Ancient and ArchaeologyΒ permalink
the first dig
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Message 1.Β
Posted by brushstroke (U14041781) on Sunday, 30th August 2009
we know archaelogy is ongoing all the time but which civilization first started to look at the past and take an interest in their history
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Message 2
Posted by an ex-nordmann - it has ceased to exist (U3472955) on Monday, 31st August 2009
An interest in history is an interest in the past, but never for its own sake. Our curiosity about what has gone before is honed by other requirements we all recognise - maybe not all of us with the same vigour or to the same extent, but requirements nevertheless placed on us as social animals with an acute sense of place and identity, and an equally acute need to understand the "why" of anything.
In modern times we have employed science to this end and it has proven a useful tool. It has expanded to a huge degree our understanding of the mechanics by which our global society has evolved, has exploded many assumptions in that respect which hitherto were forced to suffice for want of anything better, and in the process has (for those interested) brought new data, new perspectives and new questions to bear on that unwavering demand we express to understand ourselves.
But this has been only a recent development in satisfying that demand. As long as humanity has existed it has apparently prioritised the question of identity and employed history as a means by which such identity can be explained, justified or amplified. The early medieval Irish annals and Saxon chronicles, the Norse sagas, even the Old Testamant, are simply some well-known examples to us of just such an attempt. But they are by no means unique. There are few cultures which have not compiled similar histories, be they written or orally transmitted. Even fewer cultures have not recognised the nod to posterity they felt was owed (consciously or unconsciously) by leaving markers in their wake and placing a value on the markers left by others before.
This, whether the participants knew it or not, was not just a contribution to history but a proof that they valued history as much as we do. And this is as true it appears for the most isolated and illiterate societies as for those highly complex and literate civilisations with which we are most familiar throughout history. Few did not place a value on their origin and understanding it, and few therefore did not construct a history connecting that origin to who and what they felt themselves to be at the time.
We are still doing just that, albeit with less dependence on myth. Our motivation has really not changed at all, simply our methods. Our debt as the present occupants of other people's posterity is one we feel as keenly as they did themselves, and the subject we call "history" is simply a modern term to cover how we sate our curiosity about those people in order to better understand ourselves, just as they once did themselves.
The Mycenaeans built myth from their own incursions and investigations into the debris of the Minoan civilisation which had flourished before them. But for the application of science and knowledge we now possess but which was denied them this was, in terms of underlying motivation, no different from modern archaeology - the satiation of our unquenchable curiosity about our past by finding and interpreting its remnants. -
Message 3
Posted by brushstroke (U14041781) on Monday, 31st August 2009
a very interesting answer,but obviously they didn,t have "science" like we do to"prove" things so any interest in any history at all must have arisen from oral accounts
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Message 4
Posted by stalteriisok (U3212540) on Tuesday, 1st September 2009
hi brushstroke
a good question and again one which i have wondered about
most history hasnt actually been history - it has been tales and legends - told and retold by generations of people who lived in the same places for hundreds of years
in the old days you lived and died in the same village - you probably knew everything that had happened by word of mouth
i think digs started to happen when u lost that continuity - when people started moving about and u lost the word of mouth
i always wonder about sutton hoo - it was a suprise when it was found - but for hundreds of years it was known what and where it was
at what point did it disappear ??
st
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Message 5
Posted by an ex-nordmann - it has ceased to exist (U3472955) on Tuesday, 1st September 2009
Well, to be honest, the notion of "proof" is one which even today merits some circumspection with regard to archaeology and the other disciplines which attempt at scientifically revealing the past. That is why, when reading archaeological research findings, you will find the authors (the good ones anyway) prefer words like "indicate" and "suggest", rather than "prove" when announcing deductions based on the data under review. "Proof" is often a euphemism for "confirming pre-conceived notions" which, unless well grounded in existing data, is a stance which should be avoided by the objective analyser of any data.
In Ireland, for example, the Gaelic people took the existence of dolmens and other such structures as "proof" that the island had once been inhabited by giants, and this duly went into their history as they chose to interpret it. Nowadays the archaeologist who uses the same structures as definitive "proof" that the builders shared genetic roots with other monumental builders in Europe, should heed the warning from history and the many debunked "proofs" over the millennia.
Solid historical theory, especially that theory constructed from ancient data, tends to result from accrual of many tiny bits of data rather than any one clinching "proof". Archaeology and other forensic applications of science employed to deduce history should provide indications rather than proofs, the clearer the better of course. The historian's job is then to gauge if and how those indicators contribute to a plausible theory. -
Message 6
Posted by an ex-nordmann - it has ceased to exist (U3472955) on Tuesday, 1st September 2009
On the subject of "digs" (excavations with the deliberate aim of deducing historical fact rather than finding treasure etc), I assume they pre-date what is regarded as modern archaeology by a good long time.
In Dublin, for example, James Butler, Duke of Ormonde and then Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, took a personal interest in the clearing of the site for his new Royal Hospital in Kilmainham in the 1680s, built on the site of an old Templar (and later Hospitaller) monastery. When a hidden crypt was discovered he stopped all work on the site and invited members of the Dublin Philosophical Society (including William Petty) to examine the structure before it was destroyed. While part of his motivation might have been hope of finding lost Templar gold (such was the rumour in any case), he did not appear overly disappointed when nothing of that nature was found, and insisted on protecting the site militarily until the DPS members were finished surveying, measuring and sketching the structure. Robinson, the architect, was said to have used the sketches as inspiration for his design of the arched colonnade in the finished hospital.
Today we would call that archaeology. Then it was just called satisfying intellectual curiosity, and I am sure it was by no means an isolated incident. -
Message 7
Posted by Xenos5 (U1814603) on Tuesday, 1st September 2009
Hello Nordmann
I would have agreed with that until recently; think I still do. But I noticed last week an article by Richard Dawkins in which he was raising evolution beyond the status of 'theory supported by mass of evidence' into the status of 'proven fact'. I thought his argument was uncontroversial (and correct), but I noticed that he seemed to interchange notions of historical theory/fact with notions of scientific theory/fact.
Now, I don't say this is wrong. But I had rather been taken in past with the idea that historical 'facts' and scientific ones were of rather different classes, and the endeavour of history a fundametally different one from that of science.
Do you think the scientific advances in archaology have eroded this distiction ? Do you even think it was ever valid ?
X -
Message 8
Posted by an ex-nordmann - it has ceased to exist (U3472955) on Tuesday, 1st September 2009
Hi X,
We're straying into historiography rather than history here, and this dichotomy of views is represented in differing historiographical methods of examining data. Some approaches lean heavily on the side of semiotic interpretation, which means that almost all data is regarded as having been filtered through subjectively applied criteria of assessment, if not by the people who left the data then by those who uncovered it or, as in many cases, by those who preserved the data. One of the more severe of these approaches is the deconstructionist one, which challenges all data on this basis as a matter of course, however "solidly" it appears to lend itself to deduction. An example would be each new example found of a Roman bath which would appear to further suggest and even definitively prove that the Romans liked taking baths. The deconstructionist would challenge this deduction since the archaeological data, as yet, has not actually provided us with this datum. It is conceivable, for example, that only a tiny minority of the population had access to these facilities and the Romans en masse were a rather filthy lot. As long as the qestion remains unanswered therefore any historian writing about life in a Roman town should be on guard against deducing too much with regard to Roman hygiene from the data to hand. Deconstructionism actually has a more rigorous application historiographically, but you get my drift.
For a cultural historian however the data is entirely adequate to demonstrate generally high standards of personal hygiene, since the baths indicate a concerted intention to be clean, and it is a logical assumption backed up by observations from a cultural historical standpoint that such intentions, when demonstrated by tangible and extensive committment to satisfying them, inevitably infer more than mere policy, but an actual social norm.
To the archaeologist of course such arguing approaches are immaterial, or at least secondary to the process of recording the data accurately, whatever conclusions are then based on it.
Most historians however tend to the model which lies between - namely that a preponderance of data pointing to a fact can be taken as a fact until something disproves it. Like a good scientist, a good historian will welcome revisionism applied to this "fact" and the data which produced it, even when it fails to disprove it or set up an equally valid hypothesis since history, like science, is essentially a product of observation and deduction, and there is always the possibility that smething which could have been observed wasn't, and therefore a valid deduction was missed. In that sense Dawkins is correct in his comparison, if I understood your summation of his statement correctly. Where history and biology diverge however is in the leeway the former allows for subjective reasoning based on hypothesis compared to the latter. In that sense evolution has much greater claim at this stage to be regarded as immutable fact than the majority of historical theories. -
Message 9
Posted by Xenos5 (U1814603) on Tuesday, 8th September 2009
Thanks Nordmann. Interesting as ever.
If I followed you (!) then I agree.
And your final comments remind me that there is a vital process involved in historical theorising which is absent in scientific - namely inferring the role of (human) agency in the evidence. Intentionality is absent from biology (and physics, etc); it is always present in history, though easily misinterpreted perhaps. -
Message 10
Posted by an ex-nordmann - it has ceased to exist (U3472955) on Tuesday, 8th September 2009
Thucydides decided on the basis of graves excavated that islands which were to play a huge political role in the Peloponnesian Wars (of which he was a witness and probably a victim) had been colonised by Carians, because that was the best scientific analysis available to him, and he considered himself an objective historian. Carians were his contemporaries, and he noted the differences as well as the similarity between the armour found in the graves (then already 500 to 1,000 years old) but opted for the modern (to him) interpretation of the current political implications over the historical.
But for his shoddy forensics the guy was trying to behave exactly as a modern archaeologist would behave. And this - over the millennia - convinces me that there was always existed intellectual curiosity about what has gone before, even if it wasn't always served well by the science of the day. -
Message 11
Posted by PaulRyckier (U1753522) on Tuesday, 8th September 2009
Re: Message 8.
Nordmann,
thank you very much for your message. I learnt a lot from it, including food for thoughts in a debate on another messageboard: "Is history a science?"
I would rather use as you: "Is "historiography"...?" But even the connotation of what "historiography" is, the concept of the word "historiography" is already differing according to what source. Type once in Google: historiography, historiographie, geschiedschrijving, Geschichtsschreibung...
Warm regards and with esteem,
Paul. -
Message 12
Posted by Jim Reuss (U10298645) on Wednesday, 9th September 2009
I recall reading a quotation from a Babylonian? Sumerian? king when he boasted about digging to the foundations of a previous temple in order to restore it. It wasn't archaeology, as we define it, but he was attempting to restore the past. And wasn't Thutmose III responsible for freeing the sphinx from a sandy covering?
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Message 13
Posted by SimonSays (U2111137) on Sunday, 13th September 2009
Without disputing the interesting and useful earlier comments about the subject, I'd personally always be wary about the "scientific" conclusions of evangelists such as Dawkins - and this is a case in point. There's always another agenda.
I'm as committed a supporter of the evolutionary theory as anybody - it makes the most sense, it seems logical and from what we know, it's borne out by discovery. But "proven fact" - no, I don't think it can be that - there are too many things that we don't know, or don't understand, to go that far.
Another example would be light: as most of us will be aware, it appears to be both a wave and a particle, somehow. Seems logical and borne out by experiment. Theories abound as to how it works. But a fact, rather than a theory? - no: because it may well be something completely different, currently way outside our knowledge and frame of reference.
Don't forget that Dawkins has attempted to talk up this supposed "battle" between science and religion to advance his own beliefs: it's precisely this sort of idea that can appear to his advantage, if you don't think about it too much!
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Regarding early archaeologists, don't forget the Egyptian tomb investigators. Not only was their interest in their history so great that they undertook extensive excavation projects, they were also committed, centuries ahead of their time, to recycling...
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Message 14
Posted by Mutatis_Mutandis (U8620894) on Sunday, 20th September 2009
It is interesting to debate the nature of facts, but then one has to be very careful about terminology.
I think there is a decent case to be made that evolution itself is a "historical fact", as the evolution of species is well documented by the fossil record and the relations between the currently living species. Strictly speaking, I guess, we cannot consider it "historical" if the record of it is unwritten, but it is a record nevertheless.
The term "scientific fact" can then be applied to the theory of evolution, i.e. the Darwinian argument that this process is driven by natural selection. This is something separate from the fossil record of evolution, as one could this record and presume an entirely different mechanism to explain it: As Lamarck indeed did, in his suggestion that living beings could pass on treats they had acquired by exercise to their offspring.
"Historical fact" and "scientific conclusion" can therefore both be involved. Or as someone put it, "the theory of evolution explains the fact of evolution". -
Message 15
Posted by Mutatis_Mutandis (U8620894) on Sunday, 20th September 2009
The best current theory on the nature of light, as far as I know, is that of quantum electrodynamics (QED). Basically this describes light as particles -- photons -- of which the behaviour is controlled by "wave functions". Like quantum theory in general, it is probabilistic. By taking all the possible paths over which the light could travel, and making the sum of the wave functions associated with every path, one can calculate the probability that a photon will be observed in a location, or another. The theory very neatly reconciles the observations of particle-like and wave-like behaviour of light.
Experiments have shown that the predictions made by the theory of QED are extremely accurate. Indeed this is probably the physical theory that has been verified to the greatest level of accuracy, because electromagnetic frequencies can be very precisely measured. Nevertheless, it remains a scientific theory in the sense defined by Karl Popper: It cannot be proven, but an observation that contradicts the predictions of theory would falsify it.
Yet, even if the theory of QED would be falsified by an experimental example contrary to its predictions, it is likely that it the theoretical model would remain into use because for many purposes it is accurate enough. Just as we still use the classical Maxwell equations a lot: We know that these cannot possibly be the "correct" theoretical explanation, but for practical everyday use, they are usually sufficient. This is in fact routine procedure in the "exact" sciences. When we calculate how long it will take for a stone to fall three meters, most of us will simply use the Newtonian theory of gravity, although we know perfectly well that this theory has been falsified and that Einstein's formulas would produce a slightly more accurate prediction. But we know that in our everyday world, the Newtonian equations will do very well, and they have the merit of being relatively simple.
Exact science, therefore, rarely rejects a theory completely because it is "falsified" in the Popperian sense, although in theory we should do just that. Instead, it builds up a layering of theories not unlike an onion. As we dig deeper in the structure, the results delivered by succeeding theories get progressively more accurate and complete, unfortunately usually at the price of more complex and more abstract mathematics. Nearer the core are theoretical models we have not yet discovered or cannot yet justify, which are more accurate and more complete than our best current theory. (One can question whether such a thing as the perfect and all-inclusive physical theory, to be found at the center of our onion of theory, really exists.)
Given that we have falsified all the previous theories, the conservative assumption is that our current theory is flawed as well -- but does that really matter that much? In practice, a big part of skill of a physicist is knowing under which conditions theories are "valid enough" and what their underlying assumptions are, so that one can choose the best compromise between relevance and mathematical complexity. Even so, when a theory provides an equation describing a particular problem, it is often (usually) an equation that is still too complex to solve, and the scientist will have to look for further ways to simplify and approximate it. When describing the fall of a stone, is it necessary to include aerodynamic drag or not? That depends on the stone's shape, density, and drop height; among other things.
All but the simplest systems have to be calculated by approximation.These days, computers provide both simulation modelling and symbolic logic capabilities that have taken some of drudgery out of it, but I remember making some extremely tedious (and error-prone) perturbation calculations by hand as a student.
Suppose that there is a theory that predicts the behaviour of light more accurately than QED, or delivers the right result in some not yet discovered situation in which QED delivers the wrong result. As far as our current experimental knowledge goes, it is going to make less difference than one part in a billion, and almost all of the real-world predictions we make with the theory are going to be approximations anyway. Therefore, although we cannot claim that our best scientific theory is a "fact", it is reasonable to say that it provides a decent approximation of the facts, and it is likely to continue to do so under all conditions tested by us so far.
This is not a plea for stopping research in the field of theoretical physics: A better understanding of it might not only be of great intellectual and scientific value, but could also have important practical implications. After all tools such as lasers and LEDs that are now in everyday use, are the product of scientific theories that to most of us are highly esoteric. Einstein predicted the process that underlies the functioning of lasers, stimulated emission, on purely theoretical grounds.
But it is a warning against rejecting scientific theories and models because they are on philophical grounds necessarily flawed, because "more research is needed", or because they do not have the indisputable status of fact. Newton's mechanics still predict the fall of a dropped stone accurately enough. It would be silly to say that we cannot predict how the stone will fall because Newton's (and Einstein's) theories are flawed.
I hope you will excuse the off-topic diatribe, which has become very long.
Regarding the origins of archaeology, I think we need to make a distinction between archaeology and treasure-hunting. Digging for treasure must be an activity nearly as old as civilisation itself. In the Western world, I think the concept of archaeology proper is usually traced back the Renaissance, and the great interest its scholars took in the remains of antiquity. They did not only dig or study the archives, but also had an interest in critically reviewing what they found, instead of just admiring it.
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