On archaeology

I like to think I am an individual with many diverse interests. Obviously I love history and soon will have some thoughts on the Wars of the Roses based on a tome I am perusing at odd intervals. I write a lot of stuff I think is funny. I love sports, both active and some more passive...I could play 500 for hours and Hold 'Em for almost as long (with people I like), for example. But rooted under all these things is still a deep-seated interest in truth.In history I seldom accept one view point. Perhaps a notable exception would be the works of Baruch Halpern on David (David's Secret Demons) in which he considers himself such an expert on the subject that in his book he cited himself over 90% of the time as his source. Okay, so I consider his interpretations suspect...so yeah, trusting one person is dangerous at best, banal at worst.



It also is eye-opening. When I reviewed Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun I pointed out that the expressed aim of the book...to retrace the path DeSoto took...was expressly a failure when the CLOSEST the admittedly sharp Hudson could come to the route had, at some points, a circumfrence of 300 miles where he could have traveled. That is Seattle to Medford, out into the Ocean and over into Idaho from where I sit. And that was for one of the most important events of the expedition that the route cannot be traced any closer than that. We are talking about events from 500 years ago. If it is that difficult to recreate something that happened 5 centuries ago for which we have 2 written sources then how much more difficulty is there in recreating events that occurred in the more distant past?



Archaeology attempts that very feat. However, they are working without a net. The pressure to A) come up with fantastic finds to justify funding and time and B) fit in with the often politically driven timelines leads to hypothesis which, if the facts do not support them, they simply adjust the facts to fit the hypothesis. This leads to a historical timeline, at least for pre-history, that is in reality nothing but wild conjecture.Time and again the narrative of our past changes as major, major reassessments occur.



Example A: Stonehenge has long been considered to have been modeled on Mycenae...until they decided radiocarbon dating showed the opposite of what they thought it did and that the Henge was built first. So was Mycenae modeled on Stonehenge? I know of nobody claiming that...but that is a pretty fundamental change in how history is interpreted.



If Stonehenge comes after and is based on Mycenae then we have Greek civilization affecting England. Conversely, if Mycenae is influenced by English elements...what does that mean for the ideas of the Classical Philosophers of Greece, for example? Remember, Mycenae was long claimed to be the influence on Europe.



Example B: For a long time the Biblical record of Abraham having camels when he traveled to Egypt was considered spurious because Egypt had no camels at the time of Abraham. This, of course, changed when new discoveries places camels in Egypt centuries before the time Abraham was around.



These are pretty fundamental shifts. Over and over events have their timeline shifted. Sometimes it is a few dozen years. Sometimes it is a few hundred. Sometimes a few thousand. And sometimes a few million. Not a typo. Million.



When we go through school, these things are taught with certainty. And perhaps we do have knowledge. Yet some key pieces are missing. In The Wars of the Roses by Alison Weir, she has meticulously researched the events, the people involved...and yet major, major players have lines like, "He died in either 1464 or 1467." These are not fringe players...they are major peers, landholders who could shift the balance of power between the Yorks and Lancasters...yet there are 3 year periods where we don't even know if they were alive. These are events of 6 centuries ago...and we don't know what happened for sure, though we certainly have the broad outline.



I think there are lots of interesting points to be made there. Weir talks about battles where concurrent documents show 40,000 man armies...yet current historians put the numbers af 500 or 4000. When you see variances like that it calls into question the accuracy of many things. I mean, nobody believes the numbers Herodotus routinely reported...but they have such broad ranges for how many Persians or Greeks were roaming around that you wonder about how big an impact these things had.



In the aforementioned Knights of Spain we learn that population estimates for North America prior to and in the early years of Spanish exploration ranged from a few hundred thousand to over several million. Did 450,000 people die...or did 27 million? Nobody knows.



Yet we take a few pot sherds, a wheel, and a fragment of bone and "conclusively prove" events from 150,000,000 years ago? I call shenanigans.