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There's a lot of assumptions baked into archaeology, inherited from the early days when gentlemen scientists wandered around digging things up randomly and pron
by marcus_holmes 7y ago
There's a lot of assumptions baked into archaeology, inherited from the early days when gentlemen scientists wandered around digging things up randomly and pronouncing on them. We get Vikings in horned helmets from the same phenomenon.
One of the assumptions is that life was "nasty, brutish, and short". The other, that early societies were very hierarchical and had a huge difference in living standards. There's not much evidence to support either, but that has been the baseline assumption for decades, because it reflected the beliefs of the Victorians.
Modern archaeology has to publish papers with evidence to counter these baseline assumptions. So having a paper that says that most people were able to afford to drink wine is good, because it counters a baseline assumption (based on no evidence) that only rich people could afford imported wine.
- gmac 7y agoI did some archaeology as an undergrad, and found it full of amusing/annoying conventions in this regard. “Ritual significance” was a (heavily used) euphemism for “no clue what this was for”. And who could forget the Law of Stratigraphy, which says that things that are deeper are older?
- marcus_holmes 7y ago"ritual purposes" is the bane of anyone trying to interpret finds. Because whoever dug it up doesn't say "I don't know what this is" and therefore throws it open to interpretation, instead they say "ritual purposes" and anyone trying to interpret the find has to start by saying "this isn't a ritual object because...". Archaeologists never have to specify which ritual was involved, or what part in the ritual the object took. Which you have to do for everything else. That one condition would massively improve archaeological find interpretation imho.