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I get the impression archeologists are incredibly resistant to pushing history back or otherwise enlarging it. This resistance seems to go beyond appropriate s

by api 6y ago

I get the impression archeologists are incredibly resistant to pushing history back or otherwise enlarging it. This resistance seems to go beyond appropriate scientific caution and into the realm of unscientific dogmatism. There was a thread here a few days ago about Graham Hancock. I do think he's a bit of a crank, but I get the sense he gets a lot of traction because he's one of the few who will even talk about certain things. (Reminds me of how the alt-right and even worse ideologues get traction because they are the only ones who will talk about the economic collapse of the American center. Their ideas are bullshit, but everyone else pretends it's not happening.) Other fields of science seem to have no problem with discovering that things are much bigger than they thought. Astronomers discover that they were undercounting the number of galaxies by two logarithmic factors? Neat! Archeologists don't seem to greet enlargement of their domain this way. Maybe it comes from religious and cultural chauvinism or residual religious literalism. Deepening the historical narrative might mean the Mesopotamians were not "first" or that history vastly predates the historical accounts of many religious texts. The fact that entire cultures rose and fell so long ago might also make us uncomfortable. It reminds us of our collective mortality. I see this with many Americans wanting to pretend that native Americans were just the most primitive hunter-gatherers, not that they had sophisticated cultures with history and ideas... that could vanish in a very short span of time and barely be remembered.

Spooky23 6y ago
I think that’s an unfair assessment. It’s difficult for anyone to fundamentally challenge their thought processes with the near absence of facts. When you consider that the flood myth is almost a universal story across cultures, and that human population was dramatically smaller, and left behind little, it’s difficult to Have a position on pre-history. I recall taking classes on this era in college, and the professor spending time talking about what we don’t know — which highlighted the importance of small details of ancient cultures that allow us to infer knowledge. In the last 30-40 years more discoveries have been made that challenge even our understanding of Ancient Greece, we’re learning and eventually people will reach consensus about new discoveries.
AlotOfReading 6y ago
It's probably my thread from yesterday you're referring to. There's a pretty big divide here between what archaeologists/anthropologists say to the public and how they interact within their communities. There's a lot of reasons for this that I'm more than happy to go into (e.g. preventing looting, caution about the use of our works to justify bigotry, or simply because there's a lot we don't know). This essentially manifests as "the safest thing to communicate is the basic consensus." It's also the easiest thing to provide layperson accessible resources for. Internally though, the fields are quite aggressive about challenging popular narratives. That's pretty much the best way to make a name as a young researcher and grad classes tend to settle into a debate format, where you take turns trying to rip (sometimes each other's) arguments apart. Secondly, if we're going to point out issues in an entire field, it helps to be specific. No one can actually respond to the assertion that "archaeologists don't talk about things I haven't named." Like, do I list a bunch of things that have been rewritten over time? Finally, archaeology is hard and the record just doesn't answer a lot of the questions we want it to. The field as a whole is moving back from resolving big questions and producing grand narratives to answering little questions and small narratives the record allows us to support. These aren't the things the public asks about, so there's quite a large gap mostly filled by the kind of people too ignorant to realize why there's a gap. The challenge that we need to do a better job filling it was Jared Diamond's most interesting idea, in my opinion.
WalterBright 6y ago
> not that they had sophisticated cultures with history and ideas The trouble is the lack of writing. Even when there is writing, there was mass illiteracy, people may not have written much, and what books and accounts that were written were lost. This is true for about all civilizations up until the printing press. Consider how little we know about the Vikings, Arthurian England, etc.
- narutouzumaki 6y ago
  I think we do need to reconsider the weight we give to writing as an a priori factor and it’s supposed suitability and effectiveness at storing ancestral knowledge and history and conserving its quality. I will try to find the source(s) later if there’s interest, but remember reading articles on Aboriginal Storytelling that used to be only considered folklore until it was proven that the stories, passed on orally, contained and preserved a variety of knowledge of the land, weather and historical events of Australia dating back to when the very first Aborigines set foot unto the continent, reaching back further than virtually all known written records. Contrast this to much younger texts that even today we still haven’t managed to decode or the burning of libraries of the likes of Alexandria and Baghdad that at once wiped out huge chunks of the most valuable knowledge mankind was able to accumulate.
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    Consider family oral histories. How much do you know about the lives of your great-grandparents? Me, I know pretty much nothing. I do know something about my ancestors from 200+ years ago, because one was famous and has been written about. The people in between then and my grandparents - nada. Other branches of my family - zip.
  - jacobush 6y ago
    Alexandria burning is a myth, but otherwise, yes, I agree with your argument.
- gregjor 6y ago
  We know quite a bit about many cultures predating the printing press. Ancient Egypt, Sumeria, Greece, Rome, Persia, China, India. The Bible predates the printing press, so do Homer, Aristotle, Caesar, Buddha, the Vedas, and Confucius. Arthurian England is not documented because it’s a made-up collection of legends. The Vikings left written Eddas, poems, and a body of Norse mythology, and we actually know quite a lot about Viking history.

by api 6y ago

Spooky23 6y ago

I think that’s an unfair assessment. It’s difficult for anyone to fundamentally challenge their thought processes with the near absence of facts. When you consider that the flood myth is almost a universal story across cultures, and that human population was dramatically smaller, and left behind little, it’s difficult to Have a position on pre-history. I recall taking classes on this era in college, and the professor spending time talking about what we don’t know — which highlighted the importance of small details of ancient cultures that allow us to infer knowledge. In the last 30-40 years more discoveries have been made that challenge even our understanding of Ancient Greece, we’re learning and eventually people will reach consensus about new discoveries.

AlotOfReading 6y ago

It's probably my thread from yesterday you're referring to. There's a pretty big divide here between what archaeologists/anthropologists say to the public and how they interact within their communities. There's a lot of reasons for this that I'm more than happy to go into (e.g. preventing looting, caution about the use of our works to justify bigotry, or simply because there's a lot we don't know). This essentially manifests as "the safest thing to communicate is the basic consensus." It's also the easiest thing to provide layperson accessible resources for. Internally though, the fields are quite aggressive about challenging popular narratives. That's pretty much the best way to make a name as a young researcher and grad classes tend to settle into a debate format, where you take turns trying to rip (sometimes each other's) arguments apart. Secondly, if we're going to point out issues in an entire field, it helps to be specific. No one can actually respond to the assertion that "archaeologists don't talk about things I haven't named." Like, do I list a bunch of things that have been rewritten over time? Finally, archaeology is hard and the record just doesn't answer a lot of the questions we want it to. The field as a whole is moving back from resolving big questions and producing grand narratives to answering little questions and small narratives the record allows us to support. These aren't the things the public asks about, so there's quite a large gap mostly filled by the kind of people too ignorant to realize why there's a gap. The challenge that we need to do a better job filling it was Jared Diamond's most interesting idea, in my opinion.

WalterBright 6y ago

> not that they had sophisticated cultures with history and ideas The trouble is the lack of writing. Even when there is writing, there was mass illiteracy, people may not have written much, and what books and accounts that were written were lost. This is true for about all civilizations up until the printing press. Consider how little we know about the Vikings, Arthurian England, etc.

narutouzumaki 6y ago
I think we do need to reconsider the weight we give to writing as an a priori factor and it’s supposed suitability and effectiveness at storing ancestral knowledge and history and conserving its quality. I will try to find the source(s) later if there’s interest, but remember reading articles on Aboriginal Storytelling that used to be only considered folklore until it was proven that the stories, passed on orally, contained and preserved a variety of knowledge of the land, weather and historical events of Australia dating back to when the very first Aborigines set foot unto the continent, reaching back further than virtually all known written records. Contrast this to much younger texts that even today we still haven’t managed to decode or the burning of libraries of the likes of Alexandria and Baghdad that at once wiped out huge chunks of the most valuable knowledge mankind was able to accumulate.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  Consider family oral histories. How much do you know about the lives of your great-grandparents? Me, I know pretty much nothing. I do know something about my ancestors from 200+ years ago, because one was famous and has been written about. The people in between then and my grandparents - nada. Other branches of my family - zip.
- jacobush 6y ago
  Alexandria burning is a myth, but otherwise, yes, I agree with your argument.
gregjor 6y ago
We know quite a bit about many cultures predating the printing press. Ancient Egypt, Sumeria, Greece, Rome, Persia, China, India. The Bible predates the printing press, so do Homer, Aristotle, Caesar, Buddha, the Vedas, and Confucius. Arthurian England is not documented because it’s a made-up collection of legends. The Vikings left written Eddas, poems, and a body of Norse mythology, and we actually know quite a lot about Viking history.