Something I find incredibly cool is that they’ve found neandertal bone tools made from polished rib bones, and they couldn’t figure out what they were for for the life of them.
“Wait you’re still using the exact same fucking thing 50,000 years later???”
“Well, yeah. We’ve tried other things. Metal scratches up and damages the hide. Wood splinters and wears out. Bone lasts forever and gives the best polish. There are new, cheaper plastic ones, but they crack and break after a couple years. A bone polisher is nearly indestructible, and only gets better with age. The more you use a bone polisher the better it works.”
It’s just.
50,000 years. 50,000. And over that huge arc of time, we’ve been quietly using the exact same thing, unchanged, because we simply haven’t found anything better to do the job.
i also like that this is a “ask craftspeople” thing, it reminds me of when art historians were all “the fuck” about someone’s ear “deformity” in a portrait and couldn’t work out what the symbolism was until someone who’d also worked as a piercer was like “uhm, he’s fucked up a piercing there”. interdisciplinary shit also needs to include non-academic approaches because crafts & trades people know shit ok
One of my professors often tells us about a time he, as and Egyptian Archaeologist, came down upon a ring of bricks one brick high. In the middle of a house. He and his fellow researchers could not fpr the life of them figure out what tf it could possibly have been for. Until he decided to as a laborer, who doesnt even speak English, what it was. The guy gestures for my prof to follow him, and shows him the same ring of bricks in a nearby modern house. Said ring is filled with baby chicks, while momma hen is out in the yard having a snack. The chicks can’t get over the single brick, but mom can step right over. Over 2000 years and their still corraling chicks with brick circles. If it aint broke, dont fix it and always ask the locals.
I read something a while back about how pre-columbian Americans had obsidian blades they stored in the rafters of their houses. The archaeologists who discovered them came to the conclusion that the primitive civilizations believed keeping them closer to the sun would keep the blades sharper.
Then a mother looked at their findings and said “yeah, they stored their knives in the rafters to keep them out of reach of the children.”
Omg the ancient child proofing add on tho lol
I remember years ago on a forum (email list, that’s how old) a woman talking about going to a museum, and seeing among the women’s household objects a number of fired clay items referred to as “prayer objects”. (Apparently this sort of labeling is not uncommon when you have something that every house has and appears to be important, but no-one knows what it is.) She found a docent and said, “Excuse me, but I think those are drop spindles.” “Why would you think that, ma’am?” “Because they look just like the ones my husband makes for me. See?” They got all excited, took tons of pictures and video of her spinning with her spindle. When she was back in the area a few years later, they were still on display, but labeled as drop spindles.
So ancient Roman statues have some really weird hairstyles. Archaeologists just couldn’t figure them out. They didn’t have hairspray or modern hair bands, or elastic at all, but some of these things defied gravity better than Marge Simpson’s beehive.
Eventually they decided, wigs. Must be wigs. Or maybe hats. Definitely not real hair.
A hairdresser comes a long, looks at a few and is like, “Yeah, they’re sewn.”
“Don’t be silly!” the archaeologists cry. “How foolish, sewn hair indeed! LOL!”
So she went away and recreated them on real people using a needle and thread and the mystery of Roman hairstyles was solved.
She now works as a hair archaeologist and I believe she has a YouTube channel now where she recreates forgotten hairstyles, using only what they had available at the time.
Okay, I greatly appreciate the discussion here about the need for interdisciplinary work in academia, and the need to reach outside of academia and talk to specialists when looking at the uses of tools, but somehow people always have to turn this into a “gotcha!” where the stuffy academics get shown up (even though this very thread shows some archeologists reaching out to craftspeople to ask about how tools are used because they recognize the need for that knowledge and expertise).
“A hairdresser comes a long, looks at a few and is like, “Yeah, they’re sewn.”
“Don’t be silly!” the archaeologists cry. “How foolish, sewn hair indeed! LOL!”
So she went away and recreated them on real people using a needle and thread and the mystery of Roman hairstyles was solved.”
Did they? Did they really? The archeologists all laughed at the plucky hairdresser and then she proved her theory by simply recreating the styles?
See, what actually happened is that Janet Stephens (the hairdresser/hair archeologist in this post), who published an article about her theory in The Journal of Roman Archeology in 2008, spent about 6 years of research pursuing her idea that perhaps Roman hairstyles were sewn hair and not wigs. She did both hands-on experimentation sewing the actual hair, and more traditional research reading through a ton of sources. This is coming from an interview done with Stephens herself:
“Lots and lots of reading, poring over exhibition catalogs, back searching the footnotes to the reading and reading some more! It helped that I am fluent in Italian and, in 2006, I took a German for reading class. Working in my spare time, the research took 6 years.”
“I am an independent researcher, but my husband is a professor of Italian at the Johns Hopkins University, so I have library privileges there. We are friendly with colleagues in the Classics/Archaeology department and at the Walters Art Museum. They were kind enough to send me articles and clippings, read drafts and help with some picky Latin, though I try not to impose.”
Wow, so people in the Classics/Archeology department and at the art museum sent her articles and clippings and HELPED her with her research as opposed to laughing at her in their gentleman’s club! It’s almost like people working the archeology/art history these days aren’t all stuffy old white guys from the 1950’s!
Stephens also presented her work at the Archeological Institute of America Conference, and according to the interview I cited above, it was apparently well received: “It seemed to create a a lot of buzz and people said they enjoyed it. It’s not every conference where you go to the poster session and see “heads on pikestaffs”!”
Like, there’s plenty to be said about the ivory tower and the need for interdisciplinary work, and the racism/sexism etc. that newer researchers are working against, but framing this story as “hairdresser totally shows up the archeologists with her common sense!” is needlessly shitting on the academics involved here (and the humanities in general have been struggling to maintain funding at many universities in the US, they don’t need to be further attacked), as well as greatly over-simplifying and downplaying Janet Stephens’ achievement. I think it’s more respectful to acknowledge the six years of work that she put into the project than to tell the story like she just sewed some hair and then all the archeologists’ monocles popped out.
While we’re on that, the story about the leatherworker above is also entirely apocryphal – which is actually proven in the article linked to the entirely fictional paragraph above. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:
This claim that “they couldn’t figure out what they were for the life of them. Until, of course, they showed it to a traditional leatherworker” and all about her taking one look at it yadda yadda is…entirely unsubstantiated.
The story makes no sense if you pause to think about it: it’s new to discover this tool from this long ago. But, if we’re still using them today, then people were probably still using them throughout history from that time until today. So is the idea supposed to be that anthropologists have just been encountering this tool from all different time periods, up to and including the modern day, and just….never bothered to figure out what it was? Until they found a REALLY old one and were like, well, better get on this now? Of course not!
These anthropologists were able to identify the use of this tool, because they have experience, as anthropologists, studying tools. In fact, the risk that they might not have been able to identify this tool was not because they were anthropologists, but because they were anthropologists who studied a time period from which these tools had not previously been discovered. However, because they had experience with other time periods, AS ANTHROPOLOGISTS, they were able to identify this tool.
Here is a quote from that article (unsurprisingly, it does not support the “gosh wow!” conversation in the original post):
“The first three found were fragments less than a few centimeters long and might not have been recognized without experience working with later period bone tools. It is not something normally looked for in this time period. “However, when you put these small fragments together and compare them with finds from later sites, the pattern in them is clear,” comments McPherron. “Then last summer we found a larger, more complete tool that is unmistakably a lissoir, like those we find in later, modern human sites or even in leather workshops today.” ”
To repeat: the reason these anthropologists might not have recognized this tool is not because it’s new to anthropology, or because all anthropologists have just been like ¯_(ツ)_/¯ every time they found it. It’s because they “might not have been recognized without experience working with later period bone tools” because “it’s not something normally looked for in this time period.” Happily, these anthropologists had that experience! However, anthropology as a field has long been familiar with these tools – because “we find [them] in later, modern human sites or even leather workshops today.” Unlike the fake!anthropologist from this post, the real anthropologists, named Marie Soressi and Shannon McPherron, were not shocked that a modern leatherworker was still using these tools – because they knew that already! What they didn’t know was that Neandertals also used that tool, so long ago.
I’ll let them share a little more about their thoughts on this discovery:
“Lissoirs like these are a great tool for working leather, so much so that 50 thousand years after Neandertals made these, I was able to purchase a new one on the Internet from a site selling tools for traditional crafts,” says Soressi. “It shows that this tool was so efficient that it had been maintained through time with almost no change. It might be one or perhaps even the only heritage from Neandertal times that our society is still using today.”
This apocryphal story crediting our fictional she/her leatherworker reinforces the idea that anthropologists and other scholars are a bunch of elites who know nothing about the real world and the lives of people outside the ivory tower, including the people they study. This ends up both erasing the tremendous amount of knowledge that people in these fields hold (I find giving the fictional leatherworker she/her pronouns to be an interesting twist, given that it’s erasing the contributions of the real woman working as an anthropologist who co-made this discovery), and distracting from the real issues of racism, sexism, and exclusion that have shaped these fields and affect the increasingly diverse people working in them today. These issues are real, and the harms that the field of anthropology has and does perpetuate are real, and are best addressed honestly.
Instead of creating parables that scholars know nothing, let’s celebrate what human curiosity has been able to discover about our past; learn about and work to repair the real (not apocryphal) harms perpetuated in anthropology and academia; continue to make academia more inclusive of people with various expertise, gender, race, ethnicity, prior knowledge, and ways of knowing about the past; value multiple types of expertise both in and outside of the academy; and celebrate what is most exciting about this discovery:
not that anthropologists are all ignorant, but that our ancient ancestors were wiser and more creative than we knew, and gifted us this tool so long ago.
amhrancas 