Basarabi Culture

Alaka Culture

A preceramic shell midden culture on the northwest coast of Guyana which may date to c 2000 BC. Located in the mangrove swamps, the middens have been grouped into the Alaka Phase. The culture relied on shellfish gathering, with some grinding stones, choppers, manos, and metates. There are some cr...

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Alaka Culture

Corded Beaker Culture

A Late Neolithic culture in central and northern Europe from c 2800 BC, named after a characteristic cord-marked decoration found on pottery. The Corded beaker culture belongs to the so-called Battle-Ax cultures of Europe. There were two phases of new burial rites, with individual rather than com...

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Corded Beaker Culture

Tanged Point Culture

A term once used for any of a series of cultures of the Postglacial period whose tool kits include small tanged or shouldered points, e.g. the Ahrensburgian and Hamburgian.

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Tanged Point Culture

Culture Center

The center of a culture area, so designated because it best represents the essential qualities of the culture.

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Culture Center

Megalithic Culture

In India, an Iron Age culture of the south from the 1st millennium BC or earlier which lasted into the early 1st millennium AD. The grave forms include urn burials and various cist, pit, and rock-cut graves. Stone alignments are also associated and graves generally contain burnished black-and-red...

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Megalithic Culture

Andronovo Culture

A culture of southern Siberia, between the Don and Yenisei Rivers, dating to the 2nd millennium BC. The culture was relatively uniform in this large area and agriculture played a large role. Wheat and millet were cultivated and cattle, horses, and sheep bred. The metal-using culture (ores from th...

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Andronovo Culture

Ertebølle

The final Mesolithic culture of the west Baltic coastal region and coastal kitchen midden culture of Scandinavia. The type site is a coastal shell mound in Jutland, Denmark, dated to c 3900-3250 BC. Pollen analysis places the start of the culture within the Atlantic period, after c 5000 BC. The l...

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Ertebølle

Riverton Culture

Archaic culture near Vincennes, Indiana, dating c 1500-1000 BC. It was a hunting-gathering culture with a variety of stone and bone tools. There were year-round settlements and seasonally occupied bases, hunting, and transient camps.

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Riverton Culture

Przeworsk Culture

Late Iron Age culture in the Vistula and Bug drainages in southeast Poland of the La Tène period. It is known mainly from graves, which have metal artifacts and fibulae.

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Przeworsk Culture

Rössen Culture

The successor of western branch of the Neolithic Linear Pottery Culture, with which is has many features in common. Its main distribution was in Rhineland and central and southern Germany, parallel to Lengyel culture in Czechoslovakia and mid-Danube. It is characterized by pottery with complex in...

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Rössen Culture

Old Cordilleran Culture

A late Pleistocene cultural tradition based on the hunting of small game and the collection of wild foods in the mountain and plateau region of western North America, especially Oregon and Washington, between c 9000-5000 BC (or later). The diagnostic tool is the leaf-shaped Cascade point, a disti...

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Old Cordilleran Culture

Jastorf Culture

Iron Age culture of the southern Baltic during the late Hallstatt (600-300 BC), with some of the earliest iron metallurgy of the area. It extended from Lower Saxony through Pomerania.

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Jastorf Culture

Denalian Culture

A prehistoric culture or complex of central Alaska (the Tangle Lakes) dating to c 10,500-7000 BC. Similar to the Siberian Dyuktai (Diuktai) culture and defined by H. West in 1967, it is characterized by wedge-shaped microcores, microblades, burins, and bifacial points, scrapers on flakes, and lar...

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Denalian Culture

Spitsyn Culture

Early Upper Palaeolithic culture on the Don River in European Russia, dating to c 40,000-30,000 bp. Its artifacts include burins, retouched blades and scrapers, bone tools and ornaments.

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Spitsyn Culture

Agrelo Culture

The Agrelo culture was centered in northwestern Argentina and dates from AD 1 to 1000. The type site is just south of Mendoza and it features distinctive deep, wide-mouthed pottery with parallel stepped incised lines, punctations, and fingernail impressions, typical of southern Andean tradition. ...

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Agrelo Culture

Ozieri Culture

Late Neolithic culture of Sardinia, known from caves and open villages, and dated to the late 4th and 3rd millennia BC. It produced elaborately decorated, high-quality pottery. Classic Ozieri decorated ware has been dated to c 4100-3500 BC at the Grotta di Filiestru (Bonu Ighinu). There are rock-...

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Ozieri Culture

Majiabang

A Neolithic site and culture of Jiaxing, China, near Shanghai. The people are descendants of the 5th millennium BC Ho-mu-tu in the region south of the Yangtze near Shanghai. The early phase yielded a radiocarbon date of c 4000 BC. It had close ties with the Ch'ing-lien-kang culture in southern Ki...

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Majiabang

Titterington Culture

A non-ceramic Late Archaic culture of the Midwest, c 2500-1900 BC, with small hunting and processing camps, base settlements, and mortuary sites. The artifacts include bifaces and were not heat-treated.

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Titterington Culture

Peterborough Culture

Neolithic culture grafted on to the native Mesolithic culture, one of the two major Neolithic groups of England (with the Windmill Hill people). They lived in villages and on seashores, grew grain and raised cattle, and hunted with square-tipped arrowheads. They also used axes and microlithic sic...

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Peterborough Culture

British Mountain Culture

A Late Palaeolithic culture of the Northwest Arctic in Yukon, near the border of Canada and Alaska. Artifacts, such as percussion flakes, share traits of European and Asian Levallois-Mousterian stone toolkits and are possibly 18,000 years old.

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British Mountain Culture

Boat-Ax Culture

A culture of eastern Scandinavia found in the late Neolithic Period, c 2000 BC, that was an outlier of the European Battle-Ax cultures. This single-grave culture spread rapidly through Sweden, Finland, and the Danish islands. The people displayed the aspects of a homogeneous culture, with central...

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Boat-Ax Culture

Laurel Culture

An Initial Woodland culture, dating c 200 BC-700 AD, located in northern Michigan, northern Ontario, northern Minnesota, south-central Manitoba, and east-central Saskatchewan. Artifacts include togglehead antler harpoons, cut beaver incisors, copper tools and beads, and grit-tempered pottery with...

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Laurel Culture

Michelsberg

A Middle Neolithic culture of Belgium, northeastern France, the Rhineland and parts of Switzerland from c 4500-4000 BC. It occupies a frontier zone on the borders of the Danubian culture, TRB culture, and western Neolithic complex, and shares traits with all three. The type site is a hilltop encl...

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Michelsberg

Danubian Culture

Early farming culture(s) of the Danube basin of central and eastern Europe, of the Neolithic and Eneolithic, starting c 5300 BC. The stages, named by Gordon Childe, were Danubian I (Linear Pottery culture), Danubian II (later Neolithic cultures, such as Tisza, Lengyel, Rossen, and stroke-ornament...

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Danubian Culture

Dnieper-Donets

A 3rd- and 2nd-millennium BC Late Neolithic culture of the Ukraine. Large numbers of small settlements are known with hunter-gatherer subsistence known. Large quantities of comb-pricked pots found but grave goods were rare except for copper rings and tooth necklaces. Extended inhumation was the n...

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