About Archaeology

I do not consider myself a scholar in the contemporary sense of the word.  Most dictionaries
define the term "scholar" as 'one who has already mastered one or more disciplinary fields'.  I personally do not think such a thing is possible.  Any student or educator eventually comes to the conclusion we don't yet know what we don't know.  As educators and scientists our entire lives are spent in the pursuit of knowledge.
 

For the exact sciences it may one day be possible to know everything there is to know about a select few things; such as the specific molecular makeup of a chocolate bar by a certain manufacturer on a given specific date.  But that's all we can know about that "artifact".  By the standards of contemporary archaeology that is a great deal of knowledge. Therefore a scholar is a perpetual student, always studying something, proposing theories and evaluating those theories.  Some things can be empirically tested but archaeology has little of those.  The archaeologists theories are tested through the minds of the contemporary 'greats' and by new information discovered in subsequent excavation.


Unfortunately the practical truth of the matter in archaeology is that almost every "fact" about ancient history is really just a thesis; an educated guess based on an individual archaeologist's or a team of archaeologists' (and probably other disciplines such as historians etc) conclusions about the physical remnants of evidence recovered in an excavation.  The more ancient those recoveries are tends to affect the amount of information (and, certainly, the quality of that information).  For the most part these ancient objects are rarely signed by the author or artist until the late Renaissance era.  Also, where the artifacts were housed (the climate and exposure to the elements) contributes to the availbility of ancient literature and other artifacts.

Unless we have a contemporary signature of the perpetrator and a detailed description of what an object is that has been recovered in a specific site and/or we have something similar still in use today it's not an easy task to identify a 4000 year old worked stone (i.e. obviously carved - not a natural state of that particular mineral).  Nobody today is alive who was alive when say King David ruled in Judah.  As scientists, we can only give it our best guess.  The hard part comes when we try to convince others that our idea is the best interpretation of the physical evidence.


Each generation adds to the currently known pool of information.  Each successive excavation in any given area of the world gives us a chance at recovering some new evidence.  Unfortunately many ancient societies either didn't record information or they used a medium to do so which did not survive into our modern world.  Of course, we may still find some of that information.  But at the moment we don't have it.  It's foolish for anyone to insist a theory is a fact when there is no evidence to back up the supposition.  "However, an absence of evidence is not evidence none exists." (That cited sentence probably belongs to every archaeologist, historian, teacher, preacher etc that ever existed up to and including our own time.)

Some cultures recorded some of their knowledge and activities of daily life but they used materials which could not stand the proverbial test of time.  We have found some of them as tattered and incomplete textual artifacts.  They help but they often pose more questions than the content can provide answers for.  On the other side of the coin, so to speak, there are cultures who left their mark in grandiose ways; such as the Babylonians, the Assyrians, and the Egyptians; to name but a few.


The above civilizations quite literally carved information into stones which have more often than not survived to our era.  As long as we're able to translate these "documents" we can get a general idea of what their meaning was in comparison to modern languages relevant or descended from that original ancient tongue.  [Anyone can back this up by simply reading about how archaeology was significantly affected by the discovery of the Rosetta stone and other (many of them - gargantuan)" textual evidences.]


I say " general idea" because language changes.  In the last 50 years, especially since the invention of the Internet and the world wide web, we have seen yearly changes in the meaning of common everyday words.  Bad used to mean something was not right; it was bad- not what we would like in a given situation.  Today if we say something is bad we are more likely meaning it's  a good thing.  This may be perceived as a nemesis to the archaeologists of about the year 3000 CE.


On the other hand, however, there are issues with accepting what is written in our textual artifacts as absolute fact.  We not only have the issues we've already discussed above but there are some more things to consider.  Who wrote it and what was the contextually intended purpose?  We may have nothing but a bunch of baloney if some noblemen is writing to glorify his contemporary god king in hopes to get that new position of power.


If the said god king happens to have been a monstrous dictator, the person who penned (or carved) that bit of information may have said exactly what he needed to say in order to keep from losing his life.  Information like that of a similar type can not be automatically assumed to be factual just because it was written down.  As a charge nurse (a few decades ago) I can tell you what was written down  (as completed) by some staff members  sometimes was not done and we had the physical proof that it was not.  In archaeology exactness is going to be a very rare instance.


The invention of clay tablets was a both a detriment and mark of significant literary progress on many levels from document collection, to records of contracts and historical relevance.   Some of those tablets were cooked into a stone condition which allows us permanent textual evidence of that specific society in a specific given time.  We know that I'm either buying names mentioned or is sometimes from the date was written down or at least the year of what ever king was on the throne might be included.  The collection is limited though.  If we just concentrate on the thousands of clay tablets fired by a destruction inferno of Babylon we can more easily understand our point.


When Babylon was destroyed the fire cooked every single document in their library/archive into stone AKA ceramic.  Even so not all of those documents were preserved because the documents on each of the upper shelves would fall as those shells burned and those tablets would then fall go crashing through the next layer all of those then falling through the next layer so that what remains for us on the floor of some intact documents, lots of fragments and a lot of dust.


The very same thing happens when a piece of wet pottery is fired in a kiln with properly dried and stacked pottery.  The wet clay explodes shattering the very brittle bisque ware being fired.  Some pieces will be whole, most will be fragmented and some will be dust.  We can glean information from the former two classes of artifact but that dust will yield us nothing other than there was a catastrophe.


Not all of Babylon's documents were there to be fired when Babylon went down.  The scribes used clay tablets to pen down information but that wasn't always something needed for posterity in the eyes of whom ever was responsible for recording specific transactions, deeds or spectacular events.  The wet clay could be moistened a little bit and erased like an old fashioned chalk board.  And of course if the document was not there when the destruction fire occured then it didn't get preserved.


Most of the events carved into stone over the centuries and millenia were intended to brag about someone's great feats.  Some may also have been documented for posterity so that doer of great deeds would never be forgotten but it also has a practical effect as well.  Usually the most important person in any of these textual remains is larger than all the rest.  So we can say he's the most important any probably was the king but he didn't really have to be called a king to get the message across that he was big enough and bad enough to slice and dice any would be contenders.


They didn't have CNN in that era but the wall at Beitan not only tells the words the sculptor was saying (or perhaps a script provided to the sculptor) about his king but even people who couldn't read could discern by the incised scenic artwork.  It does not take a literate person to scratch out letters in a rock.  That person rendering the script could have been looking at the message merely as another shape to be incised.  So then they may not be the thoughts of the artisan at all.


It is said that only the Babylonians gave both sides of the story that is the good things the king did as well as the not so good things; especially in what we call the Babylonian Chronicles.  In fact, Dr. Lipschits reports many archaeologists and historians believe the Babylonian Chronicles are more reliable sources of information than any others because they recorded both the bad and the good things the king did during the past year for that chronicle.  That may or may not be the fact.  The Babylonian Chronicles don't go into great detail for the most part.  They were sort of a public record written in language that is rather dry and straight to the point.  There is a very little editorializing; plain language for what we might call " transparency in government" today.


Perhaps one of the toughest responsibilities of an archaeologist is to interpret the finds; that is the physical evidence left behind by a specific culture.  The pioneering archaeologists had the luxury of a blank paper tablet to identify and interpret a lot of excavations finds.  Over the centuries of archaeology becoming an actual scientifically modified social science, we have learned not every idea is correct; in fact very few of them stand the test of time.  Although the idea " the theory" may have appeared to be sound, future excavation often reputes many of them.