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

Jack Linthicum wrote:
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".

I just posted a reply to that article. It was not an archaeological report, but rather a journalist's report of a plenary talk for which I can't find a written copy. Journalistic articles are replete with what you are calling fiction--and I would not disagree with that characterization for many such articles.

I skimmed a couple of papers by d'Errico. He appears to have a normal scholarly grip on what is evidenced and what is speculation.

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.

This is the well-known situation of the human difficulty in thinking outside of her cultural and educational experience. This very difficulty is why the scientific enterprise, especially wrt such complex and intimate studies as archaeology and anthropology, requires so many data points, and always needs to be open to re-interpretation.

The instances you mention, of the initial interpretations of Knossos, Troy, the condition of some of the first-examined Neandertal skeletal remains, the nature and origin of Clovis, including the Solutrean hypothesis, the Peopling of the Americas, and the nature of agricultural introduction into Europe, are all excellent examples of two things:

First, preferred conclusions or graphs from an initial datum, or set of data points, by the original investigators. These are often examples of your contention that (my paraphrase), what you see depends on who you are.

Second, scientific re-appraisal of the initial preferred conclusions or graphs, based on new evidence, new techniques and theories, new modes of understanding evidence, new eyes, and new attitudes. In other words, a reduction of the influence of the subjective by application of more rigorously objective techniques, as well as controlling for the subjective elements among all of the relevant investigators and investigations.

There are a lot of trees in the archaeological copse of any given topic; each tree is unique, and a potentially dangerous item from which to extrapolate.

But when one takes an ecological view of the entire copse, one can reduce the danger of inappropriate extrapolation. That is what happens in modern archaeology. Mostly. Sometimes eventually.

My point is that, while there is certainly cultural and other bias in many archaeological reports, this doesn't mean that all archaeological reports are based on fiction, or use fiction.
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