incavation

English

Etymology 1

in- +‎ cave +‎ -ation

Noun

incavation (countable and uncountable, plural incavations)

1. The act of making hollow.
   • 1654, Walter Charleton, Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charltoniana, page 326:

     For, the chief Difference betwixt a Fluid, and a Soft body, accepted in a Philosophical or præcise, not a Poetical or random sense, consisteth only in this; that the Fluid, when prest upon, doth yield to the body pressing, not by indentment or incavation of it superfice, i.e. the retrocession of its superficial particles, which are immediately urged by the depriment, toward its middle or profound ones, which are farther from it; but by rising upwards in round and equally on all sides, as much as it is deprest in the superfice;

   • 1901, Henry Woodward, Geological Magazine, page 391:

     Thus it was urged that since a glacier can be shown to have produced a number of mountain tarns, there is no reason why in sufficient time it should not accomplish the incavation of a lake or an inland sea, such as Lake Geneva, or Superior, or the Caspian.

2. The act of caving in.
   • 1834, American state papers: documents, legislative and executive of the Congress of the United States, page 136:

     A case or curb to be used to prevent incavation in sinking wells and boring into loose ground

   • 1866, C.C., “Perils of the Last Days”, in The Prophetic Times, volume 4, page 14:

     In addition, may be mentioned a great variety of miscellaneous casualties, from incavations, burnings, crushings, shootings, cuttings, and particularly explosions, from which latter cause an enumeration of only 5 cases gives a list of killed and wounded, reaching nearly 2000.

   • 1918, Michael Levi Rodkinson, Tract Erubin. Tracts Shekalim and Rosh hashana, Hebrew and English, page 223:

     If a court ( through the incavation of its walls) is laid open to public ground, whosoever brings anything from private ground into such a court, or from the court into private ground, is culpable.

3. A hollow; a physical depression; a concavity.
   • 1855, Johann Julius Seidel, The Organ and Its Construction, page 78:

     This lip is in fact not a separate part of the pipe, but merely an incavation on the foot, having at its lower end the form of a tongue, as we see on fig. 1.-4

   • 1903, Thomas Stretch Dowse, Lectures on Massage & Electricity in the Treatment of Disease, page 248:

     the two portions meet at a pretty sharp angle, or I might express the condition by saying that the incavation of the waist is greatly deepened, and this not merely at the side outline, for running inward from that angle towards the spine is a pretty considerable depression which lies in well marked shadow.

   • 1952, Géotechnique - Volume 3, page 189:

     Inside a more or less narrow debouchement the incavation often widens to a cross-section which greatly exceeds that of the debouchement.

   • 1980, Lavoslav Kadelburg, ‎Jevrejski Istorijski Muzej, Exhibition Menoroth from Čelarevo, page 40:

     Along the east wall there is rectangular 20 cm. wide and 2,23 m. deep incavation with one lateral side inclined.

Etymology 2

By analogy to excavation.

Noun

incavation (plural incavations)

1. (archaeology) An act of earthing artifacts; the burial or entombment of archaeologically interesting items.
   • 2004, Neil Brodie, ‎ Catherine Hills, Material Engagements: Studies in Honour of Colin Renfrew, page 48:

     Instead, what is incavated is archaeological evidence in itself, and incavations are thus about the very possibility of archaeology.

   • 2010, Rodney Harrison, ‎John Schofield, After Modernity: Archaeological Approaches to the Contemporary Past, page 116:

     During this incavation, eight contemporary and mundane domestic assemblages were buried in the garden of a Berlin townhouse. In undertaking this 'incavation', Holtorf made a powerful statement about archaeology as a performance and a particular form of material engagement with the past.

   • 2013 April, Stephan Palmié, “Signal and Noise: Digging up the Dead in Archaeology and Afro-Cuban Palo Monte”, in Archaeological Review from Cambridge, volume 28, number 1, page 127:

     To revert to my earlier imagery, while conventional archaeological excavations aim to methodically purify what its practitioners conceive of as a target signal from a specific past, by amplifying it over and above the temporal pile-up of object noise that surrounds it, Afro-Cuban ritual 'incavations', if I may call them that, proceed no less methodically in scrambling the frequencies of space and time upon which disciplined historicist archaeological praxis depends.