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.
Until, of course, they showed it to a traditional leatherworker and she took one look at it and said “Oh yeah sure that’s a leather burnisher, you use it to close the pores of leather and work oil into the hide to make it waterproof. Mine looks just the same.”
“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.
Yeah, my generally policy is to take the phrase “used for ritual purposes” as “we don’t know wtf it was for” until evidence suggests otherwise.
And even if we do know, sometimes “ritual purposes” are totally practical? Like.
This is a yad. You use it when you’re reading from a Sefer Torah so you never actually touch the parchment. The text can be very small in some Torot, so the yad keeps your place. Reading Torah is a ritual, so this object is “for ritual purposes”….
….by which I mean “parchment and vegetable-based ink will break down very quickly when constantly exposed to the oil in your fingers, so it’s better and safer to use a piece of inert metal.” There is nothing sacred or special about the yad itself, although they do tend to be very pretty (and some communities will say it’s a mark of respect for the sacredness of the scroll to not touch it). If you needed to, you could technically use a capped pen as a yad. Or a plastic ruler. Or even an unused disposable chopstick, if for whatever reason you were reading a Sefer Torah and it was the only vaguely yad-shaped object available to you. As long as it won’t damage the parchment, it can be used. The exact appropriateness of these objects can be debated (I would personally not use a chopstick even if it was new), but all of them would do the job.
Now imagine: in a world where the Israelites had died out rather than entering the diaspora (G-d forbid), how many archaeologists would assume the little pointy finger thing “represented the hand of G-d” or some weird thing like that, rather than “it’s literally just in the shape your hand would be making if you were doing this with your fingers”? What are the odds that some, or even many, of the “ritual purposes” objects we find could have been used in prayer AND ALSO be completely practical? Or that if they didn’t seem entirely practical (why NOT have a yad that’s just like a chopstick?), maybe ancient people ALSO JUST LIKED THINGS THAT LOOKED NICE?
