Indigenous Cultures Have Archaeology Too | Hacker News Reader

Indigenous Cultures Have Archaeology Too

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68 pointsHooke56 comments

The sad little title really doesn't do this justice. This is a piece (primarily) about Papua New Guinea. In the west, we tend to hear bad things about the place, like about high rates of poverty and violence.

But:

Papua New Guinea is one of the most culturally diverse countries in the world. As of 2019, it is also the most rural, as only 13.25% of its people live in urban centres. There are 851 known languages in the country... Most of the population of more than 8,000,000 people lives in customary communities, which are as diverse as the languages. The country is one of the world's least explored, culturally and geographically. It is known to have numerous groups of uncontacted peoples, and researchers believe there are many undiscovered species of plants and animals in the interior.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papua_New_Guinea

It is also a place where 97 percent of the land is held in traditional tribal or communal commons arrangements. This creates challenges for modernizing and developing because you can't sell the land, which means you can't mortgage it.

https://thediplomat.com/2016/03/papua-new-guinea-where-prope...

I'm not done reading the piece under discussion here, but it's a really fascinating piece. Please don't be put off by the lame and vague title. They are probably trying to be respectful. My general understanding is that "Indigenous" is a preferred term, but it's really vague and doesn't seem to mean much to most Westerners (which is another problematic term, but I don't know a better one and I think most people will know what I am trying to say, never mind the inaccuracies).

PNG is just really fascinating stuff and I would love to see more pieces like this one exploring this interesting place and the peoples who live there, their culture and history and so forth. I think we have just so much to learn and haven't yet scratched the surface.

Edit: The latter part of the article also talks about other places. This is not "just" about PNG, but a part of it is about PNG and it's really interesting.

I think the title might be inspired by the recent discussions about ethnomathematics. The idea is that indigenous cultures don't just have their own art and (vernacular) architecture, but also their own valid analogues of science, history, philosophy etc. however basic these activities might seem to western eyes.

Is 'indigenous' really a vague and obscure term?

Indigenous is sort of like European or African or Asian. Stories about Asian Peoples aren't that interesting. If you want to hook someone, put China or Japan or Korea in the title.

It's extremely broad and covers a great many peoples and tells you next to nothing about who you are talking about. So, yeah, I think it is pretty vague, personally.

/2 cents

I've always taken it to mean in relation pre-colonial ethnic groups or cultures.

It's specific in its vagueness. It's not meant to describe a specific culture or population, but a class.

I know what the word means and what it is intended to describe.

I also write for pay and titles are hard and words like that don't tend to do well in titles.

PNG is one of those places I'd love to go but I'm afraid that my white skin would just put a target on my back. Port Morseby is literally a 3 hour flight from where I live(brisbane) but it seems more than a world away.

> It is also a place where 97 percent of the land is held in traditional tribal or communal commons arrangements. This creates challenges for modernizing and developing because you can't sell the land, which means you can't mortgage it.

Why is this a challenge if it is the constitutional choice of a sovereign nation. My impression is that this arrangement is knowingly and purposefully meant to avoid Western modernization and development, in order to perpetually safeguard the traditional way of life. Western property regime equals appropriation, displacement, and dislocation, then the concentration of wealth in owners. Mortgaging your land also has a negative connotation, especially when the lien-holder has unbalanced power to cause default and then take the land. Seems like PNG was trying to avoid this and keep traditional life alive in a natural state, not modernize and develop. There are plenty of places where Western ways have encroached and irreversibly changed indigenous outcomes. Let them have this one place where they have a chance to live their way.

Not really "indigenous" but one of my favorite stories of history within history is the unearthing of the classical Greek/Roman statue of Laocön in Rome in 1506. It was witnessed by Michelangelo and immediately recognized as a lost masterpiece from Latin texts that were known and still studied. So in a sense, the scholars at the time (can't really call them scientists, but essentially the experts of the time) knew they were looking at a significant masterpiece that they knew of only through the historical record.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laoco%C3%B6n_and_His_Sons

While it's interesting to learn how indigenous cultures interpret archaeological sites, this article blurs the distinction between scientific and pre-scientific understanding of archaeology. It presents "Western science" (which should be referred to as "science," an international pursuit that happens to have begun in the West) as just another means of interpreting archaeological sites, alongside myths, folk beliefs, etc.

Reading this article (and looking at some of the other articles on the site) reminds me of what I've heard elsewhere about the deep rift in anthropology between the physical and the cultural anthropologists. It appears to me to be a conflict between a scientific worldview and an increasingly subjective, politically influenced worldview. One manifestation of this is the decision by the American Anthropological Association to remove the word "science" from its mission statement.[1-2]

1. http://blogs.nature.com/news/2010/11/hold_the_science_says_a...

2. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/10/science/10anthropology.ht...

I don't see the problem. The questions anthropology seeks to answer are heavily influenced by politics and subjectivity; attempting to erase the imprecision with which humanity engages with reality paints an imprecise picture of humanity itself. As scientific inquiry is limited by the range of conceivable hypotheses (where that range is limited by experience, dogma, even bias) and available methods of observation, it seems imprudent to proclaim a "scientific worldview" (which is used inappropriately here, though not always elsewhere, as a synonym for "reason") as the be-all-end-all of interest. Especially in a society that has seen no small amount of reckless regard towards physical evidence of indigenous history. I see no reason to begrudge people the right to fill the vacuum left with whatever they like as long as it doesn't contradict physical evidence; they weren't the ones asking for developers to pave over grave sites. It's a bit of a, "lying in the bed you made," situation.

Although archaeology is certainly informed by scientific theory and uses the work of scientific fields like geology, it’s not truly a science. Crucially, archaeological excavations are not reproducible, and archaeological theories are not experimentally falsifiable. The same is true of cultural anthropology.

Many sciences are not reproducible, in that they don't have reproducible experiments. The key is the integrity of the data and clear explanation of the analysis methods.

But archaeology most definitely does have experimentally falsifiable theories, and it is undoubtedly a science.

What's a scientific field with non-reproducible experiments? I'm hard-pressed to think of any field with the kind of no-do-overs issues that archaeological excavations have.

Much of astronomy and astrophysics, for one, doesn’t even have the concept of experiments. They observe past behavior and predict future behavior, but they can’t do anything like the causal trials that define other sciences. Same with geology, the study of weather (sorry I’m blanking on the term), and some fields of biology. Anything that it is impossible to causally affect in a lab.

Paleontology.

You can't dig up the same fossil twice. But you're not going to claim that the study of ancient species using the fossil record is unscientific, I hope.

Paleontology is very similar to archaeology, but because humans aren't the object of study, it's less affected by politics, and I haven't heard of any fights within paleontology over whether to call the field a "science."

I don't think the term "science" has ever had a single unified definition. When people say "Physics is a science" and "Archaeology is a science", I'm not convinced those two sentences are using the word "science" in exactly the same sense (although of course they are using it in somewhat related senses).

Wittgenstein famously argued that there is nothing that all "games" have in common – there is no single common element to board games, card games, ball games – there is a "family resemblance" (Familienähnlichkeit) in which every "game" has some things in common with other "games", but there is no one thing that all games have in common.

Maybe something similar is true for sciences as well.

Archeology is what's called a historical science. One of the features of that designation is exactly the lack of general reproducibility you've identified. Geology (specifically subfields like geomorphology) has many of the same issues even though you've identified it as a scientific field.

That said, as someone who's been a practicing archaeologist, I would agree that it's not entirely scientific, but only because the interesting questions in it often aren't answerable in a scientific framework.

Your links are 10 years old. The current website of the American Anthropological Association seems to have reconciled (compromised on) both views:

https://www.americananthro.org/

Their subtitle is "Advancing Knowledge, Solving Human Problems"

Their About page (https://www.americananthro.org/ConnectWithAAA/Content.aspx?I...) says:

"The Association is dedicated to advancing human understanding and applying this understanding to the world’s most pressing problems. While 75 percent of our members are employed in higher education or are students of anthropology, about 25 percent of our members work in the public, private, and non-governmental sectors, beyond the academy."

The Statement of Purpose page (https://www.americananthro.org/ConnectWithAAA/Content.aspx?I...) says:

"The purposes of the Association shall be

- to advance anthropology as the science that studies humankind in all its aspects, through archeological, biological, ethnological, and linguistic research;

- and to further the professional interests of American anthropologists, including the dissemination of anthropological knowledge and its use to solve human problems."

The very fact that they fought over whether or not to call their discipline a "science" shows that there's a rift in the field. I know this same issue has led to the breakup of some anthropology departments, including at Stanford (forced to merge again later), Duke and Harvard.

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