7 ms·

Yes, this is what tfa says, and it's a good point. But tfa also points out that the archaeologists/reconstructionists know that what they're producing differs f

Yes, this is what tfa says, and it's a good point. But tfa also points out that the archaeologists/reconstructionists know that what they're producing differs from the original. The thing is the discipline of reconstruction means that they only use pigments that they have direct evidence of, and this is just the saturated underlayers. The problem is this is seldom explained when the reconstructions are presented to the public

kijin 10mo ago
The people who produce dinosaur illustrations don't seem to have as much of a problem with adding all sorts of details (extravagant plumage, wacky colors/patterns, starry eyes and acrobatic postures) that are neither directly supported nor contradicted by available evidence.
- RajT88 10mo ago
  We are not dinosaurs, so have rather less skin in the game when it comes to accuracy.
- griffzhowl 10mo ago
  They only started adding feathers after they found evidence of them being feathered, though. Plus there's zero direct evidence for their colours so there's no option but to use guesswork in these cases. And a lot of dinosaur reconstructions may be more for edutainment value rather than reflecting a scholarly best-guess. There's no uniform methodology across all these disciplines.
  - bdr 10mo ago
    > Plus there's zero direct evidence for their colours This is no longer true! Starting with Sinosauropteryx in 2010, paleontologists have identified what they believe to be fossilized melanin-containing organelles. These organelles, called melanosomes, have different shapes depending on which color they produce, and those shapes are preserved well enough to be visible under an electron microscope.
    - griffzhowl 10mo ago
      Amazing, thanks for pointing it out. In the meantime, there's been some rejigging of the classification so it's this related genus where they've found the melanosomes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huadanosaurus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huadanosaurus
    - sdiupIGPWEfh 10mo ago
      Isn't a rather good deal of color from feathers a result of "structural color", rather than pigmentation? I'd be curious if fossilized feathers could ever, in theory, preserve enough microscopic detail to guess at that.
wisty 10mo ago
Reconstructioniats say that they only show th colours they can prove existed. The article suggests they obstinately do this because they know it creates a spectacle. I think there's another explanation - if they use their own judgement to fill in the gaps (making the statues more classically beautiful) then everyone will accuse them of making it all up, even if they were to base it on fairly rigorous study of e.g. the colour pallets used in preserved Roman paintings etc.
- resize2996 10mo ago
  That is how scholarship works. It’s like a math proof: they’re interested in proving the base case. If someone else wants to do more speculative work to theorize what a well-painted version would look like, that would be super cool, but it wouldn’t be scholarship.
  - shermantanktop 10mo ago
    “The reason I’m totally misleading you with a speculative example is because of scholarship.” No way. When they engage the public, they are not longer exclusively scholars. They responsible for conveying the best truth they can to non-experts. A journal paper can be misunderstood when the reader lacks the context to interpret it. Out in the public square, that is not the reader’s fault anymore.
    - vkou 10mo ago
      Give the scholars full editorial control of the newspaper the public is getting their news from, and you might get better public understanding of their scholarship. You generally can't hold someone responsible for what someone else says about them.
  - bjt 10mo ago
    And that's a fine standard to maintain when you're writing an academic paper. When you are instead putting together a museum exhibition intended for the general public, and you observe over and over again that they will interpret your work as representing what the statues actually looked like, it is irresponsible to keep giving them that impression. It's not an either/or question. They could do some of the statues with just the pure archaeological approach of only using the paints they found in the crevices, and do others in a layered approach that is more speculative but probably closer to how they actually looked. If they did that, this article would not be necessary.
pqtyw 10mo ago
> have direct evidence of, and this is just the saturated underlayers Why do they even bother with the "reconstructions" if they know that they are inherently inaccurate, though
- Sharlin 10mo ago
  Because exhibitions make money, apparently.
- bee_rider 10mo ago
  Bare marble and garish underlayer reconstructions could be seen as two extreme ends. The article points out that the garish underlayer reconstructions have (maybe accidentally) been successful at correcting the widely held misperception of bare marble. There’s also something in… the bare marble reconstruction maps somehow to our idea of sophisticated. Garish underplayed reconstruction, our idea of silly, frivolous, or childish. There were a lot of Greeks, they didn’t all live on one end of that spectrum.
  - lo_zamoyski 10mo ago
    Borderline deception is a bad way to correct inaccurate knowledge. And frankly, if I wanted to ridicule the ancients and flatter my own age, I could think of no better way than to make the old stuff look bad. I would much rather have an exhibit that showed the bare marble, then a conservative reconstruction based on what direct evidence merits (to the degree possible, noting that it is not a complete reconstruction), then more liberal but reasonable reconstructions based on indirect evidence.
    - bee_rider 10mo ago
      I think it is hard to say to what extent there actually is even borderline deception. The internet amplifies random and funny things. In this article (which, we should note, is even-handed but leaning skeptical toward the garish reconstructions), it is noted that the images that have spread are the ugliest of the exhibit. If the exhibit tells the full story, and the internet just amplified the silt bits, that’s not deception on the part of the exhibit.
michaelbuckbee 10mo ago
The "garish" statues are more akin to a false color image of mars that shows topography or something. That they're a visual representation of a particular portion of the pigments found and are not supposed to be an accurate recreation of how the statue looked at the time it was created.
- lokar 10mo ago
  AIUI, false color images of the cosmos are hand tuned to look pretty / interesting / impressive.
xp84 10mo ago
This practice of defining a reconstruction so pedantically as to be wholly unlike real life is just so dumb to me, as a layperson. This would be like “recreating” the experience of using a Commodore 64 but we can’t find any intact copies of the software at all so we provide a fake “OS” that requires the user to write code in ASM only, and say “Ladies and gentlemen, behold our reconstruction! This is what it was like!”
- nextaccountic 10mo ago
  The alternative is no reconstruction at all on one hand, and adding fake detail on another hand And if one wants to add fake detail, why should archeologists be involved? Just have AI generate them
  - mistercheph 10mo ago
    The archeologists are already adding fake detail, just at a different level of abstraction. Did they constrain themselves to only painting in the places where they find remnants of pigment? No, otherwise there would be gaps, cracks, and random interruptions of other colors in the painted figures. And there's the guesswork involved in going from spectral analysis (+ other tools) of a pigment sample to an actual paint that could have been plausibly available to the artist. Reconstruction, (similar to translation) is an art that combines carefuly study of evidence and craftfully filling in gaps and adding in detail where necessary (or leaving details unfilled and ambiguous to communicate the impossibility of total translation or reconstruction!) to present some communicable form of the original that gives the viewer some closer but imperfect access to it.
- wang_li 10mo ago
  All of those CRT simulators? Largely bullshit, and we still have them around to look at!
amarant 10mo ago
Is there someone who tries to achieve beauty similar to what the original might've looked like? Would be interesting to see a painted statue that's actually pleasant to look at, rather than these "let's smear this one pigment we found in the armpit all over the face"-style "reconstructions"
- IAmBroom 10mo ago
  See mkehrt's link ITT.
mkehrt 10mo ago
A while back the Met in New York had an exhibit of painted reconstructed statues where they let artists make reasonable guesses about what the statues would have looked like. It was pretty fantastic. Here's an article with one picture I could find, along with a few of the more saturated ones (NSFW artistic nudity): https://www.euronews.com/culture/2022/07/14/visit-the-exhibition-bringing-colour-back-to-ancient-marble-statues https://www.euronews.com/culture/2022/07/14/visit-the-exhibi...

kijin 10mo ago

The people who produce dinosaur illustrations don't seem to have as much of a problem with adding all sorts of details (extravagant plumage, wacky colors/patterns, starry eyes and acrobatic postures) that are neither directly supported nor contradicted by available evidence.

RajT88 10mo ago
We are not dinosaurs, so have rather less skin in the game when it comes to accuracy.
griffzhowl 10mo ago
They only started adding feathers after they found evidence of them being feathered, though. Plus there's zero direct evidence for their colours so there's no option but to use guesswork in these cases. And a lot of dinosaur reconstructions may be more for edutainment value rather than reflecting a scholarly best-guess. There's no uniform methodology across all these disciplines.
- bdr 10mo ago
  > Plus there's zero direct evidence for their colours This is no longer true! Starting with Sinosauropteryx in 2010, paleontologists have identified what they believe to be fossilized melanin-containing organelles. These organelles, called melanosomes, have different shapes depending on which color they produce, and those shapes are preserved well enough to be visible under an electron microscope.
  - griffzhowl 10mo ago
    Amazing, thanks for pointing it out. In the meantime, there's been some rejigging of the classification so it's this related genus where they've found the melanosomes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huadanosaurus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huadanosaurus
  - sdiupIGPWEfh 10mo ago
    Isn't a rather good deal of color from feathers a result of "structural color", rather than pigmentation? I'd be curious if fossilized feathers could ever, in theory, preserve enough microscopic detail to guess at that.

wisty 10mo ago

Reconstructioniats say that they only show th colours they can prove existed. The article suggests they obstinately do this because they know it creates a spectacle. I think there's another explanation - if they use their own judgement to fill in the gaps (making the statues more classically beautiful) then everyone will accuse them of making it all up, even if they were to base it on fairly rigorous study of e.g. the colour pallets used in preserved Roman paintings etc.

resize2996 10mo ago
That is how scholarship works. It’s like a math proof: they’re interested in proving the base case. If someone else wants to do more speculative work to theorize what a well-painted version would look like, that would be super cool, but it wouldn’t be scholarship.
- shermantanktop 10mo ago
  “The reason I’m totally misleading you with a speculative example is because of scholarship.” No way. When they engage the public, they are not longer exclusively scholars. They responsible for conveying the best truth they can to non-experts. A journal paper can be misunderstood when the reader lacks the context to interpret it. Out in the public square, that is not the reader’s fault anymore.
  - vkou 10mo ago
    Give the scholars full editorial control of the newspaper the public is getting their news from, and you might get better public understanding of their scholarship. You generally can't hold someone responsible for what someone else says about them.
- bjt 10mo ago
  And that's a fine standard to maintain when you're writing an academic paper. When you are instead putting together a museum exhibition intended for the general public, and you observe over and over again that they will interpret your work as representing what the statues actually looked like, it is irresponsible to keep giving them that impression. It's not an either/or question. They could do some of the statues with just the pure archaeological approach of only using the paints they found in the crevices, and do others in a layered approach that is more speculative but probably closer to how they actually looked. If they did that, this article would not be necessary.

pqtyw 10mo ago

> have direct evidence of, and this is just the saturated underlayers Why do they even bother with the "reconstructions" if they know that they are inherently inaccurate, though

Sharlin 10mo ago
Because exhibitions make money, apparently.
bee_rider 10mo ago
Bare marble and garish underlayer reconstructions could be seen as two extreme ends. The article points out that the garish underlayer reconstructions have (maybe accidentally) been successful at correcting the widely held misperception of bare marble. There’s also something in… the bare marble reconstruction maps somehow to our idea of sophisticated. Garish underplayed reconstruction, our idea of silly, frivolous, or childish. There were a lot of Greeks, they didn’t all live on one end of that spectrum.
- lo_zamoyski 10mo ago
  Borderline deception is a bad way to correct inaccurate knowledge. And frankly, if I wanted to ridicule the ancients and flatter my own age, I could think of no better way than to make the old stuff look bad. I would much rather have an exhibit that showed the bare marble, then a conservative reconstruction based on what direct evidence merits (to the degree possible, noting that it is not a complete reconstruction), then more liberal but reasonable reconstructions based on indirect evidence.
  - bee_rider 10mo ago
    I think it is hard to say to what extent there actually is even borderline deception. The internet amplifies random and funny things. In this article (which, we should note, is even-handed but leaning skeptical toward the garish reconstructions), it is noted that the images that have spread are the ugliest of the exhibit. If the exhibit tells the full story, and the internet just amplified the silt bits, that’s not deception on the part of the exhibit.

michaelbuckbee 10mo ago

The "garish" statues are more akin to a false color image of mars that shows topography or something. That they're a visual representation of a particular portion of the pigments found and are not supposed to be an accurate recreation of how the statue looked at the time it was created.

lokar 10mo ago
AIUI, false color images of the cosmos are hand tuned to look pretty / interesting / impressive.

xp84 10mo ago

This practice of defining a reconstruction so pedantically as to be wholly unlike real life is just so dumb to me, as a layperson. This would be like “recreating” the experience of using a Commodore 64 but we can’t find any intact copies of the software at all so we provide a fake “OS” that requires the user to write code in ASM only, and say “Ladies and gentlemen, behold our reconstruction! This is what it was like!”

nextaccountic 10mo ago
The alternative is no reconstruction at all on one hand, and adding fake detail on another hand And if one wants to add fake detail, why should archeologists be involved? Just have AI generate them
- mistercheph 10mo ago
  The archeologists are already adding fake detail, just at a different level of abstraction. Did they constrain themselves to only painting in the places where they find remnants of pigment? No, otherwise there would be gaps, cracks, and random interruptions of other colors in the painted figures. And there's the guesswork involved in going from spectral analysis (+ other tools) of a pigment sample to an actual paint that could have been plausibly available to the artist. Reconstruction, (similar to translation) is an art that combines carefuly study of evidence and craftfully filling in gaps and adding in detail where necessary (or leaving details unfilled and ambiguous to communicate the impossibility of total translation or reconstruction!) to present some communicable form of the original that gives the viewer some closer but imperfect access to it.
wang_li 10mo ago
All of those CRT simulators? Largely bullshit, and we still have them around to look at!

amarant 10mo ago

Is there someone who tries to achieve beauty similar to what the original might've looked like? Would be interesting to see a painted statue that's actually pleasant to look at, rather than these "let's smear this one pigment we found in the armpit all over the face"-style "reconstructions"

IAmBroom 10mo ago
See mkehrt's link ITT.

mkehrt 10mo ago

A while back the Met in New York had an exhibit of painted reconstructed statues where they let artists make reasonable guesses about what the statues would have looked like. It was pretty fantastic. Here's an article with one picture I could find, along with a few of the more saturated ones (NSFW artistic nudity): https://www.euronews.com/culture/2022/07/14/visit-the-exhibition-bringing-colour-back-to-ancient-marble-statues https://www.euronews.com/culture/2022/07/14/visit-the-exhibi...