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British Museum realises 'vase' is in fact an ancient mace-head upside down

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Re: British Museum realises 'vase' is in fact an ancient mace-head upside down

#31

Post by Figs »

thechao wrote: post #28
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, why is single-directional reading more efficient (is it?) the Boutstrophedon? The latter would seem, at first glance, more efficient by minimizing eye "seek" time.

Skimming requires tracking line parity. Remember that spaces are a relatively modern concept—lines of text just sort of break in the middle of words & all sort of nonsense.

Japanese is still like that. No spaces, and lines can just break in the middle of words -- though there are certain cases where word wrap algorithms are not allowed to split lines (and standardized rules for these cases). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_breaking_rules_in_East_As... if you're curious.

Re: British Museum realises 'vase' is in fact an ancient mace-head upside down

#33

Post by PhasmaFelis »

What am I actually looking at here? I see a rough, pitted, badly damaged surface with smooth, white stuff showing where it's cracked away. Is the smooth inner layer part of the original, a solid object with a decorated exterior? Or is the inner part a modern reconstruction, and the outer all that remains of a hollow original?

Re: British Museum realises 'vase' is in fact an ancient mace-head upside down

#34

Post by tzs »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #25
crooked-v wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> any time researchers are uncertain of the purpose of an object they tend to ascribe a religious meaning to it https://www.sfu.ca/~palys/Miner-1956-BodyRitualAmongTheNacir...

Unless they're biologists. Then it's for mating displays.

With non-human animals, though, aren't there much fewer possibilities than with humans? Most animals don't have the kind of food surpluses humans have, and so have can't afford to spend energy on things that aren't hunting or gathering food, fighting over territory, or reproducing.

So if an animal is doing something prominently that isn't hunting or fighting or mating or raising young and others are watching but not getting upset by it, mating display is probably a reasonably safe assumption.

Re: British Museum realises 'vase' is in fact an ancient mace-head upside down

#35

Post by michaelbuckbee »

hetman wrote: post #12

This reminds me of a tour I was once on, by one of the resident archaeologists in the open-air museum in Biskupin, Poland. It's the site of an iron age fortified settlement and there is both ongoing archaeological excavation and a reconstruction of sections of the settlement for visitors. Anyway, the archaeologist showed me a shallow elongated oval wooden vessel with a slight depression in it, that had been on displa…

Somewhat similarly there's a tendency to see items as "fixed" in time to when they were found. The archeologist was ranting about how there was this whole taxonomy of stone tools: handaxes, picks, scrapers, knives, etc. and that nowdays we think of those things as set items.

They then picked up a wedge shaped chunk of stone used it as a hand axe for a few minutes, took a chunk that had cracked off it to use as a knife, smashed it again to make a scraping tool and on and on.

I think it's just hard to understand how tools in the past were used.

Re: British Museum realises 'vase' is in fact an ancient mace-head upside down

#36

Post by dekhn »

2arrs2ells wrote: post #29
hetman wrote: post #12

This reminds me of a tour I was once on, by one of the resident archaeologists in the open-air museum in Biskupin, Poland. It's the site of an iron age fortified settlement and there is both ongoing archaeological excavation and a reconstruction of sections of the settlement for visitors. Anyway, the archaeologist showed me a shallow elongated oval wooden vessel with a slight depression in it, that had been on displa…

David Macaulay's "Motel of the Mysteries" ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/108831.Motel_of_the_Myst... ) satirizes this bias, with archeologists from 4022 inspecting a modern day motel room and uncovering the "holy" toilet. It's a gem.

https://i.stack.imgur.com/LKl5c.jpg

one of my favorite books of all time.

Re: British Museum realises 'vase' is in fact an ancient mace-head upside down

#37

Post by toufiqbarhamov »

starshadowx2 wrote: post #13
toufiqbarhamov wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Irvin Finkel is a truly entertaining and intelligent speaker. He has a bunch of videos and lectures on a range of subjects on YouTube through the British Museum Channel. I highly recommend not only his work, but the whole channel.

His video with Tom Scott playing "The Royal Game of Ur" is super fun. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZskjLq040I

I hadn’t seen that one, and it was a blast, thanks.

Re: British Museum realises 'vase' is in fact an ancient mace-head upside down

#38

Post by mikeash »

A biological example of this phenomenon: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucigenia

This bizarre creature was discovered that walked on spikes. Then it was realized that it was just upside down, and in fact was just a worm with spines sticking out the top.

Re: British Museum realises 'vase' is in fact an ancient mace-head upside down

#40

Post by nitrogen »

Balgair wrote: post #20

Man, archeology is hard , but this one, with all the upside-down writing, is a bit of a face-palm. My favorite examples in archeology is the Chaco Canyon Cultures. If you are in the western US, have a 4 wheel drive car, and a free few days, I'd go no where else. Those people are an astonishing mystery. You know how with some places, going on the journey is kinda the point? Sometimes with archeology, that's kinda true…

I'm amazed that the words "factory" or "warehouse" never appear once in that article, because that's kind of what the floor plan looks like at first glance.
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