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Comment by yarcob | Hacker News Reader

I think the most fascinating, and also frustrating, thing about archaeology is how little we actually know.

We find these tiny fragments, and they tell us something about the past, but every artefact invites a lot more questions than it provides answers.

My late father spent some time researching tattoos and body marks in antiquity. A common pattern that appeared often were 4 dots arranged like the vertices of a rhombus. The pattern appears eg. on terracotta figurines and must have had some significance. But we have no idea what it meant, and all we can do is make wild guesses.

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The problem is that we cannot use the scientific method to be sure of past events. The correct answer to a lot of anthropology is "We don't know" which is the most scientific explanation. I expect most people have the same expectation of truth across different sciences. It is a difficult concept for many people in my experience that hard physics is more truthful than anthropology, which are both called sciences.

I agree about the overall problem, but there are some empirical techniques we can use. Being able to extract and sequence DNA from preserved remains has been revolutionary. It's also amazing what we can do with pollen now. These don't solve the problem of reconstructing pre-historic culture, but they have helped us understand pieces of the picture better. They've been able to discredit some ideas that were widely held in the past.

Yes, you can use the scientific method in the historical sciences. There are all kinds of methods that you can use to be more certain about things. (I'm no historian, so I cannot elaborate, sorry.) The level of certainty you can reach may often be different from the exact sciences, but some things can be very certain; no-one is going to deny that Julius Caesar existed, for example.

You’re not wrong, despite Wittgenstein’s Brown Papers, his criticism of Golden Bough—-people continue to refuse to acknowledge the limits of knowledge.

Here’s an author theorizing on why people go to festivals TODAY, instead of the obvious answer that they’re a fun social game he creates this entire abstract theory about worship and religion.

https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/girard-series-part-1-th...

Future humans will say the same thing about us for letting non-God billionaires have disproportionate control of our economic behavior.

“They sat around playing banal number games, trying to manipulate each other’s agency, pointing at some other typical human called “Jeff Bezos”, seeking to get rich like him not realizing he’s actually protected by their consent to then contemporary political arrangements. They played along with all of it!”

The only difference is they’ll probably have a perfect digital record of our acquiescence to laugh at over.

"Manipulating each other's agency" is a hell of a description of nonessential economic activity.

We're already, today, looking back at the utter failure of multiple attempts to impose alternative economic models, and the horrific human costs in lives and poverty until they turned back to free market economics or a mixed public/private model to save themselves.

And yet the more one learns in any scientific field, finds you answering more and more: "I don't know." The more you learn about anything the more you realize how little you 'know'. Only idiots are left with the certainty they are 'right.'

“We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.”

John Archibald Wheeler

Or to quote Operation Ivy, “All I know is that I don’t know nothing!” I believe Socrates’ whole schtick was that people don’t know much except for maybe some super specific knowledge and he spent his life making a public spectacle out of proving this.

Future alien civilizations are going to think the cool S means something. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_S

Huh, never seen that before.

You clearly didn't go to high school in the 1980s.

It's still a very popular thing for kids to doodle even today.

Or the 1990s, or the 2000s, or the 2010s...

Or not American ?

How universal is it? It had made it's way to Australia by at least the early 90's.

Was also common in Ukraine in early 2000s.

I did go to secondary school in the 1980s, but not in the US.

I'm pretty sure it means not paying attention during class in 1985

I too feel frustrated that we know so little. One big issue, I've come to realize after visiting so many sites around the world.

A lot of the amazing archaeological sights are in countries that struggle/struggled economically and security wise. (E.g. Iraq, Ethiopia, Turkey, Syria, etc.)

Many sites are destroyed or we simply can't invest the proper time and money. Very frustrating.

But how could it not be that way? No matter how much we can find, there will always be something just a little out of reach or just a little bit getting destroyed. If it was easy to find, it wouldn't be very interesting.

I think part of it is that some items/patterns/etc might actually mean absolutely nothing. It might be a dead end even with perfect knowledge.

Some Neanderthal was fucking around with some rocks one day and we look for some meaning in the remains. Was it a tool? Religious artifact? Nope, just Bobby Neander being bored and hitting rocks together into a shape with no meaning.

To be clear, that doesn't mean it's not worth trying to find the meaning if there is one.

Good ole Bobby "Bashrocks" Neander. RIP Bobby.

and much of what we do "know" is still based purely on speculation but has been repeated enough to be considered truth. consider modern "ironic" appreciation of things, how would that appear to future archaologists?

Could be birth marks of a king or some famous, so having them was considered high status. See beauty marks

Right, that's the stuff we come up with: Kings, religious ceremonies, symbolism.

And then it turns out (or rather, we never fully figure out) that it just meant that the owner paid that time's equivalent of sales tax on the figurine. And that the "unknown site probably used for ritual purposes" was more akin to that society's DMV, and people spent a lot of time there sitting around being bored until it's their turn at the clerk's station.

I should add that I don't really think that my "sales tax" explanation is in any way more likely in that specific case, but I do wonder if we (as layman, not necessarily archeologists) tend to discard mundane theories a lot. And yet I somehow find how the mundane stuff was handled in ancient times much more interesting then any regal or religious ceremony stuff...

Sure, of course we do. That's what we found when we were finally able to translate old Babylonian tablets. We thought they might be works of literature or important stories. They were basically all contractual agreements and receipts. As a result, we may have to conclude that written language was probably created for business, not for art.

In hindsight, this makes a lot of sense. Of course writing was created to keep track of who got paid and who's yet to be paid, who's paid their taxes and who's yet to pay.

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