ML/NJ
Posted on 10/24/2021 10:17:21 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
...That evidence and more—from the Ice Age, from later Eurasian and Native North American groups—demonstrate, according to Graeber and Wengrow, that hunter-gatherer societies were far more complex, and more varied, than we have imagined. The authors introduce us to sumptuous Ice Age burials (the beadwork at one site alone is thought to have required 10,000 hours of work), as well as to monumental architectural sites like Göbekli Tepe, in modern Turkey, which dates from about 9000 B.C. (at least 6,000 years before Stonehenge) and features intricate carvings of wild beasts. They tell us of Poverty Point, a set of massive, symmetrical earthworks erected in Louisiana around 1600 B.C., a "hunter-gatherer metropolis the size of a Mesopotamian city-state." They describe an indigenous Amazonian society that shifted seasonally between two entirely different forms of social organization (small, authoritarian nomadic bands during the dry months; large, consensual horticultural settlements during the rainy season). They speak of the kingdom of Calusa, a monarchy of hunter-gatherers the Spanish found when they arrived in Florida. All of these scenarios are unthinkable within the conventional narrative.
The overriding point is that hunter-gatherers made choices—conscious, deliberate, collective—about the ways that they wanted to organize their societies: to apportion work, dispose of wealth, distribute power. In other words, they practiced politics. Some of them experimented with agriculture and decided that it wasn't worth the cost... None of these groups, as far as we have reason to believe, resembled the simple savages of popular imagination, unselfconscious innocents who dwelt within a kind of eternal present or cyclical dreamtime, waiting for the Western hand to wake them up and fling them into history.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
ML/NJ
Note that the “noble savage” is getting thrown out at the same time.
Yup, that’s my point.
Heh...
Well, it wasn’t in my library catalog, but oh, well.
Thanks.
Leftists always underestimate flyover country, in this case 40,000 years of human history.
Doh.
Not all archaeologists are arrogant. As a former “digger/explorer” I found that each site and people had very interesting buildings, structural organization (i.e. walls, fences, house-spacing, etc) as well as products - stone carvings, stone made weapons/tools, some very beautiful and useful pottery, etc.
Climate, geography, vegetation, social organization, food gathering/hunting/growing practices that fit each society/civilization differed much more than we ever thought.
That is why archaeological explorations/digs today are revealing much more about the diversity of past peoples but also that they were often smarter and skilled than we ever imagined. That is the “fun” in archaeology, finding something “new” that makes up rethink ages old stereotypes (but this is what discovery/research/reinterpretation is all about).
The article addresses this but seems, in its brief summary, to largely ignore the fact that “science” as we know it today was not what it was hundreds or thousands of years ago.
As technology grew, esp. in the European/Asia Minor/Mediterranean countries of northern Africa/Middle East areas and Eastern Asia, scholars were able to revise and advance our understanding of the past.
The invention of the telescope, the microscope, metallurgy, and the printing press, all changed the limited scope of research that could be done in the past, say, 700 years or so. Once tools, i.e. inventions were developed, looking back into the past and understanding it became easier but not necessarily totally accurate.
I think that this is one point somewhat hidden in the Atlantic article review, but it is the major point of how man’s technology enables it to develop new views of the past.
You couldn’t invent the car without the idea/development of the wheel, internal combustion or steam heat/boilers, steering mechanisms, transmissions (i.e. gears), etc.
Then, as they say, “It was off to the races”.
And those old stereotypes are based on the assumption that if it’s old, or not technologically advanced, they were ignorant or stupid.
So while things are changing in that area, the ideas came from somewhere and archeologists who made all kinds of assumptions about the people groups they were studying, are where those images came from.
Even now, your comment that “ that they were often smarter and skilled than we ever imagined.” shows a built in bias or expectation of backwardness simply based on living conditions. It’s like a subconscious mentality of our inherent superiority over them simply because we’re here now and more “advanced” than they were.
I’m not denying that we are more technologically advanced. That’s obvious. I object to the automatic, default assumption of their intellectual abilities based on that.
Everything they do is based on that.
By constrast, leftists live in flyopen country.
One vast development which has received very little study is the 300 to 400 mile square area south and west of the Okavango Delta with many parallel “irrigation?” ditches spaced about one mile apart. I once spent 3 hours going over this whole area on Google Earth map. Looking from high and low to better understand this huge, but apparently unstudied and mostly unknown human phenomenon. Some areas appear much older than others and sometimes are oriented in slightly different directions. I wondered if the people who did this were precursors of the people who built “Greater Zimbabwe?” See these images to excite your imagination and desire to do research.
https://www.google.com/search?newwindow=1&safe=off&q=ancient+irrigation+channels+at+okavango+delta&tbm=isch&source=univ&client=firefox-b-1-d&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjo_OikgsnnAhVxl3IEHSG_DDkQsAR6BAgKEAE&biw=1600&bih=764
They are geological in origin and prehuman.
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