There are a lot of wild writing styles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon
No, there are not. Top-down right-left, right-left top-down, left-right top-down, boustrophedon, "filling the available space (hieroglyph)" and that's it. I never heard of a writing system going bottom to top.
I find it rather confusing that way, though; I think I've read it as "AHEAD STOP" and mentally scratched my head every time I've seen text like that (which isn't too often).
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 don't think it's hard to understand, it's just the plague of consumerism IMO.
It's not consumerism it's specialisation: with the advance of sedentarisation and techno-industrial might, we can afford to go beyond one tool doing a bit of everything not very well (e.g. shave and punch holes and cut food and …) and instead use plenty of tools which do one job very efficiently or conveniently.
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 don't think it's hard to understand, it's just the plague of consumerism IMO. It's not consumerism it's specialisation: with the advance of sedentarisation and techno-industrial might, we can afford to go beyond one tool doing a bit of everything not very well (e.g. shave and punch holes and cut food and …) and instead use plenty of tools which do one job very efficiently or conveniently.
Strange that tech seems to be moving in the opposite direction, with single-purpose devices like MP3 players, GPS devices and cameras being consolidated into phones.
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.
I'm not sure what the "gender" part of your comment refers to? In the animal world it's generally only animals of one gender (usually males) that engage in these displays.
> I don't think it's hard to understand, it's just the plague of consumerism IMO. It's not consumerism it's specialisation: with the advance of sedentarisation and techno-industrial might, we can afford to go beyond one tool doing a bit of everything not very well (e.g. shave and punch holes and cut food and …) and instead use plenty of tools which do one job very efficiently or conveniently.
Strange that tech seems to be moving in the opposite direction, with single-purpose devices like MP3 players, GPS devices and cameras being consolidated into phones.
I'm not sure it's strange: these are "nomadic" not sedentary devices, you don't keep your MP3 player and GPS device and camera in your shed, you have them on you at all times, so combining them makes for a much simpler nomadic experience.
Not to mention phones are really quite good at being mp3 players and GPS devices and cameras at least for the average person, so the tradeoff is not big.
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 civiliz…
> 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.
You say that, but there's data on media from 40 years ago that can't be accessed either because of bit rot or because the technology no longer exists. Hell, most of the content on the internet from 20 years ago has since vanished forever.
A fired-clay headed mace? I'm the daft one now, but how does this work? What fired-clay is sturdy enough to whack someone with more than once? Clearly there is some, but if someone can point to a modern example I might know I will get over this disbelief more easily.
> Now displayed right-side up, the mace head is topped by a painted representation of a net that was used to immobilise enemies for execution.
It sounds like they had a thing of capturing enemies, tying them down in a net, and then bashing them to death to really show them who was boss. If this mace wasn't entirely ceremonial, it was probably at least used in fairly controlled circumstances.
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.
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…
Your anecdote reminds me of the Roman Dodecahedron. I saw a video on here some years ago about it being a suprisingly good tool for knitting fingergloves. But the wikipedia page still says it is all but that.
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 don't think it's hard to understand, it's just the plague of consumerism IMO. It's not consumerism it's specialisation: with the advance of sedentarisation and techno-industrial might, we can afford to go beyond one tool doing a bit of everything not very well (e.g. shave and punch holes and cut food and …) and instead use plenty of tools which do one job very efficiently or conveniently.
It's not just specialization, often it's overspecialization, driven by commercial interests. Even though a generic tool G can do tasks A, B and C well, people are told to buy specialized tools for each of those tasks that are only marginally better at their specific tasks (sometimes, not even that) at the expense of being worse for the other tasks. Hell, sometimes it's the same tool, but with a specialized label and extra markup (e.g. disposable shaving razors for men and women which differ only by a) color, and b) price). But people fall for that.
