2. In a linguistic form, commonly used in an earlier time but rare in present-day usage except to suggest the older time, as in religious rituals or historical novels. Examples: "thou, wast, methinks", and "forsooth".
3. Forming the earliest stage; prior to full development: the archaic period of psychoanalytic research.
4. A reference to or designating the style of the fine arts; especially, painting and sculpture, developed in Greece from the middle 7th to the early 5th century B.C., chiefly characterized by an increased emphasis on the human figure in action, naturalistic proportions and anatomical structure, simplicity of volumes, forms, or design, and the evolution of a definitive style for the narrative treatment of subject matter.
5. Ancient; old; in Jungian psychology, denoting the ancestral past of mental processes.
6. A term used to describe an early stage in the development of civilization.
In New World chronology, the period just before the shift from hunting, gathering, and fishing to agricultural cultivation, pottery development, and village settlement.
Initially, the term was used to designate a non-ceramic-using, nonagricultural, and nonsedentary way of life. Archaeologists now realize, however, that ceramics, agriculture, and sedentism are all found, in specific settings, within contexts that are clearly archaic but that these activities are subsidiary to the collection of wild foods. In Old World chronology, the term is applied to certain early periods in the history of some civilizations.
In Greece, it describes the rise of civilization from about 750 B.C. to the Persian invasion in 480 B.C. In Egypt, it covers the first two dynasties, circa 3200-2800 B.C. In classical archaeology, the term is often used to refer to the period of the 8th-6th centuries B.C.
The term was coined for certain cultures of the eastern North America woodlands dating from around 8000-1000 B.C., but usage has been extended to various unrelated cultures which show a similar level of development, but at widely different times.
For example, it describes a group of cultures in the Eastern U.S. and Canada which developed from the original migration of man from Asia during the Pleistocene, between 40,000-20,000 B.C., whose economy was based on hunting and fishing, shell and plant gathering.
Between 8000-1000 B.C., a series of technical achievements characterized the tradition, which can be broken into periods: Early archaic 8000-5000 B.C., mixture of big-game hunting tradition with early archaic cultures; also marked by post-glacial climatic change in association with the disappearance of Late Pleistocene big game animals; then Middle archaic tradition cultures from 5000-2000 B.C., and a Late Archaic period 2000-1000 B.C. In the New World, the lifestyle lacked horticulture, domesticated animals, and permanent villages.
2. The representation of someone as existing or something as happening in other than chronological, proper, or an historical order: "The novel has one anachronism after the other."
It is an obsolete notion to wear a bustle which has become obsolescent for daily wear. It is somewhat of an anachronism, like wearing lace mitts to the opera because lace mitts are archaic, something my great grandmother wore; however, now they are just considered an archaism best left for the manikin in the museum.
Neanderthals in Europe and Solo man in Asia are usually classed as archaic humans. According to one model of human evolution, widely separated but interbreeding archaic groups in different parts of the world evolved independently into today's physiologically distinct geographic populations.
They were decorated with geometric motifs, leaves, and other forms outlined in brown and set into green or brown backgrounds.
They were sold as far away as Spain, North Africa, and northern Europe. There seems to be a connection to earlier Byzantine and Persian products.