Re: The lowly sweet potato may unlock America's past, How the root vegetable found it's way across the Pacific

On Mar 28, 8:44 am, Tom McDonald <kilt...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Jack Linthicum wrote:
On Mar 27, 4:46 pm, George <gbl...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Mar 28, 7:53 am, Jack Linthicum <jacklinthi...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

That sounds like Blue of Capricorn. You have never read it, have you?
And nor have I
Fiction isn't a good reference point for any subject

I wonder if you knew how much fiction must go into every
archaeological report if you would hold that view?

Jack, would you elaborate on this? There is often speculation in
archaeological reports, but I've seldom seen actual fiction in
any of them.

Read the post I just posted "Neanderthals used make up and liked to
chat". Look at Knossos as Sir Arthur Evans imagined it, not
necessarily as it was. The amount of noise generated by the inability
of the excavators of Troy to lose their Greek viewpoint and actually
look at the location of Ilios/Troia and read the correspondence
between what would seem to be Mycenean Greece and the Hittites.

IIRC the first Neanderthal skelton found was crippled, or had
ricketts, etc.

"1886: Betche-aux-Rotches cave, Spy d'Orneau, Belgium: Marcel de Puydt
& Max Lohest find two nearly complete Neanderthal skeletons in
association with Mousterian tools. The publication of these remains
established Neanderthals as a separate type of ancient human, rather
than pathological modern humans. Unfortunately, the limb-bones were
misinterpreted as indicating that Neanderthals walked with bent knees
in an ape-like posture."

If you give me a single data point I can draw any graph I can imagine
and some I might not. The same with a single site or strata. Example
might be Clovis, but I will pose a "hypthetical" here. Clovis was more
"advanced" than Folsom and more widely distributed. I have just seen a
TV program that postulated that the large number of Clovis points in
the Chesapeake Bay area meant the Clovis makers or users came from
someplace over the Atlantic. Soluterian influence, is the end belief.

I believe, for instance, the first paleolithic pre-Indians came down
the Pacific Coast in boats and went as far as Monte Verde in Chile.
You can believe that or not. My origins on the California coast
probably flavor my belief. Making it a "given" makes a lot of
scholarly work seem to be fiction. Ice-free corridors and the like to
explain the location of those Clovis points. Radio carbon dating
provided the "absolutes" of archaeology, constraining what was
"believable" and what wasn't. DNA may do the same.

A lot of noise was made over the first agricultural people sweeping
into Europe as an invasion. DNA, still a more or less untested tool,
tells us they came in smaller numbers than suggested earlier and
taught the local population, who began to farm.

Almost any archaeological project can be the subject of "fiction",
taking a certain viewpoint and expanding it into the established
framework through which all work on that project must flow.
.

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