Terms

The words archaeologists use, in plain language.

69 terms met in study, grouped by subject. Each names the work it comes from. Full references are on the Sources page. Maya words have their own page, Words.

Stone tools and crafts

Biface

A stone tool chipped on two sides. (Moholy-Nagy, 1997)

Ovate biface

An oval or teardrop chert blade, hafted in wood and used as an axe. (Moholy-Nagy, 2003, pp. 13 to 14)

Prismatic blade

A narrow obsidian blade with keen edges, pressed off a prepared core. (Moholy-Nagy, 1997. Moholy-Nagy, 2003, p. 33)

Lancet

An unbroken prismatic blade. Such blades were placed in offerings with chert pieces and tied to the drawing of blood. (Moholy-Nagy, 2003, pp. 23, 33)

Core

The parent stone that a knapper strikes to get flakes or blades. (Woodfill and Andrieu, 2012)

Debitage

Chips and scraps thrown off while stone is worked. (Woodfill and Andrieu, 2012)

Knapper

Someone who makes stone tools by knocking flakes off a stone. (Moholy-Nagy, 2003, p. 44)

Hammerstone

A rounded stone a knapper strikes with. (Moholy-Nagy, 2003, p. 44)

Eccentric

Chert or obsidian chipped into a strange outline. Eccentrics went into offerings and were never used as tools. (Moholy-Nagy, 1997, p. 306)

Ideotechnic

Of an object whose purpose was ritual or symbolic, with no everyday job. (Moholy-Nagy, 1997, p. 306)

Incised obsidian

Big obsidian flakes or blades with images cut into a face. Tikal made many of them. (Moholy-Nagy, 2011/2014, pp. 34 to 35)

Mano

The stone held in the hand to grind maize and other food against a metate. (Moholy-Nagy, 2003, pp. 37 to 39)

Metate

The flat or hollowed lower stone for grinding. (Moholy-Nagy, 2003, pp. 39 to 41)

Celt

A polished stone blade. At Tikal most celts are jadeite. (Moholy-Nagy, 2003, pp. 44 to 45)

Barkbeater

A ridged stone that pounds tree bark flat, to make paper or bark cloth. (Moholy-Nagy, 2003, p. 45)

Spindle whorl

The small weight that keeps a spindle turning as fiber is spun into thread. (Moholy-Nagy, 2003, pp. 46 to 47)

Perforator

A sharp bone point. At Tikal it may have served in weaving and basketry. In Maya art a perforator pierces skin for blood. (Moholy-Nagy, 2003, p. 59. Chinchilla Mazariegos, 2017, p. 175)

Doughnut stone

A limestone ring whose use is not known. It may have weighted a club. (Moholy-Nagy, 2003, p. 48)

Use-wear

Also called microwear. The scratches and polish that work leaves on a tool edge, studied with a microscope. (Fagan and Durrani, 2016, p. 206. Aoyama, 2007, p. 7)

Refitting

Putting struck flakes back together around their core, like a puzzle. (Fagan and Durrani, 2016, p. 206)

Expedient and specialist production

Expedient tools were made fast, by whoever needed them. Specialists made finer goods for other people. (Moholy-Nagy, 2003, p. 9)

Attached and independent production

Attached craftworkers made goods for a patron who controlled the work. Independent ones made goods to sell or trade. (Moholy-Nagy, 1997)

Offerings, burials, and trash

Cache

Objects buried as a gift, beneath a stela or inside a temple or palace. (Moholy-Nagy, 1997, p. 302)

Problematical deposit

A Tikal term for a find that is neither a clear offering nor a clear burial, often mixed or in an odd spot. (Wright, 2012. Moholy-Nagy, 2003, p. 6)

Termination ritual

Rites that ended the life of a house or building. Haviland saw grinding stones left in caches and graves as part of such rites. (Moholy-Nagy, 2003, p. 38)

Bloodletting

Offering one's own blood to the gods. Also called self-sacrifice. (Chinchilla Mazariegos, 2017, pp. 70, 123)

Midden

A dump of household refuse, often beside the platform of a house. (Moholy-Nagy, 1997)

Chultun

A pit carved down into bedrock. Many may have stored food or water, and many were later packed with fill. (Moholy-Nagy, 1997. Moholy-Nagy, 2003, p. 39)

Buildings and monuments

Stela

An upright slab of stone with carving, often of a ruler and dates. The plural is stelae. (UNESCO, Tikal National Park)

Lintel

The beam across the top of a door. Some at Tikal were carved wood, such as those of Temple I. (Kennett et al., 2013, p. 1)

Plaza Plan 4

A Tikal house group with a small shrine standing in the middle of its patio. (Román Ramírez et al., 2025)

Methods and science

Lidar

Laser pulses sent from an aircraft that map the earth beneath trees. (Houston et al., 2021. Canuto et al., 2018)

Hillshade

A relief map, lit as if by a low sun, drawn from lidar heights. (Maryland Department of Information Technology, MD iMAP)

Photogrammetry

Measuring an object or place from a set of overlapping photos. (Román Ramírez et al., 2025)

dStretch

A program that pushes color contrast so faded paint shows. (Román Ramírez et al., 2025)

AMS radiocarbon dating

A form of radiocarbon dating that counts atoms in an accelerator, so a tiny sample is enough. (Povinec et al., 2009, p. 45; Fewlass et al., 2018, p. 425)

cal yr BP

Radiocarbon years after calibration, counted back from AD 1950. (Tankersley et al., 2020)

Correlation constant

The day count that converts a Maya Long Count date to a date in the Gregorian calendar. The common one is the GMT constant. (Kennett et al., 2013, p. 1)

Strontium and oxygen isotopes

Chemical signals in tooth enamel that point to the place a person lived as a child. (Wright, 2012)

X-ray diffraction

A lab test that names the minerals in a sample from the way they scatter X-rays. (Tankersley et al., 2020)

Paleoethnobotany

The study of ancient plant remains to learn what people grew, ate, and burned. (Lentz et al., 2014. Biwer and VanDerwarker, 2015)

Starch grains and phytoliths

Tiny bits of plants that last on grinding tools and in soil and can be named under a microscope. (Piperno et al., 2009)

Seriation

Ordering pottery styles in time by tracing how each one comes into fashion and fades. (Fagan and Durrani, 2016, pp. 110 to 111)

Cross-dating

Giving a layer a date by finding in it a style already dated at another site. (Fagan and Durrani, 2016, p. 111)

Archaeological survey

Looking for and mapping sites across a landscape, with or without excavation. (Cline, 2018)

Ethnoarchaeology

Watching how people live now to help read what the past left behind. (Fagan and Durrani, 2016. Palka et al., 2026)

Cultural ecology

An approach that explains a culture by how its people fit their surroundings. (Hastorf, 2017)

Land, water, and farming

Swidden

Farming by clearing forest, planting for a season or more, then letting the plot rest and regrow. (Lentz et al., 2014)

Agroforestry

Tending forest so it yields wood, fuel, and food. (Lentz et al., 2014)

Extraction zone

The country around a city that supplied it with crops, firewood, and timber. (Lentz et al., 2014)

Carrying capacity

The number of people a stretch of land can support. (Lentz et al., 2014)

Bajo

A low area that floods in the rainy season, with swamp forest. (Lentz et al., 2014)

Karst

Limestone ground full of cracks and caves, where rain sinks out of sight. (Tankersley et al., 2020)

Zeolite

A volcanic mineral full of tiny pores that catch germs and poisons. It filtered water at Tikal. (Tankersley et al., 2020, p. 1)

Speleothem

A stalagmite or other cave growth. Its bands hold a record of past rain. (Lentz et al., 2014)

Time at Tikal

Protoclassic

A brief span between the Preclassic and the Classic, the Cimi phase at Tikal. (Moholy-Nagy, 1997)

Manik 3A

A slice of Tikal's Manik phase, AD 380 to 480, when signs of Teotihuacan contact appear. (Román Ramírez et al., 2025)

Early Late Classic and Late Late Classic

The earlier and later halves of the Late Classic, as Tikal Report 27B divides it. The dates are to verify. (Moholy-Nagy, 2003, p. 2)

Postclassic

The time after the Classic. Tikal's Caban phase belongs to its early part. (Moholy-Nagy, 1997)

From Teotihuacan

Talud-tablero

A building profile of a sloped base topped by a framed upright panel, tied to Teotihuacan. (Houston et al., 2021)

Tablero

The upright framed panel in a talud-tablero wall. (Román Ramírez et al., 2025)

Adosado

A platform added onto a pyramid's front face. (Román Ramírez et al., 2025)

Fresco secco

Paint laid on plaster that has already dried. The painted altar at Tikal shows brush layers of this kind. (Román Ramírez et al., 2025)

Theatre incense burners

Censers named for their showy, stagelike ornament. More than 5,000 pieces came from one Tikal group. (Román Ramírez et al., 2025)

Tlamimilolpa and Xolalpan

Two phases in the Teotihuacan sequence. Late Xolalpan runs from about AD 450 to 550. (Román Ramírez et al., 2025)

Glyphs and study

Emblem glyph

A title glyph that names a royal house and the place it ruled from. To verify.

Top affix

A small sign written above the main sign of a glyph block. To verify. (Thompson, 1962, as named by type foundries)

Epigrapher

A scholar who reads ancient inscriptions. To verify.

Beyond the Maya

Were-jaguar

An Olmec image that mixes a human baby with a jaguar. To verify.

Checked November 6, 2026.