Musa, mihi causas memora

me: I'm literally begging you to do the one task you need to do

my brain:

posts that are like “archaeologists are so racist because *unchecked information* *shit that some colonialist archaeologists did from 18th century to first half of the 20th* *wild misinterpetation of the entire field of archaeology*” make me want to throw up

I want to hear more about this, I wanna hear what OP knows about archeology because I didn’t get taught very much but I find it fascinating nonetheless

so this how it goes in real life and not in the movies

there are archaeologists who are poc. (this is the same reason why the popular “all historians are homophobic and erase queer history” rhetoric is not only untrue, but also harmful. see, some of us are queer. we don’t contribute to our own erasure. same with poc)

secondly, i don’t get why people seem to think that archaeology is about white people hopping on a plane to dig some graves in africa/asia/south america. like, that’s not how it works at all. sites in europe are excavated just the same as they are in everywhere else in the world. it’s regulated by laws of the local government everywhere. most of the archaeologists working in a country are usually from that country too (in fact, most of us work in our home countries all our lives). a foreign team needs special permissions to excavate somewhere and then too, they are usually aided and supervised by their local collegues. and even if an excavation is carried out by a foreign team, artifacts stay in their country of origin, not taken to some european museum (this isn’t the first half of the last century anymore). only a small amount of samples can be taken - with special permission, yeah i hope you guessed - to laboratories, for scientific analysis.

and this is something i noticed that a lot of people don’t know, but the biggest chunk of archaeological work happens to preserve and save a site that would otherwise be destroyed by modern construction works. excavations that only have a purely scientific goal (i.e. they are not threatened sites) are actually the minority.

see, archaeologists spend years studying, and like, we don’t do it just to find some treasure and steal it from the culture and country it belongs to. hearing people reduce a whole scientific field to that is just so tiring if i’m really honest

i know it’s hard to recognize what archaeology contributes to society, because it’s not something tangible, like an invention of a medicine or a new technology or something like that, something corporations can sell and you can buy and use, but… you know, everything we have and everything we are came from somewhere. we just want to understand it and share that understanding with others. so just, let us do our job please

I think its also worth mentioning that archaeology is all too aware of it’s past, and is quite open in examining this. It looks inwards at the negative things this field of study has done, and looks to redress this.

Archaeology is NOT a well paid profession at all. In fact, many archaeologists are forced our of the profession of they want to have a family/buy a house/etc because the salary is very poor given the amount of training and study it takes to become an archaeologist. I trained for 4 years at university in archaeology, and my starting salary was £10,000 lower than most graduate entry starting jobs in the UK. I was paid less than the secretarial and support staff. I know this is very similar in other countries. We don’t go into this profession for profit, we do it for the love of it. We do it because we are fascinated by the past, want to learn from it, and want to protect it.

In my time as an archaeologist, I have been honoured and privileged to have been invited to dig in Egypt twice, and in France and Belgium. I’ve always been part of a team where the majority of archaeologists were from the home country. It was an amazing experience to work with my archaeological brothers and sisters at different sites, and for us to share our knowledge and experiences in our field.

To understand your ancestors and all those who went before you, and what they left behind is to understand where we currently are, and where we may go as individuals, communities and countries. I’ve dug up sites in central London near communities who immigrated into the UK, and on some of those sites I’ve had my favourite interactions with schoolkids and interested passers-by. They are fascinated by what we are doing. Its wonderful to share that archaeology, knowledge and understanding with people who live there now.

Just want to jump into this (as a historian, not an archaeologist) to mention that a lot of this rhetoric around archaeologists and historians actively participating in the erasure of the past is rhetoric that falls in line with right wing attempts to delegitimise academia and make it inaccessible to those who need it most. that sort of anti-intellectualism doesn’t help marginalised communities, it hurts them, and it especially hurts the people in academia who are from marginalised communities who do really incredible and important work to rescue marginalised communities from the enormous condescension of posterity, to borrow the words of EP Thompson.

it’s important to criticise the status quo in academia, of course, and it’s what academics spend most of their time doing. but to criticise it productively you need to understand it and you need to engage with it seriously. anything less than that is doing harm to those who are trying to make it better.

We had a lot of classes on ethics and what harm archeology has been used for in the past when I studied Archaeology at university. As a field, it started out as colonialism/imperialism, nothing short of outright plunder, absolutely. And even once it became its own field of science, it was used to justify wars and ethnic cleansing through twisted “this land has always belonged to our culture” arguments.

Archaeology as a science is well aware of this, and is actively working to prevent it - directly after World War II ended, there were massive efforts made within the field to prevent it being twisted that way again. That’s another reason why modern archaeology focuses a lot on what humanity as a whole has in common, learning about the things that unite us, and celebrating the fascinating things that are unique for every culture.

Much like traveling, learning about our shared past offers insights and a sense of scale to problems that may seem huge through the lens of a single individual’s timeframe. It gives us a map to try and avoid making the same mistakes over and over (in theory…) and how to deal with those problems once they arise.

It’s a beautiful field of study, inclusive by nature, bridging humanities and STEM in equal measures, all just to understand ourselves and the way people are and always have been people, and preserving those stories for future generations.

Of course there are still bad apples, like in any academic field, but on the whole, like the people above have stated, it’s mostly pursued out of love, passion and genuine respect for fellow human beings, now living and long gone. It’s humbling, and it instills hope.

plus, re: the bad apples - the benefit of progress is that now when a modern anthropologist/historian is egregiously racist, the rest of the academic world is free to open season on them with a deluge of researched, peer-reviewed knowledge. these kinds of academic debates rarely make it to the public, but we humanities students are reading them as they happen at ALL levels, from the first year of undergraduate onwards, learning by example how to call out and discredit the bad actors among us.

that wouldn’t be possible if we’d given up on these fields back when most of the scientific knowledge we had was diluted and falsified by racists and sexists.

feel like rise of skywalker tried real hard to make kylo ren look hot and it just Wasn't working. he was so wet in that one scene. like was it meant to be attractive emerging from that wave because he was just So Wet. my man was looking like a sad cat after a bath. his friends pushed him into the pool before he had a chance to change. flipped his canoe and fell right into the lake

dude looks like han forgot to pick him up from soccer practice and he walked home in the rain

I spent way too much time on this

god bless you

*sips coffee* hmmm *flips through the morning twitter paper*

*adjusts reading glasses* my word. darling wake up new poop has dropped

reblog this with the last song on your spotify wrapped 👀

were you in an artist’s top 0.5% of listeners or are you normal

imagine being mads mikkelson and hugh dancy filming like multiple takes making out passionately and then the director’s like alright we’re not using any of those

this haunts me

Klingon tumblr is called tm’blarr and if you post a nipple they stab you

Unrealistic

I really wish people would realize that you are allowed to be horny for a character without needing to justify them morally.

You’re allowed to consider emperor Palpatine to be a nasty little thottie without thinking that blowing up planets with the death star was justified.

this is what it feels like to be insane

It’s what you see when you get to hell

Like, again, The Last Jedi might have been an okay movie if the Luke Skywalkerr Tragic Flaw wasn’t the complete polar opposite of where his character arc took him. 

#like…again….#his flaw was always that he COULDN’T hurt the people he cared about#and that made him easy to manipulate#he couldn’t run away with han#he couldn’t leave his friends to suffer#he couldn’t just kill his father#so throwing down “oh he tried to kill his nephew and that frightened his nephew into being evil” is so radically WRONG#and no it’s not a good twist or subversion it’s lazy and inconsistent#again: if kylo had been Actually Evil and Luke had refused to kill him…completely different but in-character

I need a minimum of 2 hours at the start of every day to just vibe before I actually begin my day lol