@thepaperplaneofexistence / thepaperplaneofexistence.tumblr.com
God could you imagine how mad geologists must have been to slowly watch the "hey all the continents kinda fit like puzzle pieces :)" guy get proven right
It was a woman that did it!
god forbid 5000 year old girls do anything
I just finished filling out my 2021 Canadian census, and every time I do one of these, I think about these three hilariously belligerent Acadian men who didn’t want to talk to the census guy in 1671. (Full 1671 census here.)
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.
“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.”
Omg the ancient child proofing add on tho lol
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.
^^ THE PERSON MENTIONED HERE IS JANET STEPHENS!!
And the research she did got published in the Journal of Roman Studies (which is a big deal in the Classics world) “even though” she doesn’t have at least a Masters degree in the field.
[To give reference to the gate keeping in this field, she was, I think, only the second or so person without a PhD to be published in the history of the Journal]
But that’s the point, she knew hair and she knew her craft so well that when scholars had ridiculous theories and scoffed at her own, she went ahead and experimented and proved her theories right.
@archaeologistproblems have you experienced anything similar?
Honestly this is probably my #1 favourite thing about archaeological research and looking at things with an interdisciplinary eye. This is also why experimental archaeology is such a great aspect of research - sometimes we no longer have living people who “do the thing,” so we try to “do the thing” ourselves to find out what works best.
Two years ago I got to visit an active brass and bronze foundry and do some filming, because the couple who do the casting could clearly demonstrate and identify what a lot of the mystery items I was finding on a 200-year-old iron foundry site actually were. Biggest one, I was speculating that some of the items I was finding were some kind of rough ingot for excess molten iron during a pour - turns out they were remnant pouring cups. Who knew? (They did. Heh.)
I did some work on a historic Mi’kmaw site seven years ago, one of the first items we found was a small knife. To me it was just a knife, but when one of the Mi’kmaw excavators saw it, he immediately knew that it was specifically a basket knife (Mi’kmaw basket-making was a really prominent craft in my area for generations, though there are far fewer people still doing it today).
On the same site I had a weird, ornamental piece of glass that I was identifying as some kind of candy dish lid. I contacted an antique glass collector who immediately identified it as the base to a glass oil lamp - he even knew which pattern it was. I love this stuff.
(Side note and pet peeve on one of the earlier anecdotes in this post, no decent archaeologist would have referred to a civilization as “primitive.” We don’t exist as civilizations on a single spectrum of “primitive to advanced.” Technology is technology, whether it’s incredibly skilled stone tool manufacture, or designing cell phones.)
*sigh* Booty Shorts
Adult website and period tracker
No, I’m no one’s wife, but, oh, I love my life! And all that jazz!
No, I’m no one’s wife, but, oh, I love my life! And all that jazz!
sorry bro can't go out tonight. i'm stuck in an eternal state of melancholy
figured out my thought process
“(…) the sea no longer torments me; the self I wished to be is the self I am.”
— Louise Glück, from Otis in “Poems 1962-2012″ (via xshayarsha)
Me, at fictional characters: THIS WOULDN’T BE A PROBLEM IF YOU JUST TALKED ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS
Me, in real life: if i give even the vaguest notion of my feelings to anybody i would die
The Great Gatsby's copyright expires January 1, 2021 and I for one am quite looking forward to the inevitable publication of Nick/Gatsby fanfiction.
Look me in the eye and tell me there's not at least ten people sitting on a completed manuscript right now. I dare you.
Oh dude time to write the Greater Gatsby
Y’all I got great news for you:
Tordotcom Publishing is thrilled to announce that Ruoxi Chen has acquired Nghi Vo’s The Chosen and the Beautiful, a magical reimagining of The Great Gatsby told through the eyes of a queer, Asian-American Jordan Baker as the American immigrant narrative that Gatsby always should have been.
WHAT
good morning to repressed bi artists, sad gay alcoholics, exiled english lords, conflicted catholic ladies, clever italian mistresses, flamboyant aesthetes who stutter, emotionless older brothers, and teddy bears in a good temper
