21st May 2012, 04:08 PM
Jack Wrote:[quote=P Prentice]
A weakness in terms of they are fantasy, passed down and embellished through the centuries. Written down hundreds of years after the time they are set in. Translated, re-written and re-written.
Very little to do with archaeology.
After all you wouldn't use the King Arthur film (c.2004) as a reference to say a site on sub-roman Hadrians wall..........even though 'The producers of the film claim to present a historically accurate version of the Arthurian legends, supposedly inspired by new archaeological findings' (wikipedia).
So why would older stories be any more accurate?
Religious beliefs are a whole different kettle of fish. Difficult to extract fact from propaganda; motives from lies; beliefs from agendas.
An organised religion is an institution bent on its own agenda...be it war on other ideologies, its own propagation through increasing membership, domination through wealth and/or politics or control of knowledge/ persecution and so on.
Evidence of these exist in history, so meaningful questions can be tackled. Before this, other than the physical remains of the end products (burials, deposits, artefacts) of whatever the people did/ thought/ believed, its a lot of conjecture.
Yes, there are some fragments of human bone, fragments of a pot common in graves, and an item of carved antler that may have some significance within the fill of that tree-throw hole.
But were they placed there? Were they thrown in as some kind of ceremony? Or is that tree-throw an accidental reservoir of soil and a conglomeration of stuff from an old topsoil the rest of which has been removed by later ploughing?
The items may have had ritual significance to those that made and/or deposited (or discarded/lost) them but how the hell (pun) can we understand this without knowing the details of that religion?
oh jacky boy - hard science in archaeology will never win out
If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers