1950s and 1960s revealed two main groups of material. The oldest dates to between 18000 and 13000 years ago and includes large blades, burins, scrapers, and some bifacial points made on obsidian. The younger group dating to the period 13000 through to 10000 years ago has more bifacial points and microblades, the latter made in a distinctive technique, known as the Yubetsu technique, in which a large biface is made into a core in the form of a long carinated scraper.
[Rep.: T. Naganuma
et al
., 1999, Excavation report on the Shirataki site group in Shirataki Village, Manbetsu District.
Journal of the Japanese Archaeological Association
, 8, 101–16]

 
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An administrative and political subdivision of the Saxon kingdoms which developed into the principal division of England as a whole during the later 1st millennium
ad
. Initially established as military districts from which an army could be raised, the ealdorman as the leader of a shire soon had other responsibilities including tax collection and presiding over a shire court or
MOOT
. By the mid 10th century
ad
subdivisions of the shires were also widely recognized:
hundreds
in the midlands and south and
wapentakes
in the north where Scandinavian influence was strongest. It is suspected, however, that these smaller units (roughly equal to 100
HIDES
of land) were in fact much older as defined territories than the shires they formed part of; in some cases the hundreds may originate in late Roman administrative units.

 
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Long thin chisel-shaped ground-stone tool with a D-shaped cross-section. Common in LBK assemblages of central Europe during the early Neolithic where they were probably used as a sort of hoe.

 
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