Archaeological Related Quotes

To become aware of what is constant in the flux of nature and life is the first step in abstract thinking. The recognition of regularity in the courses of the heavenly bodies and in the succession of seasons first provides a basis for a systematic ordering of events, and this knowledge makes possible a calendar. ... Simultaneously with this concept, a system of relationships comes into the idea of the world. Change is not something absolute, chaotic, and kaleidoscopic; its manifestation is a relative one, something connected with fixed points and a given order.

All we can infer (from the archaeological shards dug up in Berkshire, Devon and Yorkshire) is that the first Britons, whoever they were and however they came, arrived from elsewhere. The land (Britain) was once utterly uninhibited. Then people came.

The history of ideas, then, is the discipline of beginnings and ends, the description of obscure continuities and returns, the reconstitution of developments in the linear form of history. But it can also, by that very fact, describe, from one domain to another, the whole interplay of exchanges and intermediaries: it shows how scientific knowledge is diffused, gives rise to philosophical concepts, and takes form perhaps in literary works; it shows how problems, notions, themes may emigrate from the philosophical field where they were formulated to scientific or political discourses; it relates work with institutions, social customs or behaviour, techniques, and unrecorded needs and practices; it tries to revive the most elaborate forms of discourse in the concrete landscape, in the midst of the growth and development that witnessed their birth. It becomes therefore the discipline of interferences, the description of the concentric circles that surround works, underline them, relate them to one another, and insert them into whatever they are not.

... I was flipping through a National Geographic magazine and I came across an article with this headline: "Women Created Most of the Oldest Known Cave Art Paintings, Suggests a New Analysis of Ancient Handprints. Most Scholars Had Assumed These Ancient Artists Were Predominantly Men, So the Finding Overturns Decades of Archaeological Dogma."... According to the article, Snow "analyzed hand stencils found in eight cave sites in France and Spain. By comparing the relative lengths of certain fingers, Snow determined that three-quarters of the handprints were female. 'There has been a male bias in the literature for a long time,' said Snow... 'People have made a lot of unwarranted assumptions about who made these things, and why."' But Snow suggested that women were involved in every aspect of prehistoric life-from the hunt to the hearth to religious ritual. "It wasn't just a bunch of guys out there chasing bison around," he said." Leaving the Cave - pg. 93

The Pyrenean ibex, an extinct form of wild mountain goat, was brought back to life in 2009 through cloning of dna taken from skin samples. This was followed in June of 2010 by researchers at Jeju National University in Korea cloning a bull that had been dead for two years. Cloning methods are also being studied for use in bringing back Tasmanian tigers, woolly mammoths, and other extinct creatures, and in the March/April 2010 edition of the respected Archaeology magazine, a feature article by Zah Zorich (“Should We Clone Neanderthals?”) called for the resurrection via cloning of what some consider to be man’s closest extinct relative, the Neanderthals. National Geographic confirmed this possibility in its May 2009 special report, “Recipe for a Resurrection,” quoting Hendrik Poinar of McMaster University, an authority on ancient dna who served as a scientific consultant for the movie Jurassic Park, saying: “I laughed when Steven Spielberg said that cloning extinct animals was inevitable. But I’m not laughing anymore.… This is going to happen.

It is difficult, then, to pin gender inequality firmly to the emergence of agriculture or property ownership. If there were changes in the balance of power between people in prehistory because of these factors, they must have been subtle because they left no appreciable trace in the archaeological record. Where we really can start to spot a shift in gender relations, the first shoots of overarching male authority, is with the rise of the first states. The moment gender becomes salient is when it becomes an organising principle, when enormous populations are categorised in ways that deliberately ignore their everyday realities and force them to live in ways they may not otherwise choose.

The idea that modern civilization started practically from scratch, from a single source of ape-men several millennia ago, has distorted, or caused to be ignored, information that has reached us just as much by tradition as through archaeological finds. We are so fascinated by the technological advances of the last centuries of modern civilization that we simply forget the periods of obscurantism that preceded them and the differences in the level of development of the various peoples of the world. We tend to consider "progress" a continuous and general phenomenon stretching from the apes to Einstein. Yet the history of man is not one of regular development. It is characterized by a succession of developments and regressions related to astrological and climatic cycles. Barbaric races, still in their infancy, destroy civilizations that had been developed by older, more evolved populations, doing away with the sciences and arts, yet allowing some scraps of knowledge to survive which serve as the basis of the development of new cultures. On all continents we can find traces of outstanding cultures and advanced technologies belonging to bygone ages, followed by periods of barbarism and ignorance.

The period before fifty thousand years ago was a busy time in Eurasia, with multiple human populations arriving from Africa beginning at least 1.8 million years ago. These populations split into sister groups, diverged, and mixed again with each other and with new arrivals. Most of those groups have since gone extinct, at least in their “pure” forms. We have known for a while, from skeletons and archaeology, that there was some impressive human diversity prior to the migration of modern humans out of Africa. However, we did not know before ancient DNA was extracted and studied that Eurasia was a locus of human evolution that rivaled Africa. Against this background, the fierce debates about whether modern humans and Neanderthals interbred when they met in western Eurasia—which have been definitively resolved in favor of interbreeding events that made a contribution to billions of people living today—seem merely anticipatory. Europe is a peninsula, a modest-sized tip of Eurasia. Given the wide diversity of Denisovans and Neanderthals—already represented in DNA sequences from at least three populations separated from each other by hundreds of thousands of years, namely Siberian Denisovans, Australo-Denisovans, and Neanderthals—the right way to view these populations is as members of a loosely related family of highly evolved archaic humans who inhabited a vast region of Eurasia.

The inescapable and troublesome conclusion was that if there was a political entity in tenth-century Judea, it was a small tribal kingdom, and that Jerusalem was a fortified stronghold. It is possible that the tiny kingdom was ruled by a dynasty known as the House of David. An inscription discovered in Tell Dan in 1993 supports this assumption, but this kingdom of Judah was greatly inferior to the kingdom of Israel to its north, and apparently far less developed. The documents from el-Amarna, dating from the fourteenth century BCE, indicate that already there were two small city-states in the highlands of Canaan—Shechem and Jerusalem—and the Merneptah stela shows that an entity named Israel existed in northern Canaan at the end of the thirteenth century BCE. The plentiful archaeological finds unearthed in the West Bank during the 1980s reveal the material and social difference between the two mountain regions. Agriculture thrived in the fertile north, supporting dozens of settlements, whereas in the south there were only some twenty small villages in the tenth and ninth centuries BCE. The kingdom of Israel was already a stable and strong state in the ninth century, while the kingdom of Judah consolidated and grew strong only by the late eighth. There were always in Canaan two distinct, rival political entities, though they were culturally and linguistically related—variants of ancient Hebrew were spoken by the inhabitants of both.

Archaeological evidence shows that the primordial pattern for human beings is to gather together in relatively tightly knit, clan-sized groups closely aligned with nature. Today, we need consciously to reinvent cooperative and harmonious ways of living together.

If we were to consult the archaeological and historical records, many would now probably hold that the money-form didn’t arise the way that Marx proposes at all. I am inclined to accept that argument, but then on top of it say the following—and this comes back to Marx’s interest in understanding a capitalist mode of production. Under capitalism, the money-form has to be disciplined to and brought into line with the logical position that Marx describes, such that the money-form reflects the needs of a system of proliferating exchange relations. But by the same token (forgive the pun), it is the proliferation of commodity-exchange relations that disciplines any and all preceding symbolic forms to the money-form required to facilitate commodity-market exchange. The precursors of the money-form, which can indeed be found in the archaeological and historical record of coinage, have to conform to this logic to the degree that they get absorbed within capitalism and perform the function of money. At the same time, it should be clear that the market could not have evolved without that disciplining taking place. Though the historical argument is weak, the logical argument is powerful.

The literary and other evidence relating to these events comes from a variety of different periods, ranging from the immediately contemporary to ones several centuries later. The testimony of these sources thus differs greatly in value and usefulness. As a rule of thumb, reliability, and also brevity of narrative, are usually in direct proportion to chronological proximity. Thus, the fullest and most elaborate versions, which provide the most detailed accounts, tend to be those most removed in time from the events they are supposed to describe. The soundest methodological approach would be to take the earliest evidence first, and then proceed to the later sources in roughly chronological order, in so far as that can be established. This way it will be possible to see at what period the different elements first enter the story. In other words, the literary evidence can be treated in an almost archaeological fashion to establish the strata in which the various components of the narrative first appear.

A final form of intra-societal violence that is very significant is the collective killing of one male by the other males of the group. The rationale for such killings seems to be that the male singled out for killing has become so violent and dangerous that he must be eliminated in order to protect the group from further episodes of unnecessary intra-group violence or dominating behaviour. As far as one can tell, such individuals are typically very good warriors. They seem to authenticate their value to the community by displaying their fighting ability. They bully and injure or kill other males in the group, they likely access other men’s women (although that is likely played down in the accounts of such incidents to the recorders), and their behaviour is so intolerable that they become more dangerous to the community than their value as a good warrior warrants. Because they are dangerous, killing them needs to be done carefully. Moreover, if not done properly, their relatives may feel it was unjust and seek revenge. In some cases, the community instructs the individual’s close relatives to kill him in order to eliminate any basis for revenge. In others, it is a community act. There is one account given to me directly by a Yanomamo tribesman visiting the United States of a Yanomamo dangerous warrior who, it is decided, must be killed. He is tricked into climbing a tree, and by necessity leaves his weapons behind. As he climbs down, weaponless, he is beset by all the males and killed." (Steven Leblanc)

Early on, advocates of big bang cosmology realized that the universe is evolutionary. In the words of one famous cosmologist, George Gamov, “We conclude that the relative abundances of atomic species represent the most ancient archaeological document pertaining to the history of the universe.” In other words, the periodic table is evidence of the evolution of matter, and atoms can testify to the history of the cosmos. But early versions of big bang cosmology held that all the elements of the universe were fused in one fell swoop. As Gamov puts it, “These abundances …” meaning the ratio of the elements (heaps of hydrogen, hardly any gold—that kind of thing), “… must have been established during the earliest stages of expansion, when the temperature of the primordial matter was still sufficiently high to permit nuclear transformations to run through the entire range of chemical elements.” It was a neat idea, but very wrong. Only hydrogen, helium, and a dash of lithium could have formed in the big bang. All of the elements heavier than lithium were made much later, by being fused in evolving and exploding stars. How do we know this? Because at the same time some scholars were working on the big bang theory, others were trying to ditch the big bang altogether. Its association with thermonuclear devices made it seem hasty, and its implied mysterious origins tainted it with creationism. And so, a rival camp of cosmologists developed an alternate theory: the Steady State. The Steady State held that the universe had always existed. And always will. Matter is created out of the vacuum of space itself. Steady State theorists, working against the big bang and its flaws, were obliged to wonder where in the cosmos the chemical elements might have been cooked up, if not in the first few minutes of the universe. Their answer: in the furnaces of the very stars themselves. They found a series of nuclear chain reactions at work in the stars. First, they discovered how fusion had made elements heavier than carbon. Then, they detailed eight fusion reactions through which stars convert light elements into heavy ones, to be recycled into space through stellar winds and supernovae. And so, it’s the inside of stars where the alchemist’s dream comes true. Every gram of gold began billions of years ago, forged out of the inside of an exploding star in a supernova. The gold particles lost into space from the explosion mixed with rocks and dust to form part of the early Earth. They’ve been lying in wait ever since.

In the...overemphasis on the ego and on adjustment to others, one has an underestimation of history and its weight. Technical interventionism:...transference becomes conditioning by the analyst...The cure becomes a suggestion...The institution of psychoanalysis prepares subjects that it can (apparently) 'cure.' But they are not cured because they are not sick: they are normal for this historical milieu. On the contrary, in the Freudian spirit: psychoanalysis as therapeutic and not institution does not provide objective proof of its truth: truth is here brought in relation to transference...One does not aim for the ego and its passing emotions; one tends toward the liberation of what is imprisoned, i.e., toward its reintegration into the entire life of the subject. One aims at the domain of our 'archaeology'--The analyst does not have the key. It is to be made for each case. He is not the one who knows in the face of the one who does not know. He is in the game (counter-transference). It is necessary that he continue to know himself in order to know the other. Socratic dialectic (almost silent Socrates) = emergence of truth in the dialogue--transference, as Platonic love, is the condition, not the cause of the ascension toward truth.

Sewing is an enjoyable hobby that allows you to be creative and make a variety of items for yourself and others. At Clothingus.com, we offer a range of resources to help you learn how to sew, including easy projects and information about different sewing tools and their uses. Here are some interesting facts about sewing and related materials that may inspire you to try this useful craft: Cotton fabric can last for up to 100 years with proper care. In fact, cotton fabric has been found in many archaeological sites, indicating its longevity. Women's buttons are typically sewn onto the left side of a garment due to historical reasons. In the past, buttons were expensive, and only wealthy women with domestic help could afford them. To make it easier for the help to button up the garments, they were placed on the left side. Zippers were invented in 1893 and were initially used only on shoes and boots to make them easier to put on. Over time, they gained popularity and were used on other garments as well. The term "calico" refers to a type of cotton print that originated in the city of Calcutta, India. These hand-woven printed fabrics were made in the late 18th century and were named after the city. Buttons on sleeves were introduced by Napoleon Bonaparte. He wanted to prevent his soldiers from wiping their noses on their sleeves, so he ordered buttons to be sewn onto the ends of the sleeves. Sewing is believed to be one of the first skills that Homo sapiens learned. Archaeologists have found evidence of people sewing together fur, hide, skin, and bark for clothing dating back to 25,000 years ago. Early sewing needles were made of bone and ivory, with metal needles being developed later in human history. By the 20th century, more than 4000 different types of sewing machines had been invented. However, only those that made sewing simple, fun, and easy survived over time. If you're interested in learning more about sewing, visit Clothingus.com for lessons and projects that can help you build a solid foundation in this skill. Whether you're a beginner or have some experience, we have something for you. Visit Clothingus.com now.

Joyce is not purely aspiring in ‘this book of universals . . . to the conditions of a universal consciousness’, as Hassan has argued, but is intrigued by its opposite and complement, the split essence of modernity, by the part defined by Baudelaire as ‘the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable’.18 And Joyce is interested in the relationship between these two halves of art, and their relative position. For it is under these ephemeral fugitive contingent elements, under modernity, that the eternal is to be swamped. Joyce is not putting them side by side, but placing the ephemeral on top of the universal. His methods of intense rewriting, where he conjures up superimpositions, composite figures, and analogues, are themselves analogous to the way culture’s myths rewrite us and force us to return to our visions of ourselves and our world, and to revise and reassess those visions. The supposedly universal myths may well be available through intensive archaeology, but such quests will only produce the ‘early drafts’ of culture, fragmented and increasingly disparate, the further back you go.

Israel’s beginnings are mysterious from an archaeological point of view, so we can’t be dogmatic about explaining how and when Israel began. But it does seem that a nation eventually called “Israel” probably came on the scene gradually and relatively peacefully.

if you tidied up a Homo sapiens woman or man from 200,000 years ago, gave them a haircut and dressed them in twenty-first-century clothes, they would not look out of place in any city in the world today. There’s a conundrum in that stasis. Though we may not look different, humans did change, and profoundly. There’s debate about when this transition occurred, but by 45,000 years ago, something had happened. Many scientists think that it was a sudden change – sudden in evolutionary terms means hundreds of generations and dozens of centuries, rather than a thunderbolt. We don’t quite have the language to relate to the timescales involved in such transitions. But what we can observe from the archaeological record is that we see the emergence and accumulation of a number of behaviours that are associated with modern humans, and there was a time before that where we see fewer or none of them. Given how long life has existed on Earth, this switch happened relatively in a heartbeat.

Even Mr. Masrani’s announcement of his plans to open a park had been shrouded in mystery. The man had a flair for drama. It started when packages containing amber-handled archaeological tools—the kind that paleontologists use to dig up bones—began arriving. At first, it was journalists, social media influencers, actors, pop stars, the leading professors and minds of the world. Then, as the buzz began to start, the tools began arriving at random people’s doorsteps across the world. Everyone starting talking about it because it was so weird—and the selection of people who got the tools was so broad and varied. The tools came with no note, just a simple card that had the profile of a T. rex skeleton stamped upon it. Two more packages arrived for the lucky recipients over the next few weeks. It became this status thing to post about them. Everyone was trying to trace the company that sent them, but no one could figure it out. The second package contained a compass; carved on the back was that same T. rex stamp. When the third and final package arrived, it caused a sensation. Each person’s box had three clues—a jagged tooth, a curled piece of parchment with the sketch of a gate in spidery ink, and an old-fashioned-looking key, one clearly not made to unlock anything. The speculation this caused throughout the world was unparalleled. What did these objects mean? Did they relate to each other? Was this just some elaborate prank? The first person to discover how to activate the boxes was a farmer’s son in Bolivia. After he disassembled the wooden box the trinkets were sent in, he noticed a strange indentation in the top of the lid and placed his key inside. Once he posted his discovery on YouTube, people across the globe were inserting their key in the notch, activating a hidden hologram chip embedded in the key’s handle. This beamed a message. Two silver words. One date. They’re coming. May 30, 2005 By the time Mr. Masrani held his press conference the next day, the entire world was buzzing about the possibility of a new park and a chance to get close to the dinosaurs. Both of the islands had been restricted for so long, it was the only thing anyone could talk about. It’s one of those things you compare notes on with other people: Where were you when Masrani announced Jurassic World?

In other words, media critique is not only about saying things, it is about design and materiality – doing critique in an alternative fashion, against the grain, so to speak (see Lovink 2003: 11). Through such material existence, the media-archaeological work puts the spectator/user/viewer into a new relation with the imaginary, and hence forces us to engage creatively with the presence of media – new and old, imagined and real.

Meteorology . . . is quite as “scientific” as geology and far more so than archaeology—it actually makes more use of scientific instruments, computers, and higher mathematics. . . . Yet we laugh at the weatherman every other day; we are not overawed by his impressive paraphernalia, because we can check up on him any time we feel like it: he makes his learned pronouncements—and then it rains or it doesn’t rain. No scientific conclusion is to be trusted without testing—to the extent to which exact sciences are exact they are also experimental sciences; it is in the laboratory that the oracle must be consulted. But the archaeologist is denied access to the oracle. For him there is no neat and definitive demonstration; he is doomed to plod along, everlastingly protesting and fumbling through a laborious, often rancorous running debate that never ends.

Empirical logic achieved a signal triumph in the Old Testament, where survivals from the early proto-logical stage are very few and far between. With it man reached a point where his best judgments about his relation to God, his fellow men and the world, were in most respects not appreciably inferior to ours. In fundamental ethical and spiritual matters we have not progressed at all beyond the empirico-logical world of the Old Testament or the unrivalled fusion of proto-logical intuition, 64 [see Coomaraswamy, Review of Religion, 1942, p. 138, paragraph 3] empirico-logical wisdom and logical deduction which we find in the New Testament. In fact a very large section of modern religion, literature and art actually represents a pronounced retrogression when compared with the Old Testament. For example, astrology, spiritism and kindred divagations, which have become religion to tens of millions of Europeans and Americans, are only the outgrowth of proto-logical interpretation of nature, fed by empirico-logical data and covered with a spurious shell of Aristotelian logic and scientific induction. Plastic and graphic art has swung violently away from logical perspective and perceptual accuracy, and has plunged into primordial depths of conceptual drawing and intuitive imagery. While it cannot be denied that this swing from classical art to conceptual and impressionistic art has yielded some valuable results, it is also true that it represents a very extreme retrogression into the proto-logical past. Much of the poetry, drama and fiction which has been written during the past half-century is also a reversion from classical and logical standards of morality and beauty into primitive savagery or pathological abnormality. Some of it has reached such paralogical levels of sophistication that it has lost all power to furnish any standards at all to a generation which has deliberately tried to abandon its entire heritage from the past. All systematic attempts to discredit inherited sexual morality, to substitute dream-states for reflection, and to replace logical writing by jargon, are retreats into the jungle from which man emerged through long and painful millennia of disillusionment. With the same brains and affective reactions as those which our ancestors possessed two thousand years ago, increasing sophistication has not been able to teach us any sounder fundamental principles of life than were known at that time. . . . Unless we can continue along the pathway of personal morality and spiritual growth which was marked out for civilized man by the founders of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, more than two thousand years ago, our superior skill in modifying and even in transforming the material world about us can lead only to repeated disasters, each more terrible than its predecessor. (Archaeology and the Religion of Israel, 5th Ed. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 31-33.)

When we study the past seeking evidence of a highly advanced culture, we should not expect to find objects that we associate with our own culture. Different cultures develop along different paths. This process occurs even over relatively short periods of time, especially when one society is isolated from others. For example, when the Allies went into Germany after Hitler's defeat, they found that after only twelve years of isolation German technology was being developed along lines vastly different from our own. Pauwels and Bergier wrote: 'When the War in Europe ended on May 8th, 1945, missions of investigation were immediately sent out to visit Germany after her defeat. Their reports have been published; the catalogue alone has 300 pages. Germany had only been separated from the world since 1933. In twelve years the technical evolution of the Reich developed along strangely divergent lines. Although the Germans were behindhand as regards the atomic bomb, they had perfected giant rockets unmatched by any in America or Russia. They may not have had radar, but they had perfected a system of infra-red ray detectors which were quite as effective. Though they did not invent silicones, they had developed an entirely new organic chemistry, based on the eight-ring carbon chain. [...] They had rejected the theory of relativity and tended to neglect the quantum theory. [...] They believed in the existence of eternal ice and that the planets and the stars were blocks of ice floating in space. If it has been possible for such wide divergencies to develop in the space of twelve years in our modern world, in spite of the exchange of ideas and mass communications, what view must one take of the civilizations of the past? To what extent are our archaeologists qualified to judge the state of the sciences, techniques, philosophy and knowledge that distinguished, say, the Maya or Khmer civilizations?

Anzick-1's "Clovis connection" is of immediate relevance to our quest here--which is that although Clovis did, at the limits of its range, extend into some northern areas of South America, its heartland was in North America. Intuitively, therefore, we would expect the Montana infant, a Clovis individual, to be much more closely related to Native North Americans than to Native South Americans. Further investigations, however, while reconfirming that Anzick-1's genome had a greater affinity to all Native Americans than to any extant Eurasian population, revealed it to be much more closely related to native South Americans than to Native North Americans!

In an interesting, and unexplained, related piece of trivia, the actor Brad Pitt now reportedly has a tattoo of Ötzi on his left forearm—Hollywood meets archaeology?

This idea is part of a compelling argument that it was honey and bee larvae, as much as meat, that made the human brain larger and helped us to outcompete all other species. Meat eating gets all the glory, the argument goes, because stone tools used in hunting turn up in the archaeological record, while evidence of eating honey does not. But there are plenty of other clues. Our closest relatives in the animal kingdom – chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans – all eagerly gorge on honey and bee larvae, nature’s most energy-dense food. And in the earliest rock art discovered, inside caves in Spain, India, Australia and South Africa, there are depictions of honey collecting dating back at least 40,000 years.