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The study of skeletal remains from archeological sites by biological (or physical) anthropologists. Bioarcheology differs in several ways from traditional skeletal research (see illustration). Previous work focused on individual case studies (for…

The oldest archeological cultures of the New World, the ancestors of modern Native Americans. The Paleoindian colonizing populations of the Americas were Homo sapiens sapiens who arrived during the late Pleistocene (Ice Age) from Asia, though…

The study of disease in the ancient past. Paleopathology is the investigation of ancient diseases and their origins. The term applies to any evidence of disease in any form of life, including both plants and animals. However, the research emphasis…

The set of ideas that prescribe the manufacture and use of implements before written history. Technology is the principal means through which the human species has succeeded in occupying most of the world. The prehistoric record documents that for…

The assertion that under certain light restrictions the surface integral of (∇ × ℑ) · ν over a surface patch S is equal to the line integral of ℑ · τ taken around C, the boundary curve of S, provided the sense of transcription of C is right-handed…

One of the four fundamental operations of arithmetic and algebra. The first printed use of the symbol − to denote subtraction is in Johann Widman's Behennde und hüpsche Rechnung, Leipzig, 1489. Subtraction is often regarded as an operation inverse…

A two-dimensional geometric figure (a collection of points) in three-dimensional space. The simplest example is a plane—a flat surface. Some other common surfaces are spheres, cylinders, and cones, the names of which are also used to describe the…

A term describing a relationship of two figures (usually of the same dimension) in the neighborhood of a common point. The figures are tangent at a point P if they touch at P but do not intersect in a sufficiently small neighborhood of P. To be more…

The systematic study of tensors which led to an extension and generalization of vectors, begun in 1900 by two Italian mathematicians, G. Ricci and T. Levi-Civita, following G. F. B. Riemann's proposal concerning a generalization of Euclidean…

A proposition arrived at by the methods of logical deduction from a set of basic postulates or axioms accepted as primitive and therefore not subject to deductive proof. So long as a theorem is part of a purely formal system, it is not meaningful to…