Something I find incredibly cool is that they’ve found neandertal bone tools made from polished rib bones, and they couldn’t figure out what they were for for the life of them.
Until, of course, they showed it to a traditional leatherworker and she took one look at it and said “Oh yeah sure that’s a leather burnisher, you use it to close the pores of leather and work oil into the hide to make it waterproof. Mine looks just the same.”
“Wait you’re still using the exact same fucking thing 50,000 years later???”
“Well, yeah. We’ve tried other things. Metal scratches up and damages the hide. Wood splinters and wears out. Bone lasts forever and gives the best polish. There are new, cheaper plastic ones, but they crack and break after a couple years. A bone polisher is nearly indestructible, and only gets better with age. The more you use a bone polisher the better it works.”
It’s just.
50,000 years. 50,000. And over that huge arc of time, we’ve been quietly using the exact same thing, unchanged, because we simply haven’t found anything better to do the job.
i also like that this is a “ask craftspeople” thing, it reminds me of when art historians were all “the fuck” about someone’s ear “deformity” in a portrait and couldn’t work out what the symbolism was until someone who’d also worked as a piercer was like “uhm, he’s fucked up a piercing there”. interdisciplinary shit also needs to include non-academic approaches because crafts & trades people know shit ok
One of my professors often tells us about a time he, as and Egyptian Archaeologist, came down upon a ring of bricks one brick high. In the middle of a house. He and his fellow researchers could not fpr the life of them figure out what tf it could possibly have been for. Until he decided to as a laborer, who doesnt even speak English, what it was. The guy gestures for my prof to follow him, and shows him the same ring of bricks in a nearby modern house. Said ring is filled with baby chicks, while momma hen is out in the yard having a snack. The chicks can’t get over the single brick, but mom can step right over. Over 2000 years and their still corraling chicks with brick circles. If it aint broke, dont fix it and always ask the locals.
I read something a while back about how pre-columbian Americans had obsidian blades they stored in the rafters of their houses. The archaeologists who discovered them came to the conclusion that the primitive civilizations believed keeping them closer to the sun would keep the blades sharper.
Then a mother looked at their findings and said “yeah, they stored their knives in the rafters to keep them out of reach of the children.”
I remember years ago on a forum (email list, that’s how old) a woman talking about going to a museum, and seeing among the women’s household objects a number of fired clay items referred to as “prayer objects”. (Apparently this sort of labeling is not uncommon when you have something that every house has and appears to be important, but no-one knows what it is.) She found a docent and said, “Excuse me, but I think those are drop spindles.” “Why would you think that, ma’am?” “Because they look just like the ones my husband makes for me. See?” They got all excited, took tons of pictures and video of her spinning with her spindle. When she was back in the area a few years later, they were still on display, but labeled as drop spindles.
So ancient Roman statues have some really weird hairstyles. Archaeologists just couldn’t figure them out. They didn’t have hairspray or modern hair bands, or elastic at all, but some of these things defied gravity better than Marge Simpson’s beehive.
Eventually they decided, wigs. Must be wigs. Or maybe hats. Definitely not real hair.
A hairdresser comes a long, looks at a few and is like, “Yeah, they’re sewn.”
“Don’t be silly!” the archaeologists cry. “How foolish, sewn hair indeed! LOL!”
So she went away and recreated them on real people using a needle and thread and the mystery of Roman hairstyles was solved.
She now works as a hair archaeologist and I believe she has a YouTube channel now where she recreates forgotten hairstyles, using only what they had available at the time.
Okay, I greatly appreciate the discussion here about the need for interdisciplinary work in academia, and the need to reach outside of academia and talk to specialists when looking at the uses of tools, but somehow people always have to turn this into a “gotcha!” where the stuffy academics get shown up (even though this very thread shows some archeologists reaching out to craftspeople to ask about how tools are used because they recognize the need for that knowledge and expertise).
“A hairdresser comes a long, looks at a few and is like, “Yeah, they’re sewn.”
“Don’t be silly!” the archaeologists cry. “How foolish, sewn hair indeed! LOL!”
So she went away and recreated them on real people using a needle and thread and the mystery of Roman hairstyles was solved.”
Did they? Did they really? The archeologists all laughed at the plucky hairdresser and then she proved her theory by simply recreating the styles?
See, what actually happened is that Janet Stephens (the hairdresser/hair archeologist in this post), who published an article about her theory in The Journal of Roman Archeology in 2008, spent about 6 years of research pursuing her idea that perhaps Roman hairstyles were sewn hair and not wigs. She did both hands-on experimentation sewing the actual hair, and more traditional research reading through a ton of sources. This is coming from an interview done with Stephens herself:
“Lots and lots of reading, poring over exhibition catalogs, back searching the footnotes to the reading and reading some more! It helped that I am fluent in Italian and, in 2006, I took a German for reading class. Working in my spare time, the research took 6 years.”
“I am an independent researcher, but my husband is a professor of Italian at the Johns Hopkins University, so I have library privileges there. We are friendly with colleagues in the Classics/Archaeology department and at the Walters Art Museum. They were kind enough to send me articles and clippings, read drafts and help with some picky Latin, though I try not to impose.”
Wow, so people in the Classics/Archeology department and at the art museum sent her articles and clippings and HELPED her with her research as opposed to laughing at her in their gentleman’s club! It’s almost like people working the archeology/art history these days aren’t all stuffy old white guys from the 1950’s!
Stephens also presented her work at the Archeological Institute of America Conference, and according to the interview I cited above, it was apparently well received: “It seemed to create a a lot of buzz and people said they enjoyed it. It’s not every conference where you go to the poster session and see “heads on pikestaffs”!”
Like, there’s plenty to be said about the ivory tower and the need for interdisciplinary work, and the racism/sexism etc. that newer researchers are working against, but framing this story as “hairdresser totally shows up the archeologists with her common sense!” is needlessly shitting on the academics involved here (and the humanities in general have been struggling to maintain funding at many universities in the US, they don’t need to be further attacked), as well as greatly over-simplifying and downplaying Janet Stephens’ achievement. I think it’s more respectful to acknowledge the six years of work that she put into the project than to tell the story like she just sewed some hair and then all the archeologists’ monocles popped out.
I want to point out that the original post actually fundamentally misunderstands the original article. This was not a case of the archaeologists not recognising the artefact type and a leather worker identifying them, this was a case of the artefact being so unexpected in this context, that it was almost missed. Here is a direct quote from the article:
“The first three found were fragments less than a few centimeters long and might not have been recognized without experience working with later period bone tools. It is not something normally looked for in this time period.”
The archaeological team almost missed them because these bone fragments were both tiny and unexpected as “[the] technology [was] previously associated only with modern humans”. As in, Neanderthals had not been shown to have even been capable to make these artefacts before that point. I don’t think people quite understand how big of a deal this is - this is about the equivalent of finding pottery in a modern human group about 20 000 years ago (they haven’t but that’s the level of *that shouldn’t be there*)
This was identified *by the archaeologists working on the project* because they’d found them before. They fully knew what these artefacts were in the first place, they just didn’t expect to find them there.
Then to prove it, they replicated the use-wear by buying a modern tool off the Internet and doing microscopic analysis. There was not a single modern leather worker mentioned in either the article linked or the actual paper put out. That is absolutely something that would have been acknowledged in both of the papers.
This paper was revolutionary in our understanding of Neanderthal crafting capabilities, recognisied by brilliant and diligent archaeologists and this entire narrative of incapable stuck up archaeologists is an insult to their work.
The women who recognised that the blades were being stored out of reach of children were also archaeologists. Janet Stephens’ research is part of a legitimate branch of archaeological research called Experimental Archaeology. Experimental archaeology has been practiced academically/professionally since the 80s. I’m a hobbiest in a lot of historical crafts and have been the person that a colleague turned to when struggling to identify an artefact. We were able to figure out what it probably was because I knew what use-wear to look for and how to find parallels.
The narrative that archaeologists are opposed to interdisciplinary work is very frustrating as so many of us, including myself, are strong proponents for it. We are very happy to talk to any and all professionals who will talk to us and highly value modern parallels (sometimes a bit too much, actually)
i need non-jews to realise that the recent rise in antisemitism isn’t strange or weird or unprecedented it’s because people just like you never unpacked the antisemitic biases in their mentality and society and continue not to attempt to. you need to listen to jews - read our books and engage with our issues and listen to us when we say things. i don’t care how much you hate nazis, you MUST be willing to deconstruct the antisemitism YOU HAVE INTERNALISED or sighing about how tragic the rise in antisemitism with no action whatsoever is is worse than nothing
I know I need to work on my dissertation, but I was seized by an absolute cinema idea for a Star Wars fanfic, so... I mean, what's really more important, my masters degree or Star Wars?
Beyond the Golem & the Dybbuk lies a forgotten world of Jewish magic and folklore myths!
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Americans when we lose at soccer: "Your waffles suck!"
Egyptians when they lose at soccer: "DA JOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOS DID IT!"
Guys, Graham Platner is literally a 43 year old minor, we can't cancel him just because he has a super specific Nazi tattoo that he's kept for 19 years, blames women for sexual assault, and thinks that black people are bad at tipping!!
Since he's been so honest and authentic about being a walking disaster with no respect for key parts of the democratic coalition, we should reward him by giving him our one collective shot at taking Susan Collins' Senate seat!
I made this post in October. Since then, it came out that Graham Platner fully knew about his Nazi tattoo and playfully referred to it as "his totenkopf." It came out that he has a history of slurs and prejudice against gay men. It came out that he joined the military specifically because he wanted to kill people. It came out that he is a serial cheater. Today, it has come out that he is a physical abuser.
I am begging the democratic primary voters of Maine to stop this. As liberals and progressives, we have to be the first to shut down awful men like this, not the last.
Question that I'm asking in good faith because I really do want to know about it: why does Herzl describe israel as a colony if it isn't one?
(All good faith questions are welcome, Anon - thanks for this one!)
TLDR: Because words change meanings over time and Herzl wasn't psychic.
In the 1890s, "colony" just meant a planned settlement or concentrated community. This included Jewish agricultural colonies in the Pale, temperance colonies in Colorado, and utopian communes everywhere.
It was basically the Victorian word for "intentional community," with absolutely no imperial baggage required.
The specific meaning activists now deploy (colony as racial domination, metropole extraction, indigenous suppression) is a 20th century framework that didn't exist when Herzl was writing in 1896.
So a reader of the 21st century finds the word "colony" in an old text and assumes it carries a technical definition that was coined decades later.
It's a little like finding the word "trauma" in a Civil War field report and concluding the surgeon was diagnosing PTSD.
Meanwhile, 'settler colonialism' as applied to Israel isn't a neutral analytical tool that happens to fit badly. It's a framework specifically constructed to exclude the features that distinguish Jewish return from actual settler colonialism...and it still fails on its own stated terms.
Jewish immigrants to the Levant were never agents of any empire. They were overwhelmingly refugees from empires who were fleeing Russian pogroms, Eastern European persecution, and later Nazi Germany. No metropole sent them. No metropole would take them back if the project failed.
That's not a minor quibble about definitions, either - it's the primary distinction between settler colonialism and every other form of large population movement in history.
There's also the matter of indigeneity. The Jews returning to the Levant weren't arriving in a place with which they had no connection.
Jewish presence in the region is documented continuously from ancient history, including in Egyptian records dating to roughly 1210 BCE.
The religious, linguistic, and ancestral connection to the land is what distinguishes this case from the British in Kenya or the French in Algeria, who had no such ties - and it is some of the best-documented, most indisputable history humans have ever gathered. (This is why they're so constantly engaged in historical revisionism.)
So when proponents of the settler colonialism framework of accusation encounter these objections, what do they do?
They move the goalposts.
The absence of a metropole gets explained away as an "exception."
The indigenous origin of the Jewish people to the Levant gets ahistorically dismissed or ignored, despite the fact that the Jewish people are the only group whose national identity, language, and religion originated in and remained oriented toward that specific land throughout their entire existence.
The framework gets rewritten and the history is revised until Israel fits the allegation.
So, one word in Der Judenstaat doesn't settle* any of this.
From The Atlantic: The False Narrative of Settler Colonialism (paywall bypassed)
Okay, there's actually a lot of interesting history around this, so let's dig into it.
It's completely correct that the semiotics of "colony", "colonization", etc., have evolved over time, and that back in the late 19th Century when Herzl was writing the connotation was more neutral than it became in the 20th Century. (I also need to stress that that one "it is something colonial" quote-mine you see shared everywhere is from a letter that was never even sent, because Herzl realized it was a bad idea.)
But more to the point: the old guard Zionists were fully aware of accusations they were European colonizers - and they actively refuted those claims.
— Jews and Muslims in the Arab World: Haunted by Pasts Real and Imagined (Jacob Lassner, Ilan S. Troen, 2007)
— Hebrew Repatriation to Eretz Yisrael (Samuel Kruglikoff, 1930)
— Eliahu Eliachar, Testimony to UNSCOP (United Nations Special Committee on Palestine) Regarding Jews in Arab Countries (1947)
— Ber Borochov, Poalei Tziyon Peace Manifesto (1917)
— David Ben-Gurion, Statement to the Elected Assembly of Palestine Jewry (1947)
Zionists wrote copious volumes about the indigeneity of Judeans to Eretz Yisrael, and denying accusations that they were merely pawns of an imperialist agenda (initially it was claimed they were Russian agents, and then later British colonists) or seeking to conquer or to exploit the land or its people. Contrary to the popular claim that Zionists thought (or promoted the concept) the land was uninhabited, a very substantial amount was written about the Palestinians (particularly from the perspective of class analysis), and how the return and liberation of Judeans must go hand-in-hand with class solidarity and the liberation of Arab workers. In other words: the exact opposite of colonialism. What we today would call decolonization - and specifically decolonization via proletarian revolution.
The simplistic quote-mining about "colonization" used today is a hundred years outdated: all such arguments were debunked before the state was even founded.
What’s next? Is it going to come out on Politico that he raped a woman and the Democratic Party leadership will remember rape is bad again or something?
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