…evidently these people have never done goldwork embroidery.
I’m willing to bet there will be a follow up article about how scholars have made a startling discovery that the gold was used for crafts and the craft people of the world will just be like “…..Really?”
I love how they just kind of leap to “A PRIEST KING MUST HAVE WORN THIS SHINY GOLD STUFF!”
“Everything is mysterious! We have no idea! It, uh… it was for a ritual, yes.”
“…don’t you say everything is for a ritual?”
“Shhh, ancient peoples liked rituals.”
“But there’s a giant painting on this wall showing how this was used, and modern crafters you could ask.”
“SHHH. RITUALS.”I have a very strong urge to email that researcher.
This keeps happening, you know.
For decades we thought water or oil was poured onto the rocks being used to build Egyptian pyramids for “ritual purposes”. Turns out if you ask people who have worked on sand they can tell you that wet sand is A LOT EASIER TO DRAG ROCKS ACROSS.
We spent centuries unable to figure out how the hair styles of ancient civilisations were constructed, typically going with “all the women wore wigs” (seriously. That was literally the solution) until a hairdresser with an interest in the hairstyles she saw in classical art turned her hand to them and BLEW THE RESEARCH COMMUNITY AWAY with her incredibly accurate recreations of hairstyles using tools available to the original peoples.
Academia has this real, huge problem where you’ve got a whole bunch of insulated people who know a lot about history and research and academia but shit-all about anything else. And who, when presented with something they can’t figure out, they turn to other academics rather than to people who might have some practical experience with similar stuff.
And it spreads into popular culture in a really unhealthy way. Because there is so much stuff that academia leaves as “ritual purposes” or “we don’t yet know how X was done”, which becomes “it’s a mystery!!!1!” in popular science shows and magazines. Which winds up fuelling the fires of people who would rather believe that ALIENS BUILD THE FUCKING PYRAMIDS than that the Egyptian people might actually have been competent at this thing they did.
Yep. Interesting thing about the hairstylist: there was a word that kept being used in documents about hairstyles that could translate as two different things, one of which was something like “sewing needle”. Academics ruled out that translation of the word, because “lol, sewing hairstyles. That’s ridiculous.” The hairstylist who recreated them… looked at that word, at the available tools of the time, and tried a sewing technique with needles to keep hair in place. AND IT WORKED.
The silo effect in academia is a major problem.
Side note: IDK if this is the same lady or not (it probably is) but there’s an entire youtube channel devoted to not only period-correct hairstyles from ancient greece/rome and egypt all the way up to the napoleonic and civil war eras but also a few needle/fiber/cloth crafts like beading, dyeing, etc.
Channel is here, the lady’s name is Janet Stephens.
Yep, they are talking about Janet Stephens.
I love her.
The ones that bug me are always the textiles stuff – naturally, as I do that myself. Like the vase paintings of ancient Greeks and Romans and their warp-weighted looms. Archeologists kept saying shit like, “No, that must be an artistic rendering, that couldn’t possibly work like that,” and meanwhile people in Scandinavia are still using nearly identical looms today. Because nobody ever thought to ask actual weavers. The nitwits looking at women preparing wool and spinning on vases, and coming up with completely ridiculous explanations for this shit, and any spinner could glance at it and go, “Um, no.” Just. Argh.
I think this also ties into who is seen as an “expert” in our culture. Laborers who do work that is looked down in our society, such as hair stylists and landscapers, are not perceived as experts unless you’re going to get your hair done or your yard remodeled–and even then, they tend to be perceived as a worker providing labor, as opposed to a consultant or expert professional using their knowledge to preform a specialized skill or art. But these people ARE experts. Academics, however, have internalized cultural values around who is an expert and whose knowledge translates to expertise valuable enough to site in a paper.
So honestly, this is a bigger issue than academia, because our society as a whole doesn’t tend to perceive laborers as experts in hardly any capacity. Academia is just one institution that reflects this classist disdain.
Just gonna say, this problem is even worse than most people think. Academics tend not to think to even ask OTHER ACADEMICS whose specialty is relevant about these things, they just ask the people they work with. Hell, for practical shit, there’s SO many times that physicists have spent a decade or so trying to deal with some problem, but when they finally ask a mathematician the answer is so often “Oh, we did that like, a hundred years ago. Why didn’t you just ask?” (and in the occasional case, a physicist going “This is new and revolutionary!” and mathematicians going “Oh, that is cool. Haven’t seen that.” and a historian of math going “Umm…you guys. This shit’s from 600 BC in India. What the hell?”)
Like, the devaluing of knowledge and expertise of laborers is a HUGE problem in society at large, but on the problem of academics and tunnel vision, ignoring anyone who isn’t them and just saying “ritual” or “too hard” that’s to the point where no one asks anyone anything unless they’re in the exact same field.
Plus, all the examples above are historians and the like, but I also wanted to point out that physicists, who you wouldn’t think offhand would pull this, do it to.
Yep. Thankfully there is starting to be movement in some circles towards more interdisciplinary work in academia but it is slow and small and yeah.
Funny, I just rebloobed a post the other day about popular Sayings and how, over time, we tend to shorten or truncate them. Very often changing the meaning/ point of those Sayings ENTIRELY. Example-
Jack of all trades.
Master of none.-Is repeated QUITE often, but RARELY In its complete form which is-
Jack of all trades.
Master of none.
But better that.
Than a mere Master of One.The original seems kind of poignant here.
Strange Gold Spirals Dating Back To Bronze Age Unearthed In Denmark
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