A. Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers
(1827–1900) [Bi]British soldier, anthropologist, and archaeologist often regarded as the ‘father of scientific archaeology’. He was born on 14 April 1827 at Hope Hall near Bramham Park, North ...
Aaron Burr
(1756–1836)US Democratic Republican statesman. After losing the presidential election to Jefferson in 1800, Burr was elected Vice-President. He was defeated in the contest for the governorship of New ...
abacus
An ancient device for performing arithmetic calculations by sliding beads along rods or in grooves. Despite the spread of electronic calculators and computers, the abacus is still widely used in the ...
Abbeville
[Si]A gravel pit in the 45 m gravel terrace of the Somme Valley, France, from which numerous handaxes were obtained by Boucher de Perthes and others from ad 1836 onwards and which in 1939 gave its ...
Abbevillian
[CP]Now obsolete, this term was originally proposed by Abbé Breuil in ad 1939 to describe the pre‐Acheulian flint industries of western Europe on the basis of material from Abbeville in France. Also ...
ABC Model
[De]A scheme for the cultural history of the British Iron Age first proposed by Christopher Hawkes in 1931, but expanded and elaborated in the late 1950s as the opening paper at a conference on the ...
abduction
An inference process widely used in artificial intelligence, particularly in expert systems and rule-based systems. In diagnosis, for example, there may be a rule like “if measles then red spots” so ...
Abejas Phase
[CP]Fourth main phase of activity in the Tehuacán Valley of Mexico, dating to the period 4300–3000bc, marked archaeologically by the appearance of semipermanent villages of pit houses, new species of ...
Abingdon ware
[Ar]A type of middle Neolithic round‐bottomed decorated pottery found in the upper Thames valley and central parts of England, one of the regional variations of the so‐called Southern Decorated ...
abortion
There is no actual prohibition in the Bible against aborting a foetus. Nevertheless, in the unanimously accepted Jewish consensus, abortion is a very serious offence, though foeticide is not treated ...
