Apologies for the radio silence - it's a busy time here in the Teacup household at the moment! To make it up to you, here's my favourite #inktober prompt from the last week: "Choose your own adventure". . A lot of archaeology is guesswork, albiet scientifically informed guesswork. You always have to provide evidence for your final conclusions, but nevertheless sometimes the same evidence can be interpreted in remarkably different ways. . Take a prehistoric grave, for example. In it lies a person with a shield and a sword. Classically, this grave would then immediately be heralded as having belonged to a "Warrior Chieftain", with the associated assumptions of noblr fighters, elite heirarchies, and male domination. . This might indeed be the correct interpretation, but there are many other possibilities. For example, perhaps the person buried was indeed a chief, and wished to be remembered as a great warrior, but was actually pretty pathetic and considered a subject of ridicule amongst their peers. Or maybe it was a great warrior, but was a woman, as with the famous Birka grave that was assumed to be male when excavated in 1889 (simply because of the associated grave goods) but was actually shown to be a woman after a DNA study undertaken in 2017. . Of course, none of these interpretations might be the true one. Perhaps we're barking up the wrong tree entirely. That is something that I love about prehistoric research; although we can make educated guesses based on empirical evidence, at the end of the day we will never really know for sure if we're right. And if anyone ever did invent a time machine, I'm not actually sure that I'd want to go back and check... . What about you? Would you want to travel back in time? . #Archaeology #archaeologydrawing #archink #drawing #Archaeologist #archaeologylife #prehistory #prehistoric #interpretation #chooseyourownadventure #stoneage #deadandburied #October https://www.instagram.com/p/CVQHploqSUq/?utm_medium=tumblr
