Practice question · True or false
A site yielding no textiles is evidence that its inhabitants had little clothing.
Hints
- Absence here is a statement about the soil.
- Acidic ground destroys organic material entirely.
Show the answer
False
Why
It is evidence about the soil. "No textiles" means acidic ground, and reading the absence as history rather than chemistry is how timber-and-cloth societies get written up as impoverished.
Practise Material Culture as a Source
The app has 5 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. History I is free to start.
More questions on Material Culture as a Source
- Pottery from one century is highly variable in form and from the next is nearly uniform. What does the…
- Why does adding corridors to a house change social life, when it adds no rooms?
- Why is material culture essential for some populations?
- Why are waterlogged sites — bogs, wells, shipwrecks — so valuable?
- Why is enclosure visible from the air?
- Sort each material by whether it typically survives in ordinary soil.
- Why does a high rate of repair in an assemblage tell an archaeologist about scarcity?