That things like this can still be discovered -- a Mycenaean warrior's grave discovered at Pylos, complete with weapons, Linear B tablets (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_B), jewels, etc. Don't forget that "sandy Pylos" was the home of Nestor, whom Telemachus consulted to see if he knew anything about his father, Odysseus. Wise old Nestor (90 years old) had also fought at Troy, but he did not know what had become of Odysseus. Interestingly, the "Griffin warrior" recently unearthed at Pylos had trappings of the Minoan civilization (Crete), although Pylos is more associated with the Mycenean civilization.
>>The top of the warrior’s shaft grave lies at ground level, seemingly so easy to find that it is quite surprising the tomb lay intact for 35 centuries.
>>“It is indeed mind boggling that we were first,” Dr. Davis wrote in an email. “I’m still shaking my head in disbelief. So many walked over it so many times, including our own team.”
One wonders how many other discovery are similarly near the surface.
I recall a relatively recent find of a large viking cache in a long farmed field in Britain. The discovery mentioned with wonder thinking about how many time a plow had been just a few inches from it for nearly a thousand years.
It wasn't so much that the technique is still the same that struck me, so much as that the technique, and the technology to fabricate using it, existed 3500 years ago!
The main reason we're ahead of these folks is because we went about our research a bit more methodical, not because we're smarter or more precise with our fingers.
If not for a handful of men and women we'd be stuck trying to find the philosophers stone.
Gold is one of the least remarkable metals in that respect, given how soft it is, and how easy it is to melt (both that the melting point is reasonable, but also that it is relatively hard to mess up the melting compared to many other metals). You can do a lot with gold with next to no equipment and patience that required substantial technological advances to be possible with many other metals.
I'm reading a book on that era and this is pretty fascinating to read. Archeology seems like a science of studying small bits and trying to understand the big picture from them. I bet you have to be really patient to be an archeologist.
It is terribly fascinating what they can infer from the smallest of objects. I remember reading about the Viking settlements on Greenland and how archaeologists were able to deduce that Greenland Vikings did not eat fish because of the lack of fishbones found in refuse sites.
Archaeology feels like a low-tech version of the machine that rebuilds the fifth element in the movie of the same name, from just a fragment.
Reading pop-archaeology online (mainstream articles, not journals), I find they frequently seem to overreach in what can be inferred by some small find or, just as often, what they did not find at some small site.
Find one badly preserved jawbone of a humanoid and immediately we have a new species, without consideration that it might be deformed, juvenile, or from a population with unusual genetics [0] [1] (edit: see Pygmy peoples for example of Homo sapiens sapiens with unusual genetics [2] [3])
All to often they jump on what is not present in one place at one time and make wild assumptions. No fish at one refuse pit of one settlement could be explained by many different things and might not apply to a wider population.
I love dinosaurs and prehistoric beasts, but that's pretty much the way I feel about paleontology. All too often you'll read some science-y piece about some fantastic new insight- a new species, animal X did Y with regards to raising its young, etc. Then you go through a couple of layers of redirects to see the actual information, and find that the new species is classified on the basis of a partial skeleton, or just a handful of bones, or some incredibly fragmentary DNA extracted and compared from two poorly preserved specimens.
10000 years from now, our descendants will be digging through our garbage dumps and trying to find significance from the substantial deposits of shiny metallic plastic jewelry etched with the obscure glyphs "AOL" on one side.
Do you have a link for that? It sounds interesting.
It seems like a very odd situation, given that the Norse who settled Greenland surely knew about fishing before they packed up from Norway, the Orkneys and Iceland.
I've seen comments every which way about "Collapse", so I looked for something that was a bit more directly from the literature and found http://www.yale.edu/ycei/arcticworkshop/background-reading/D... . Quoting first from p.7 then p.6 (emphasis mine):
> The development and expansion of the trade in dried Atlantic cod around 1100 AD was to have widespread economic impacts throughout Europe, which probably did not work to the advantage of the Norse Greenlanders who did little if any fishing. ...
> Details of these Norse strategies of caribou and common seal
conservation in Greenland are unclear but we may speculate that it was
part of a conscious effort to conserve resilience and flexibility by
underwriting the farming economy based on imported stock and the long
distance Norðursetur hunt for trade goods. In late medieval and early
modern Iceland elements of resilience thinking in a context of
recurring labor shortage may be embedded in restrictions on sea
fishing. In order to undertake fishing, farm ownership was required,
and the development of fishing camps unsupported by agriculture was
legally discouraged. The rationale was that fishing alone could not
ensure a certain livelihood, and when it failed there would be a
burden of poor relief on the wider community if those fishing did not
have farming as well. In other words; specialization that could
produce a greater short term yield was discouraged because it could
potentially compromise the resilience of the wider community through
burdens of support during times of fishery failure. Similar rationale
may have stood behind the apparent absence of specialized sealing
stations in Norse Greenland and the failure to develop substantial
fisheries. Despite the growing role of seals in subsistence, even
small farms maintained substantial flocks of sheep and goats and at
least a few cows- this was a multi-stranded economy which spread risks
and coordinated labor on a community scale rather than specialized,
individualized subsistence system. Its major limitations were in its
inability to accumulate multi-year surplus in the absence of cereal
agriculture and the resulting recurring problem of matching high
seasonal communal labor requirements with year-round provisioning
limits.
Ah, I guess I'll have to read that over again. I recall Diamond suggesting that they for some reason didn't adopt practices from the Inuits(?), like sealing, kayaks, etc, as the climate got colder after the medieval warm period, but I don't remember anything about them not fishing.
