16 ms·
What if we called it the Flax Age instead of the Iron Age?
- DiogenesKynikos 7y agoIt's always annoying to see identity politics injected into hard sciences: > Archaeologists—predominantly male—gave ancient ages names like “Iron” and “Bronze,” rather than “Pottery” or “Flax.” Entire cultures are named after their pottery. For example, there are the "corded ware culture" and "bell beaker culture." Archaeologists pay very close attention to material culture (including more feminine items like jewelry). Maybe - just maybe - it's harder to know about fabrics than metals because the former degrade more quickly than the latter. Or we could just blame it on men. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corded_Ware_culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corded_Ware_culture 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Beaker_culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Beaker_culture
- SamBam 7y agoI think it's important to acknowledge the biases of the scientists or researchers that study first-hand materials. They absolutely affect the research and conclusions they produce and affect how the broader public understand history and science. That said, you are absolutely right in the particulars here. Pottery is extremely important to our understanding of human history -- that was an absurd mistake in the article, since it is so important -- and it makes sense that fabrics have been less important simply because there is much less evidence of the particulars of it. -- On an unrelated note, I love flax and its many uses. I love that when we eat it as seed we call it "flax seed," when we use it as cooking oil we call it "flax oil," when we use it as a protective finish we call it "linseed oil," when we make it into cloth we call it "linen," and when we make it into flooring we call it "linoleum." Let me know if I missed others.
- SketchySeaBeast 7y agoTo be fair, studies like history and archaeology are anything but hard sciences. One of the history courses I took during my degree was dedicated entirely to looking at historical texts and trying to see the biases of the historian who wrote them. There's always reason to look for bias in primary sources and secondary sources and then try and learn from them. Re-framing what we know in different lights definitely has value. All that being said, it does feel like a weird jab to throw in the male bit at the beginning. But that's who was studying this at one time, and realizing that and being open to re-framing doesn't hurt.
- klyrs 7y agoI know a few female archaeologists. They've uniformly experienced sexism, ridicule, scorn, and harassment for being women. The hard sciences are steeped in identity politics, and have been as long as there have been hard sciences. God forbid somebody actually talk about the assumptions and biases that result.
- zozbot234 7y agoArchaeology is not usually considered part of the "hard" sciences - depending on whom you ask, it's either among the "soft" or the "social" sciences.
- klyrs 7y agoWon't debate you on that. I'm a mathematician. IMNSHO, physics is a soft science because they accept 5-sigma experimental results as "proof." My parent made the claim that "identity politics" are invading archaeology, and my point is that "identity politics" have always been there -- it's no longer acceptable to explicitly forbid women from the sciences, but that doesn't mean that implicit gatekeeping isn't happening.
- cdirkx 7y agoBut then do you consider mathematics a science?
- klyrs 7y agoI do! Mostly. It's a little complicated. Read the Mathematics page on wikipedia, and you'll find I'm in good company. My strong, loosely held, opinion is that rigorous mathematics is the hardest of sciences. Where mathematicians reject computer proofs over all-human proofs, I balk at their lack of rigor and consider their stance unscientific. Mathematics is one of the only sciences that finds absolute ground truth: we state axioms, and elaborate proofs based entirely upon those axioms. Axioms are assumptions, and we freely acknowledge that results are only guaranteed to hold if the axioms are satisfied. Logicians are seen as philosophers, but I hold them as equals. There's a perspective that "science" deals purely with the natural world, and mathematicians aren't bothered by the surreality of their axioms. The way I see it is, these are truths that can extend beyond even our universe, should anything more exist. And occasionally, pure mathematical results come hundreds of years before natural observations require them -- what looks absurdly inapplicable now might not in a few generations.
- paganel 7y agoNot sure why you're getting down-voted, because you're totally right. I'd add the fibulae to the list of "female" archaeological artifacts closely studied by, well, archeologists. For example the history of late 6th - early 7th century Slavs in South-Eastern Europe is mostly "deduced" by studying women-worn fibulae like those presented in articles like this [1] [1] https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=639506 https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=639506
- cardiffspaceman 7y agoSo here's a question about flax, and other things. It seems like there is a technological progression in clothing from "I take the unprocessed hides from the animals I kill or the leaves and vines around me and just wear them" to "I tan hides to make leather" to "I grow flax or cotton to make fibers and fabric" Actual question: Do these technologies correspond to lengthy time frames in large areas in such a way that it could be useful to identify a "Leather Age/Culture" or "Plant fiber Age/Culture"?
- Merrill 7y agoSewing is a vital technology, since only with sewn, multi-layer clothing was cold-intolerant Homo sapiens able to colonize the middle and upper latitudes of the Eurasian continent during the last Ice Age. In the referenced article, it mentions needles from about 35,000 years ago. Presumably the earliest garments were furs stitched with sinew threads, but plant fiber thread from 34,000 has been found in Georgia. The archaeological problem is that bone needles and organic fibers do not endure to the present like stone and copper.
- dang 7y agoCan you please not post in the flamewar style to HN? We don't need yet another gender flamewar. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html The specific information in your comment is good. If you dropped the first sentence, the last sentence, and the snark ("Maybe - just maybe"), your comment would be a much better contribution to HN.
- calvinmorrison 7y ago"maybe don't post shitty popsci articles about how men are evil" - me, 2019
- dang 7y agoThat's not a fair description of the article, but for fun, let's suppose it were. Your argument doesn't wash. If someone vandalizes your house or (let's say) a city park, that doesn't make it ok for someone else to vandalize.
- calvinmorrison 7y agoYou're right, I flagellate myself at the God (her/she) of militant feminists. Please don't torpedo my career or sue me for hate speech
- bovermyer 7y agoAs someone who is writing a tool that procedurally generates random textile and clothing styles for fantasy cultures, this article is extremely useful to me.
- contingencies 7y agoCool. You could probably generate real clothing patterns, too, and have some robotic textile fabricators execute them. Have you seen the Mount & Blade: Bannerlord updates on clothing? https://www.taleworlds.com/en/Games/Bannerlord/Blog/61 https://www.taleworlds.com/en/Games/Bannerlord/Blog/61 https://www.taleworlds.com/en/Games/Bannerlord/Blog/84 https://www.taleworlds.com/en/Games/Bannerlord/Blog/84
- bovermyer 7y agoNot yet, but I'll check them out now! Thanks for sharing.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- janpot 7y ago> This implies that metal objects were the principal features of these times, when they are simply often the most visible and long-lasting remnants. I'm not an archeologist so I probably lack a lot of context, but I assume metal requires more advanced technology to acquire. It seems kind of logical to me to name a period after its most advanced technology.
- mrob 7y agoI don't think metals technology was significantly more advanced than textiles technology. Turning plants into good quality fabrics is a complicated process with non-obvious steps. E.g. retting (controlled partial rotting of plants to aid removal of the bast fibers) is IMO something non-intuitive, just like smelting of metals. But textiles technology gave only small incremental improvements with each step. Plant-based fabrics were more convenient than animal skins, but they weren't something fundamentally new. Metals however could be used to make things completely impossible with older technologies, so they're a better candidate for naming time periods.
- bluGill 7y agoI don't think so. Retting isn't obvious, but it isn't hard to imagine that someone encountered some material that wasn't preserved and it rotted in the right way. This could be accidentally finding it, or storing some for latter processing and then dieing - only latter was the cache discovered and used.
- ncmncm 7y agoIt is one thing for somebody to notice and use such fibers, and completely another for the practice to become part of the material culture. Archaeology is concerned with the latter. How a practice entered the material culture is an interesting detail.
- jcranmer 7y agoHow do you define "advanced"? It's not always clear. For example, bronze metallurgy is easier to achieve (it requires lower temperatures) than iron metallurgy. But bronze is, for many use cases, a superior technology to iron. So is iron or bronze "more advanced technology"? It's also easy to underestimate the difficulty in mundane technologies. Take bread for instance; this is how you make bread: Grow a grass (cereal crop). Separate the seeds, dry them, and then shell them to get your grains. Now grind it into flour, and then mix it with water, fat, and salt. Let it sit out to grow a yeast infection. Stick it in a fire, and then you get bread. Compare this to typical metalworking: Find the appropriate ore. Stick it in a fire. Depending on the metal, let it melt completely and pour it into a sand cast, or get it red-hot and then bang on it with a hammer. The popular conception of technology often hews towards a Civilization-style technology tree model, but the consensus of historians and anthropologists in modern times is that this model is quite far from the truth, and that trying to impose that model on what we know of history unnecessarily limits our understanding.
- Cthulhu_ 7y agoLooking at Primitive Technology, I'd call all of those eras the Clay Age - he uses clay for pretty much everything, including (of course) trying to melt iron from mud.
- ncmncm 7y agoFair bit of wood, besides.
- narrator 7y agoThere is one primitive tech guy who actually got iron smelting working enough to make a useable knife[1]. This naturally took him an enormous amount of work and patience. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXniZZly4oA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXniZZly4oA
- Nasrudith 7y agoWhile textiles are a twice neglected area due to decay and some cultural biases the flax age wouldn't be remotely the right naming convention. The invention age naming convention would imply when they /first used it widespread/. So a few meteoric iron artifacts in the Bronze Age wouldn't make it Iron Age but iron becoming commonplace in tools and weapons would. Similarly if we kept up metalic conventions medieval aluminium wouldn't count but 19th century when they started enmasse refining could be an "Aluminium Age" if not for the fact we know enough from records that it would be redundant. Calling it the Flax Age would be like calling Prebellum Southern US "the cotton age" - it was used already for thousand of years in several prior ages! We probably can't trace it that precisely from lack of evidence but a Flax Age would probably be among the Neolithic ages and certainly not the Iron Age.
- zebrafish 7y agoThe ages are named for the technology that made the most significant difference in history. Not because the archeologists are male, but because you can do things with iron that you cannot do with stone or wood or bone. I will grant that textiles are probably not given enough attention, but an army covered in flax clothes with wooden spears stands no chance against an army equipped with iron equipment.
- gshdg 7y agoBut why is the leading military technology the only thing we care about when defining an age?
- garmaine 7y agoBecause Bronze Age cultures wiped out Stone Age cultures, and Iron Age cultures wiped out Bronze Age cultures. These transition periods are marked by civilization collapse and literally centuries of warfare, with a radically different society at the end (different beliefs, different agricultural, different ruling structure). Naming the period after the military technology development that directly instigated such crisis and reform seems relevant.
- Merrill 7y agoOn a site called Literary Hub, they should recognize that the best reason for a "Flax Age" is the production of linen paper beginning about 1350 CE. Previously, parchment made expensively and laboriously from animal hides was the medium for the written word in Europe. However, a cheaper medium was needed for less important documents, and "rag paper" made from old linen clothes began to be produced in greater volumes in the mid-14th Century. As volumes increased it became much cheaper than parchment. As a result, Gutenberg's invention of movable type was economically advantageous and the literary explosion in Europe resulted. Had parchment still been the only medium available, the cost of books would have been very expensive, whether produced by scribe or printing press.
- saalweachter 7y ago... 1350 CE in Europe; it was in common usage in the Islamic world centuries earlier, and a millennium earlier in China.
- zebrafish 7y agoThe paper isn't the point, the press is. As is evidenced by your dates, linen paper in and of itself does not move the needle much. Asia Minor and China never produced a press. The idea of cheap, disposable paper that leads someone to think up a mass production scheme moves the needle a lot.
- munmaek 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_printing_in_East_Asia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_printing_in_East_As...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- saalweachter 7y agoThe argument put forth in "Paper: Paging Through History" is actually the opposite. Europe was exposed to cheap, disposable paper through trade for centuries but scorned it until they had a need for it. (While "Paper" is partially a history book, it also has as a thesis that societal change leads to technological change, rather than the opposite, and attempts to demonstrate it through the history of paper.)
- ncmncm 7y agoIt mentions Dzudzuana three times, but does not explain it. Presumably that is explained elsewhere in the book, but it is used inconsistently, thus confusingly, here.
- luxuryballs 7y agoWelp, guess who is going to fire up Civ 5 tonight? This guy.
- marcoseliziario 7y agoMetals are far more important because metals provide better tools and weapons. Better fibers give more comfort, better resistance to the elements. But, in itself, is not as much transformative as better tools and weapons. If you went back to the distant past with modern clothes, you'd have some marginal survival advantages, but not enough for your tribe if you needed to fight for scarce resources like food. So yes, Iron is far more relevant than flax. Because Iron gave better tools, and our history is basically the history of our tools (and weapons)
- dekhn 7y agoLinseed (flax) and using limestone are both technologies that are underappreciated.
- cardiffspaceman 7y agoWhile beer/mead/ale making is noted in descriptions of cultures, it seems like it would be a fun deep dive for teaching history to teenagers.
- Cyberdog 7y ago> Intriguingly, a 2013 discovery in southeast France has led to tentative suggestions that Homo sapiens may not have been the first species to have made string. A tiny sliver of twisted fibers—just 0.028 inches long—was found in a site occupied by Neanderthals 90,000 years ago, well before sapiens arrived in Europe. Is "0.028 inches" a typo here? How would anyone find a thread that short, and, if found, how could one tell that the thread was intentionally woven instead of just fibers lying next to each other and getting twisted together by random chance?
- Swenrekcah 7y agoSeriously, that’s only 0.7 mm. It could be the diameter?
- morelisp 7y agohttps://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277379113003788 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02773... is apparently the relevant paper. The fiber was some remnants found on stone tools, apparently. I don't have the archaeological background to say if the claim it's not possible to twist in nature in plausible or not.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- amelius 7y agoI'm wondering: did they eat a lot of flaxseed in that period? I'm asking because I like flaxseed, and there seems to be a limit on how much the body (my body) can handle of it.
- Spooky23 7y agoTextiles are incredibly important, but the age is defined by conflict. End of the day, you can make the finest cloth, but if you're armed with bronze weapons, whomever comes in with iron weapons and armor are going to kill you.
- jbay808 7y agoUnless they freeze to death along the way.
- b0rsuk 7y agoAnother activity not given enough attention is fishing. Remnants of fish, as well as fishing tools are perishable, but they played an important role before the neolithic revolution. The name seems to be misleading. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/01/190115200036.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/01/190115200036.h...