Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

Internet Archive Scholar has some interesting results for "Lagash", it's a nice resource. See this from 1956:

https://archive.org/details/sim_transactions-of-the-american...

> "This is the dream contained in the famous Cylinder A of Gudea (published in TCL VIII), the ensi of the Sumerian city of Lagash, whose floruit falls about the very beginning of the second millennium B.C. Gudea, ruler of Lagash, desired to build a fitting temple for his god, NinGirsu, and, as was customary throughout the entire span of existence of the Mesopotamian civilization, the latter sent a dream..."

These kinds of modern excavations reveal a lot more about ordinary daily life than the older translation of temple documents and royal inscriptions do, however.

>These kinds of modern excavations reveal a lot more about ordinary daily life than the older translation of temple documents and royal inscriptions do, however.

I don't think these are separate things. Excavating is a blind effort, there is no 'modern excavation', we just find more interesting things now because we excavate a hell lot more then we used to decades ago. And these boring translations of temple documents and royal inscriptions is how we get context for the objects and layers we find.

>there is no 'modern excavation'

They describe the modern technique in the UPenn announcement...

Rather than digging according to architectural construction phases, the Lagash Archaeological Project is using an approach championed by Pisa’s Pizzimenti, who excavates by microstratigraphic layers, thin lens by thin lens horizontally, across a wide swath, “like doing very careful surgery,” Pittman says. “Just 50 centimeters down, we were able to capture all of this. We were happily astounded.”

That's a refinement of practices that are decades old. Comment I responded to seemed to imply we got evidence of this tavern due to some recent breakthrough, while before we'd be doing mostly work on temples and translation. Which is false, we have slice of life findings since the beginning of archeology, and ongoing efforts on prominent buildings and bodies of text.

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