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Archaeologists believed that the women hairstyles depicted in ancient Roman statues were far too complicated, and therefore had to be elaborate wigs.
Janet Stephens, a hairdresser, took one look at the back of a bust, and immediately saw the underlying logic of the styles and how they could be achieved with a needle and thread.
When she got home, she found that archaeologists had consistently mistranslated the Latin phrase for “acus” which can mean needle and thread or single prone hairpin as only single prong hairpin. She goes on to film herself recreating all sorts elaborate hairstyles in Roman busts, and changed archeological viewpoint from then on.
Janet Stephens - Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_Stephens
EDIT: Janet Stephens uploads recreations of ancient Roman hairstyles on her YouTube channel if you are interested
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhacomyGRF2PBSm-ByuuNup6TGB3B8aAI
Thats badass actually I love it
There was a similar story about a tool no one could figure out. They showed it to a leather worker and the worker pulled out a similar tool.
Then there’s the Roman dodecahedron, which truly seems to be a mystery with no modern equivalent, but lots of theories.
They look gambling related to me, but I don’t know why that would be in a burial.
dodecahedron,
I hope my family buries me with my favorite dice set
As I recall, the bones were identified as gaming pieces. there’s a similar game played in the area, and the winner gets to keep the losers playing pieces.
Heckin gamer right there
Some people honor their loved ones by burying them with the things that made them happy. We buried my grandmother with her porn tapes and dildo/vibrator collection.
I don’t know if that last part is a joke, but my buddy and his brothers slipped the porn VHS that was still in the VCR when his grandfather died in his casket along with a bottle of Crown Royal.
Not a joke at all. Also, being the fucked up family we are, we weren’t not gonna watch it at least for a moment.
My review of Titty Fuck Follies: not my thing, but great fun for the family.
But for serious, being Jewish, they won’t let you bury synthetic materials. But when my uncle was asked to bring an outfit for my grandmother to the funeral home, he also packed up the porn and paraphernalia in an HEB grocery bag and took it on down. He asked them to not look at it, but just to bury it with her. They later told us that they had to look at it for liability reasons, but since they knew my grandmother, they totally understood and just casually tossed it in her casket.
Note: my grandmother was well known at her condo for telling all the new residents how to use the bubble jets in the hot tub to have an orgasm.
I did not realize who I was replying to hahaha. So hi there, friend!
I don’t believe in an afterlife but if I’m wrong I hope wherever your grandmother is she met up with my buddy’s grandpa and they’re terrorizing ghosts with porn and toys together.
My grandmother used to talk about how beautiful she was in high school and college, and that she thought everyone should get to be happy, which is why she loved showing off her body to every boy or girl, no matter what walk of life they came from. She also used to tell my oldest sister about how much she loved giving blowjobs, and that my sister should learn to enjoy it because it can be a lot of fun.
I guarantee you that my grandmother has a line wrapped around whenever haunted house you’re envisioning, and she’s having the time of her afterlife.
So hi there, friend!
-hug- it’s always a good day when I get a friendly “howdy” from ya
Legend
Perfection.
Bro, that’s just an ancient massage roller!
Gambling would require they be standardized, and we have enough examples that aren’t similarly sized or constructed that seems unlikely.
Unless they had a governing body it’s probably more natural to see a diverse set of sizes and constructions. When you’re shooting dice in the street it’s more fun to have (or make) your own for luck/cheating
It looks like you would wrap fibers around the vertices to make something 3d out of frabric tbh.
Edit: it seems my theory has been largely discounted 😔
I remember speculation that this could have been used to make gloves. That was discounted?
as spool knitting devices for making gloves (though the earliest known reference to spool knitting is from 1535, and this would neither explain the use of bronze, nor the apparently similar icosahedron which is missing the holes necessary for spool knitting)
From the wikipedia
Not entirely discounted but considered unlikely
I wonder if we have any computer code today where a lack of documentation will bring about similar issues hundreds of years down the line
I have already encountered this
I have created plenty of this, but I’d be surprised if any of it exists in even the next 5 years.
:D
You mean the odd shaped candleholder?
It’s so you could use candles of different sizes from different vendors without needing a distinct candelabra for each one.
It’s a genuinely useful thing to have because the small metal balls would always keep it upright regardless of the shape of the candle. You’d just need to match the diameter of the hole.
A form of bone folder, if I’m remembering correctly.
This is some facebook boomer shit.
No don’t you see, they ran their findings past a mother, as all archaeologists do (the implication of course being none of those dumb science idiots could handle being a mom as people can’t do 2 things). The mother then corrected them, likely with folded arms, likely going “mmmhmmm” once they realized that her wisdom beat their book learnin’
thus, she cemented her legashe. And that is why we all know her today: random nameless mother.
Folded arms? No no no. She had her hands full with a baby suckling at the teet when she made this discovery
Did homes in pre-Colombian America even have rafters?
Longhouses probably would have, but Tipi’s definitely didn’t.
That said, putting sharp objects where children can’t reach them seems like a pretty universal solution to a common problem. Rafters or not
Cone tents and tipis definitely have stuff strung up high every time I have been in them: modern usage being suggestive of tradition I suppose
Depends on where in america. Urban cultures south of the US definitely could have though I am no expert in their architecture.
“Local mom reveals one weird trick that archeologists hate!”
I’m not saying something like this has never happened but I expect that such claims are simply anti-intellectual urban legends more often than not.
(How would we even know where pre-Columbian people stored knives? The sort of structure that would survive for centuries seems like it would be a palace or a temple made of stone, rather than a common kitchen. There the blades presumably would serve a ritual purpose.)
Many pre-columbian cultures survived for a long while in a diminished form after colonization began. It’s not unlikely we would be aware of this and speculate about it. It’s very likely that early historians of indigenous Americans would speculate in this manner, take it from me this is my specific historical interest. I do suspect many of these tales are more legend than fact but it expresses a real issue within early histories of colonized peoples written by the colonizer.
Couldn’t find anything to validate this specific claim of archeologists claiming obsidian blades were kept close to the sun (under a roof???) to keep them sharp, but you see things like this pop up from time to time, wherein specialists or people from the region point out that a poorly-understood archeological find is just a specialist tool or regional practice that’s still in use.
Exoticizing ancient and foreign cultures is bullshit.
Yeah they believe dtuffthat sounds crazy to you,but they aren’t fucking aliens. Having people with actual relevant experience participate in archaeology is essential. Wjenlooking at stonework, bring a mason. When looking at hair, bring a barber. When looking at textiles, bring a seamstress.
Early humans are just that, humans. Their brains worked basically identically to how ours work, they just had wildly different lives. If you plucked a baby from today and time swapped it with a baby born 10,000 years ago, they’d be fine and grow up as if they didn’t know (disease notwithstanding)
This is a difficult concept for Westerners (including myself at one point) since Western historiography has a tendency to portray history as linear and unidirectional.
I’m reading the two perfect books about this at the moment:
https://www.buch7.de/produkt/horizons-james-poskett/1043666144?ean=9780241986264
Both book kinda deconstruct the western linear history storytelling
You say aliens but there are many archaeological engineering marvels from the ancient world that don’t fit the “primitive” narrative and so there are conspiracy theorists that believe it must have been aliens. One example would be the Kailasa temple in India which was carved out of the face of a cliff
It almost always boils down to “nonwhite people couldn’t have done this” and it pisses me the hell off
Yeah, because they’re racist as fuck
When looking at statues of “fertility goddesses”, bring a teenage boy. That shit wasn’t evidence of a “cult of fertility”, it was porn.
I prefer this version. Also, as someone quite close to the field, there’s an awful lot of misinformation in this thread. Tread carefully, readers.
Your sharepic is also quite misleading - yes, menstruation occurs approx. every 28 days, but the lunar month is also 29,5 days and we know of many calendar systems and ancient cultures that used lunar months. Which makes sense as moon phases are easy to observe and kind of align with the year. So that could be some stone age woman tracking her period, but it could also be a male priest tracking the moon.
Pretty sure thats the point tho, there are often multiple different explanations for each mystery. So having a diverse group of archeologists is beneficial to get as many theories as possible.
So the ‘gotcha’ by the professor probs isnt a ‘this is definitely the only explanation’, it’s just to have the students question their biases and seek diverse opinions.
That does read a little bit different to me - but let’s not argue about a tumblr screenshot
Yeah fair enough, didn’t mean to sound argumentative
Ya got it. :)
So what you’re telling us is that this is proof that women are werewolves?
Something something field advances one funeral at a time.
The strongly held opinions of “senior” people in academics and sciences are defended for the sake of ego and maybe funding, and that blocks the ability of outside information and questions that could change those ideas.
Wonder what the pass/fail rate is for things like this. How many “facts” are toppled quickly after a defender’s demise.
ITT: Lemmites upset that a WOMEN would dare say a man is wrong.
Yeah calling bullshit on this entire thing is misogynistic. Sure Jan.
Any skepticism here falls downstream of the initial failure to credit that woman’s contribution. Accepting the reduction of a contributor’s identity to “a mother” would be more misogynistic than the responses I’m seeing.
A WOMAN, singular.
as a man I invite a WOMEN to tell me I’m wrong.
This is why smug and archeology never go together. Literally I never bought Graham Hancock until smug archeologists admitted to ignoring evidence. Like wtf no shit he believes civilization is way older than we say because we are sitting on evidence waiting for it to be smug-worthy wtf!
Yup. That definitely happened.
