46 ms·

I'm reading a book on that era and this is pretty fascinating to read. Archeology seems like a science of studying small bits and trying to understand the big p

I'm reading a book on that era and this is pretty fascinating to read. Archeology seems like a science of studying small bits and trying to understand the big picture from them. I bet you have to be really patient to be an archeologist.

mmanfrin 11y ago
It is terribly fascinating what they can infer from the smallest of objects. I remember reading about the Viking settlements on Greenland and how archaeologists were able to deduce that Greenland Vikings did not eat fish because of the lack of fishbones found in refuse sites. Archaeology feels like a low-tech version of the machine that rebuilds the fifth element in the movie of the same name, from just a fragment.
- douche 11y ago
  Do you have a link for that? It sounds interesting. It seems like a very odd situation, given that the Norse who settled Greenland surely knew about fishing before they packed up from Norway, the Orkneys and Iceland.
  - davidw 11y ago
    The natives ate fish too, so they would have seen that as well. I recall reading about it in this book: http://amzn.to/1kJ7A0G http://amzn.to/1kJ7A0G
    - douche 11y ago
      Ah, I guess I'll have to read that over again. I recall Diamond suggesting that they for some reason didn't adopt practices from the Inuits(?), like sealing, kayaks, etc, as the climate got colder after the medieval warm period, but I don't remember anything about them not fishing.
    - dalke 11y ago
      I've seen comments every which way about "Collapse", so I looked for something that was a bit more directly from the literature and found http://www.yale.edu/ycei/arcticworkshop/background-reading/Dugmore_et_al-Norse_Greenland_Settlement.pdf http://www.yale.edu/ycei/arcticworkshop/background-reading/D... . Quoting first from p.7 then p.6 (emphasis mine): > The development and expansion of the trade in dried Atlantic cod around 1100 AD was to have widespread economic impacts throughout Europe, which probably did not work to the advantage of the Norse Greenlanders who did little if any fishing. ... > Details of these Norse strategies of caribou and common seal conservation in Greenland are unclear but we may speculate that it was part of a conscious effort to conserve resilience and flexibility by underwriting the farming economy based on imported stock and the long distance Norðursetur hunt for trade goods. In late medieval and early modern Iceland elements of resilience thinking in a context of recurring labor shortage may be embedded in restrictions on sea fishing. In order to undertake fishing, farm ownership was required, and the development of fishing camps unsupported by agriculture was legally discouraged. The rationale was that fishing alone could not ensure a certain livelihood, and when it failed there would be a burden of poor relief on the wider community if those fishing did not have farming as well. In other words; specialization that could produce a greater short term yield was discouraged because it could potentially compromise the resilience of the wider community through burdens of support during times of fishery failure. Similar rationale may have stood behind the apparent absence of specialized sealing stations in Norse Greenland and the failure to develop substantial fisheries. Despite the growing role of seals in subsistence, even small farms maintained substantial flocks of sheep and goats and at least a few cows- this was a multi-stranded economy which spread risks and coordinated labor on a community scale rather than specialized, individualized subsistence system. Its major limitations were in its inability to accumulate multi-year surplus in the absence of cereal agriculture and the resulting recurring problem of matching high seasonal communal labor requirements with year-round provisioning limits.
- steve19 11y ago
  Reading pop-archaeology online (mainstream articles, not journals), I find they frequently seem to overreach in what can be inferred by some small find or, just as often, what they did not find at some small site. Find one badly preserved jawbone of a humanoid and immediately we have a new species, without consideration that it might be deformed, juvenile, or from a population with unusual genetics [0] [1] (edit: see Pygmy peoples for example of Homo sapiens sapiens with unusual genetics [2] [3]) All to often they jump on what is not present in one place at one time and make wild assumptions. No fish at one refuse pit of one settlement could be explained by many different things and might not apply to a wider population. Maybe I am just overly skeptical .... [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_floresiensis#Pathological_hypotheses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_floresiensis#Pathological... [1] http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34192447 http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34192447 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmy_peoples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmy_peoples [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmy_peoples#/media/File:African_Pigmies_CNE-v1-p58-B.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmy_peoples#/media/File:Afri...
  - jamiesonbecker 11y ago
    > Maybe I am just overly skeptical .... Or, maybe they were not. Confirmation bias runs rampant.
  - douche 11y ago
    I love dinosaurs and prehistoric beasts, but that's pretty much the way I feel about paleontology. All too often you'll read some science-y piece about some fantastic new insight- a new species, animal X did Y with regards to raising its young, etc. Then you go through a couple of layers of redirects to see the actual information, and find that the new species is classified on the basis of a partial skeleton, or just a handful of bones, or some incredibly fragmentary DNA extracted and compared from two poorly preserved specimens. 10000 years from now, our descendants will be digging through our garbage dumps and trying to find significance from the substantial deposits of shiny metallic plastic jewelry etched with the obscure glyphs "AOL" on one side.

mmanfrin 11y ago

It is terribly fascinating what they can infer from the smallest of objects. I remember reading about the Viking settlements on Greenland and how archaeologists were able to deduce that Greenland Vikings did not eat fish because of the lack of fishbones found in refuse sites. Archaeology feels like a low-tech version of the machine that rebuilds the fifth element in the movie of the same name, from just a fragment.

douche 11y ago
Do you have a link for that? It sounds interesting. It seems like a very odd situation, given that the Norse who settled Greenland surely knew about fishing before they packed up from Norway, the Orkneys and Iceland.
- davidw 11y ago
  The natives ate fish too, so they would have seen that as well. I recall reading about it in this book: http://amzn.to/1kJ7A0G http://amzn.to/1kJ7A0G
  - douche 11y ago
    Ah, I guess I'll have to read that over again. I recall Diamond suggesting that they for some reason didn't adopt practices from the Inuits(?), like sealing, kayaks, etc, as the climate got colder after the medieval warm period, but I don't remember anything about them not fishing.
  - dalke 11y ago
    I've seen comments every which way about "Collapse", so I looked for something that was a bit more directly from the literature and found http://www.yale.edu/ycei/arcticworkshop/background-reading/Dugmore_et_al-Norse_Greenland_Settlement.pdf http://www.yale.edu/ycei/arcticworkshop/background-reading/D... . Quoting first from p.7 then p.6 (emphasis mine): > The development and expansion of the trade in dried Atlantic cod around 1100 AD was to have widespread economic impacts throughout Europe, which probably did not work to the advantage of the Norse Greenlanders who did little if any fishing. ... > Details of these Norse strategies of caribou and common seal conservation in Greenland are unclear but we may speculate that it was part of a conscious effort to conserve resilience and flexibility by underwriting the farming economy based on imported stock and the long distance Norðursetur hunt for trade goods. In late medieval and early modern Iceland elements of resilience thinking in a context of recurring labor shortage may be embedded in restrictions on sea fishing. In order to undertake fishing, farm ownership was required, and the development of fishing camps unsupported by agriculture was legally discouraged. The rationale was that fishing alone could not ensure a certain livelihood, and when it failed there would be a burden of poor relief on the wider community if those fishing did not have farming as well. In other words; specialization that could produce a greater short term yield was discouraged because it could potentially compromise the resilience of the wider community through burdens of support during times of fishery failure. Similar rationale may have stood behind the apparent absence of specialized sealing stations in Norse Greenland and the failure to develop substantial fisheries. Despite the growing role of seals in subsistence, even small farms maintained substantial flocks of sheep and goats and at least a few cows- this was a multi-stranded economy which spread risks and coordinated labor on a community scale rather than specialized, individualized subsistence system. Its major limitations were in its inability to accumulate multi-year surplus in the absence of cereal agriculture and the resulting recurring problem of matching high seasonal communal labor requirements with year-round provisioning limits.
steve19 11y ago
Reading pop-archaeology online (mainstream articles, not journals), I find they frequently seem to overreach in what can be inferred by some small find or, just as often, what they did not find at some small site. Find one badly preserved jawbone of a humanoid and immediately we have a new species, without consideration that it might be deformed, juvenile, or from a population with unusual genetics [0] [1] (edit: see Pygmy peoples for example of Homo sapiens sapiens with unusual genetics [2] [3]) All to often they jump on what is not present in one place at one time and make wild assumptions. No fish at one refuse pit of one settlement could be explained by many different things and might not apply to a wider population. Maybe I am just overly skeptical .... [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_floresiensis#Pathological_hypotheses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_floresiensis#Pathological... [1] http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34192447 http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34192447 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmy_peoples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmy_peoples [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmy_peoples#/media/File:African_Pigmies_CNE-v1-p58-B.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmy_peoples#/media/File:Afri...
- jamiesonbecker 11y ago
  > Maybe I am just overly skeptical .... Or, maybe they were not. Confirmation bias runs rampant.
- douche 11y ago
  I love dinosaurs and prehistoric beasts, but that's pretty much the way I feel about paleontology. All too often you'll read some science-y piece about some fantastic new insight- a new species, animal X did Y with regards to raising its young, etc. Then you go through a couple of layers of redirects to see the actual information, and find that the new species is classified on the basis of a partial skeleton, or just a handful of bones, or some incredibly fragmentary DNA extracted and compared from two poorly preserved specimens. 10000 years from now, our descendants will be digging through our garbage dumps and trying to find significance from the substantial deposits of shiny metallic plastic jewelry etched with the obscure glyphs "AOL" on one side.