Cheyenne C.C.

@rozuken

“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.

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.

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.

*mic drop*

Historians, archeologists, and anthropologists should really take a page from paleontology’s book and look to the modern day to understand the past.

This is the content I like to see

Not all heros wear capes.

I want to buy this woman a beer.

c a h l m