Archaeological horizon

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An archaeological horizon is a widely disseminated period of common art and artifacts at an archaeological site or, more usually, over a larger geographic area, and is a distinctive level in that site's or area's archaeological sequence.^[1]

An example of an archaeological horizon is the Dark Earth horizon in England, which separates Roman artifacts from later native artifacts and which indicates the abandonment of urban areas in Roman Britain during the 2nd century.

The term is used to denote a series of stratigraphic relationships that form a archaeological phase or are part of the process of determining the archaeological phases of a site. Or an archaeological horizon can be understood as a break in contexts formed in the Harris matrix which denotes a change in epoch on a given site by delineation in time of finds found within contexts.

The term 'Archaeological horizon' is sometimes, and somewhat incorrectly, used in place of the term layer or strata.

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[edit] References

• Pool, Christopher A. (2007). Olmec Archaeology and Early Mesoamerica. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-78882-3.