Re: Robert Best - a moral lesson touching on nobody-can-make-me-open-my-closed-mind prejudice


"Eric Stevens" <eric.stevens@xxxxxxxxx> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
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On Tue, 10 Jul 2007 12:44:56 +0200, "Uwe Müller"
<uwemueller@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


"Eric Stevens" <eric.stevens@xxxxxxxxx> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
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On Fri, 6 Jul 2007 08:03:49 +0200, "Uwe Müller"
<uwemueller@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


"Eric Stevens" <eric.stevens@xxxxxxxxx> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
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On Thu, 5 Jul 2007 13:20:18 +0200, "Uwe Müller"
<uwemueller@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


"Eric Stevens" <eric.stevens@xxxxxxxxx> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
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On Thu, 5 Jul 2007 07:40:13 +0200, "Uwe Müller"
<uwemueller@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


"Eric Stevens" <eric.stevens@xxxxxxxxx> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
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On Wed, 4 Jul 2007 14:47:52 +0200, "Uwe Müller"
<uwemueller@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


"Eric Stevens" <eric.stevens@xxxxxxxxx> schrieb im
Newsbeitrag
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On Tue, 03 Jul 2007 09:22:17 -0700, Carl
<pchristainsen@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

On Jul 3, 11:40 am, "Peter Alaca" <p.al...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
...



snip >

For what it is worth, I
would not have described 'pure invention' as a basis for anything to
do with serious attempts at dating and that was not meaning I took
from what you wrote. Things would be different if you had said 'pure
invention' in the first place. But then, I don't think it is hard to
show that neither date was based on 'pure invention'.

Well, then do so. I'm eager to learn.

Let's just say that they were based on intelligent extrapolation.

There was no factual basis to the stories at the time. It was simply taken
for granted, because there was nothing else. The choice was either to use
the biblical dates or don't give any dates at all.

So it was not an extrapolation, which starts off with data, nor was it
intelligence but religion.


Btw. have you ever heard about a guy called Schliemann and his Priamos
Treasure, he was off by millenia. Pure invention. Or if you like that
better, too much reliance on myths and biblical stories.

Or a very poor data base from which to extrapolate.

Instead of looking at the evidence he searched Homer, there was only one
major treasure that might have remained in Troy. But, remember the speck of
dust, there was no connection between the treasure found and Homer. It was
from the early bronze age.

Read it up, you wont believe me otherwise.




snip >


As I have recently posted, nor is the evidence of a comet impact an
invention. An extraction from legends of a date for the impact may
be
an invention but from more recent work it seems it may have been a
successful invention.

In fact, I don't think you really mean 'invention'. 'Fiction' or
'fantasy' may be closer to what you intend.

No. I ment invention and so I wrote invention.
Just have a look at the state of dating in the 30s and earlier. There
were
great differences between scholars, and biblical dating was still
important
to some of them.
Is my English that bad?

I'm not sure. I wouldn't have thought that it was. Generally you write
it like a native (oops no - better than that). :-)

In this context 'pure invention' means that somebody made it up out of
thin air. Even though C14 or similar did not exist in 1931
archaeolgists were able to date layers and finds without having to
invent numbers. I don't think 'pure invention' is an appropriate
description.

Than learn how they arrived at their dates. And compare the famous old
ones
and how far their dates differ from each other. Biblical accounts were
the
only data to use for that time period because there was nothing else.

But they didn't invent the biblical accounts. Thats why I thought that
labelling it as 'pure invention' was unkind.

I never labelled the biblical stories pure invention. I called the basis for
the dating of both theories 'pure invention', as there is no connection
between the method of dating and the layer to be dated. Remember the speck
of dust. You have to make sure to have the right speck of dust.




Research is poor for the date given, I agree. But if you want to
argue
a
world wide phenomenon at that time, why choose areas as evidence,
that
stand
out as being especially poor in controlled excavations? Because the
best
researched regions do not show anything out of the ordinary. So
they
are
simply omitted.

Is that fair treatment of the reader?

It certainly is not fair treatment if the articles I have cited were
supposed to be thorough accounts of the work that was done and the
processes by which conclusions were reached. But all I have cited so
far are but short accounts of what has been done: news, almost.

And it did not occur to you that evidence for a world wide phenomenon
would
be best sought for in areas, that are well researched? How big is the
area
of uncovered clay deposits? How big is the region, that they looked
at?
How
does the area of uncovered clay deposits compare to the researched
area,
compare to the whole world? So how big is the scientific basis of the
proposed theories of a world wide flood? It's like speculating about
the
colour of someones hair based on research on a speck of dust found on
his
coffee cup.

It's not that long ago (years) when I wrote about the possibility of
megatsunami and I was buried in abuse (in this news group) on the
basis that the tsunami record contained no evidence of realloy large
waves. Now the evidence of megatsunami is being found all round the
world on almost weekly basis. The fact that nobody has yet recognised
the evidence for exceptional events does not mean that there is no
evidence for exceptional events.

So you concede, that their is in fact, as of today, no evidence for Noahs
Flood?

Certainly not if by that you mean the flood described in the bible.
But if you look further afield you will discover many other accounts
of a flood and it is difficult to not conclude that there is a common
basis to many of them.

The common basis is of course the natural fact of floods occuring in natural
ecosystems. Why do you say that there are accounts of 'a' flood? Shouldn't
that read accounts of floods or flooding?

Of course the common basis may be no more than
that every region of the world has been subjected to severe flooding
at one time or another. That does not necessarily mean that all these
flood events happened simultaneously. However, if the Burckle impact
did occur as presently hypothesized then it could well have caused
worldwide weather events as postulated by Masse. That these would have
occurred at about the date claimed by Masse is striking.

Remember the speck of dust? Both theories can not proove 'the connection',
combining them can not strengthen either of them. Amd the basis for dating
would not allow any pinpointing to more than a couple of centuries, and
highly arguable at that.

So wether the ideas proposed are true or not, the arguments presented are
not able to proove the case. For the speck of dust example (I was somewhat
proud of having found it), any answer you give has a one in three chance of
being right, blond, brown or black. For the Flood it's even easier, either
there was One, or there wasn't.

If you have a clientel that already believes there was a Flood, and that
there must be remnants of it, the rest is easy.




Incidentally, your anaology about the speck of dust found in a coffee
cup is not a particularly good one. The police successfully make use
of this kind of evidence all the time.

Specks of dust from coffee cups can tell about the colour of someones
hair?
How would you do it?

It has to be the correct dust.

Exactly. There has to be some coneection between the speck of dust and the
person. If it has been carried in by the wind, speculations about the colour
of the hair have no scientific basis.

The same goes for clay deposits. Show that they are connected with each
other, and you have science; take a common origin for granted, and you have
speculations.


How would I do it? I would start off
with some sticky tape and a good microscope ...

The sought person may have left a note engraved in its surface, telling
about the colour of his/her hair. Not impossible, I concede, but very, very
unlikely. :-)




The problem you have described is not unique. I have long been
fascinated by the arguments about whether or not there ever was a
Greek 'dark age'. 300~700 years of possibly nothing much which some
archaeologists fail to notice while to others it is glaringly
obvious.

Come on again. The dark age is a term coined for the absence of
written
documents, so you should address historians with comments on that.
There
is
no lack of archaeological data. If you don't believe me, look at some
recent
publication on the most famous of greek grave yards, the Athenian
Kerameikos. There is no 'dark age' for archaeologists.

Yet my copy of 'Greece in the making', Robin Osborne, Routledge
History of the Ancient World, 1996, ISBN 0-415-03583-X uses a
statisticsl analysis of the frequency of archaeological finds to argue
that there was indeed a dark age.

You want me to take it apart without ever having looked at it?

Not really. I merely cited it in support of my thesis that there seems
to be considerable disagreement on that topic.

The number of finds in toto tells you nothing except when you compare
different assemblies from the same time and region.

For example, inhumation burials are being found in much greater numbers
than
cremations, they are bigger and contain more solid particles. Rich
burials
are more
easily recogniced and reported than poor burials. So comparing the number
of
graves gives you a big bias in favour of inhumations with many grave
goods.
The most common Mycenean graves were inhumations, the most common
geometric
ones were cremations. The Myceneans usually had a lot more grave goods
than
the geometric burials.

There seems to be a noted settlement continuity from geometric times
until
now in many places, so much of the geometric settlement area has already
been destroyed or is currently not available for excavation or covered by
classical ruins. The Myceneans utilised different sites, too. And their
rural
sites usually show continuity well into the geometric period while many
urban sites show signs of unrest and/or disaster.

What you get, when you compare numbers like that, is an idea about how
similar both groups are in their culture. Not about the number of people
living, nor about how 'developed' their culture was.

I don't want to try to argue Robin Osborne's case for him and all I
can is quote a relevant section from his book:

"How do all these features fit together? The general impression
that we get is of contracted horizons: no big buildings,

The palaces are refurnished , some are even rebuild, and abandoned a
generation or two later. AFAIK there are no new frescoes.

no
multiple graves,

Do we live in a dark age just because we have no multiple graves? Burial
rites are determined by religious and social needs, not by cultural or
physical ones.


no impersonal communication,

Speculation. We have no archives with fired clay tablets. Even seals are
still being used, and that is impersonal communication, but not in the
stores of a palace economy.


limited contact
with a wider world.

There are no longer big and easy to find central stores and archives. There
are still burial goods that show long range contacts. You could argue to the
contrary, that the wider distribution of those piece in the society as a
whole indicates an increase in such contacts.


After the collapse of the Mycenaean system,
things seem to be reduced to an individual level.

Wrong. The basic unit of organization, the village, remains virtually
unchanged. Land use patterns indicate that the next level, the region, saw
little change too. It was only the palaces that went out of function.


The picture is
coherent enough to make it possible to suggest that, with the end
of the palaces, not only the political units, but also the whole
social and economic organisation, broke up; individuals' livelihood
came to depend solely on their own efforts, and no dominant
individual or group extracted a surplus from the rest of the
population.

There must have been many complaining about no longer having to pay a
central authority.

In these circumstances, craft specialisms could only
be maintained for a limited time, since they depended on
community-wide support at a time when community bonds seem to
have been growing ever weaker.

The potters were obviously not told about having to close down. They made
very nice wheel thrown pots, a widely traded ceramics.

Bronze-working depended upon
access to tin and copper, which seems to have been in the control
of the elite. Whether near-eastern problems (see below, pp. 37-9)
undermined the ability of the elite to acquire the essential
metals, or whether the collapse of the elite itself ended the
supply system, it seems likely that the weakness of the bronze
industry made the development of iron technology hard to resist.

The new burial rites kept weapons and armour usually out of the graves. that
does not imply, that the living had not metal anymore. Again no connection
between the data and the interpretation.

By the eleventh century everything which depended directly or
indirectly on organisation at more than an individual level seems
to have become impossible to sustain.

Except the cemmetaries, land boundaries, village and regional organization,
trade and craftmanship.

Hence the gloom: the slate
was rubbed all but clear of the traces of earlier organisation and
the products of that organisation. It is precisely this that makes
the Dark Age so important for the historian of archaic, and indeed
of classical, Greece."

Poor guy.

I don't know how the Myceneans felt about their cental authorities, judging
from the archaeologic record I'd say, they lived on happily without central
archives and central re-distribution, and central organization.


The next section of the book is headed:

"MIGRATION, INVASION, AND DECLINE: EXPLAINING THE VOID"

The archaeological record has an end of tha palace economy, it shows no
change in rural settlements. So the basic economic system seems to have
continued, any change in the system of distribution would have affected the
rural settlements as well. There is a break-off with certain, palace
oriented crafts, elaborate seal are for instance no longer made, they become
simpler. The total number of seals does not change very much. What stops are
seal impressions. There is no brake off in general metal working, there are
no longer weapons in the burials, but there is an increase in personal
ornaments.

The archaeologic record supports the idea of a political revolution, it
would not fit a scenario of doom, a population decrease or a return to an
everyone-for-himself economy. The changes in the burial goods could indicate
a change in self-awareness, away from the social role toward individuality.

As to the (doric) migration and invasion fantasies, we have discussed them
before. There is nil or zero archaeological evidence for an invasion. Quite
the contrary. In the only region that would allow invaders access to central
Greece from the North the only changes noted for the time in question are a
difference in house architecture (that could be because of a scarcity of
wood fit for building) , an increase in the slaughtering age for sheep
(increased use of wool and milk in contrast to meat) and a rising number of
pithoi burials.

There is no difference in agriculture, where people from far away could have
introduced new plants, or different methods of cultivation, or a different
model of land-use and land-ownership. There is no change in the settlement
layout, indicating new arrivals, no change in comparative size or total
number of buildings or plots above the normal variations.

For those who rely on coffee table books, featuring only the palaces and
their sphere of life, there was indead a dark age. For those really looking
at the archaeological data, there isn't. Look at the Kerameikos cemetery,
from mycenean, to sub mycenean, to proto geometric and to geometric. Athens
was not overrun by invaders. There was a local population, living according
to its local standards, before, during and after the proposed hiatus. So
where is the hiatus, if not in the eye of the beholder?





As you almost said, with respect to Masse's hypothesis, the best
researched regions do not seem to show anything out of the ordinary.

Than explain, why a world wide flood has left no signs in the regions
with
the best state of research. And why evidence from other areas, where
research is just beginning, should overrule the hard data won in those
regions.

I can't answer that except to say that it is not likely that anyone
has attempted to collate the evidence for major floods in the time
period concerned.

Biblical archaeology has tried to show the factual basis for the stories
for
more than hundred years. And the Flood was the most obvious and most easy
to
locate story of them all.

Some geologists thought, that the deposits of the ice ages were in fact
deposits of Noahs Flood, that's why they are sometimes still called
diluvial.

Even if someone tried, the difficulty of
establishing simultaneity would make it very difficult to establish
that the world experienced an episode of major world wide flooding.

I have no problems with the plural, quite the contrary. A serious change
in
the water levels has often been noted in the archaeological data. And
those
changes seem to occur at different times.

Signs of Climatic Change I would speculate.

If there were world wide floods I don't think of them in terms of
changes in the permanent water levels but only as very severe floods
in major catchment areas. After all, there is only so much water in
the world and we can largely forget about the contributions of the
major ice caps which seem to have survived the warm period between ice
ages. Even if they were to entirely melt they would not cause water
levels to rise at a rate sufficient to give rise to legends of a
flood.

Over here the slavic population had settled the low lying areas, right next
to their sources of water. Around 1200 the waterlevel rose by about 2 m (in
some places within 30 years) flooding their cultural and economic centers,
drowning their farmland, destroying most villages.
Newcomers from the west took over, they had the technologies to cultivate
the loamy uplands and to regulate the flow of water. It is very distinctive
in the archaeological record.

In the mid 13th c. flooding seems to have been frequent, in some places
systems of drainage ditches were dug, up to 4 m wide and more that 1 m deep.
A couple of beers and 20 years of retelling later and you have a world wide
flood. And the people 100 miles away have their world wide flood a few years
later, and others have theirs too.


And the simultaneity could have been easily established, as flood
deposits
would, if the story were true, always cover structures from the moment
exactly before the flood, and would in turn be covered by structures from
exactly after the flood. Relative dating, stratigraphy, would have been
enough for that task. But reality put a stop to such speculations.

Not even C14 dating is sufficiently precise to confirm two different
approximately 5000 year old events as being simultaneous.

Relative dating does exactly that.That's why it's used evenn if it does not
give you a calendrical value.

snip <

have fun

Uwe Mueller





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