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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

#51

Post by rjf72 »

kraig wrote: post #11

considering how some museums seem like they are 75% ancient vases and cups, it makes you wonder what else is out there

Also makes you wonder about the mistakes we're making when things get truly ancient, but cannot be proved to be wrong. This vase is only 4,000-5,000 years old and the mistake was ostensibly very obvious. By contrast we have made a variety of statements, generally taken as true fact, about prehistoric humans tens of thousands of years past.

Funny to think that one day we'll be that 4,000-5,000 year old ancient civilization. Modern 'archaeologists' will be quite lucky in this regard. Digital records don't leave much room for ambiguity, and there are already countless organizations working on preservation as a purpose in and of itself, and other organizations working on data preservation for less idealistic reasons.

There will probably 4 tiers of history. Prehistory, glyphic history, written history, and finally digitized history. Well that's making the probably bad assumption that there's no tech beyond digital that we cannot even yet conceive of. Even to the smartest man of the pre-electric era, the notion of digital data storage and transmission would just be literally inconceivable.

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

#52

Post by aaaaaatttuyy »

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…

This is one of the most patronizing and boneheaded comments I've read here. I strongly suggest you read this if you want to get a more complete picture: https://uapress.arizona.edu/book/revolt

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

#53

Post by benj111 »

failrate wrote: post #46
starshadowx2 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I was so inspired by that video when I first saw it that I built my own Ur board. I prefer the 4 2-sided dice approach to the single 4-sided die, because the normal distribution of values allows for slightly more strategy. We also house ruled that rolling a 0 gave you a reroll token. Oh, and it is a genuinely fun game.

> 2-sided dice

I wasn't sure if this was an allusion to a coin flip.

Turns out there are actual 2 sided die though.

https://boingboing.net/2015/10/01/how-do-you-design-2-sided-...

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

#54

Post by TeMPOraL »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #35
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 knif…

I don't think it's hard to understand, it's just the plague of consumerism IMO. Most people have the attitude that an item has a purpose, and that this purpose is it's only sanctioned one, and you can't use the item for anything else. So instead of using an item for multiple purposes, they'll just keep buying the same thing with different labels ("food scissors", "paper scissors", "knife for X", "knife for Y", "knife for Z", ...).

I doubt kids in the past would hear from their parents such bullshit like "you can't dice these eggs with this, it's for dicing onions", etc.

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

#55

Post by usrusr »

yellowbuilding wrote: post #42
tzs wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

On this note, a vast amount of human energy (surplus and sometimes not, in the aggregate) can be understood as mating displays. Of course, we have added gender to the equation, which complicated things quite a bit.

The means easily becomes the goal for us. Is a dysfunctional mating display still a mating display?

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

#56

Post by TeMPOraL »

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…

Another confirmation for your archaeologist's observation: my mother studied archaeology & cultural studies, and she learned the same thing from her professors.

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

#57

Post by ahje »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #54
michaelbuckbee wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 knif…

I don't think it's hard to understand, it's just the plague of consumerism IMO. Most people have the attitude that an item has a purpose, and that this purpose is it's only sanctioned one, and you can't use the item for anything else. So instead of using an item for multiple purposes, they'll just keep buying the same thing with different labels ("food scissors", "paper scissors", "knife for X", "knife for Y", "knife…

I keep getting wierd looks when I do things with a regular utility knife instead of spending five minutes fetching "the right tool for the job".

I bet the ancient ones had the same problem when someone used a small shard of rock for a job that a larger shard was clearly better suited for! ;)

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

#58

Post by TomK32 »

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…

The "religious" label has been a sort of running gag on Time Team. I really miss that show.

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

#59

Post by laumars »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #54
michaelbuckbee wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 knif…

I don't think it's hard to understand, it's just the plague of consumerism IMO. Most people have the attitude that an item has a purpose, and that this purpose is it's only sanctioned one, and you can't use the item for anything else. So instead of using an item for multiple purposes, they'll just keep buying the same thing with different labels ("food scissors", "paper scissors", "knife for X", "knife for Y", "knife…

That might be true for some people from wealthier regions but I'd be surprised if that were the case for people from poorer backgrounds - even in wealthier countries. Plus it's not as if we don't have a whole plethora of multi-purpose tools from Swiss army knives, to drills that can also be used as electronic screw drivers, and even hammers that have nail pulls on them.

I suspect the reason most archaeological finds are attributed to a single purpose is a much simpler one: it can sometimes be hard to derive an accurate description for a lot of tools when you're only looking for a single use. Trying to find multiple uses is therefore going to be an order of magnitude harder. So you therefore go with the most easily identifiable use case.

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

#60

Post by Cthulhu_ »

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.

Thanks for that, I was just thinking about how people years from now would interpret stuff like our erm, sacred thrones used in the daily cleansing rituals.
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