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Rewriting Human History!!! 🤣 - TAS 244
676 Plays1 year ago
It seems like every week there is an article that says archaeologists are dumbfounded, astounded, or astonished. When that’s not happening we’re rewriting history as we know it. The three articles this week all claim to rewrite history with their claims. Let’s dive in.
Links
- A Prehistoric Pyramid May Have Just Rewritten Human History, Scientists Claim
- Pseudo-Archaeology Podcast Ep 129 - Gunung Padang Is Not A Pyramid: Does Anyone Double-Check Anything Anymore?
- Gunung Padang: What Archaeology Really Says.
- Archaeologists Call Foul on the Purported Discovery of a 27,000-Year-Old Pyramid
- Archaeologists Discover Vast, Complex Prehistoric Society That Rewrites History
- Spanish Bronze Age bling upends archaeological assumptions
Contact
- Chris Webster
chris@archaeologypodcastnetwork.com - Rachel Roden
rachel@unraveleddesigns.com
RachelUnraveled (Instagram)
ArchPodNet
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Transcript
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
Introduction and Purpose
00:00:04
Speaker
You're listening to The Archaeology Show. TAS goes behind the headlines to bring you the real stories about archaeology and the history around us. Welcome to the podcast. Hello and welcome to The Archaeology Show, episode 244. On today's show, we rewrite history three times in three different places. Let's dig a little deeper and keep rewriting those textbooks and these podcasts.
00:00:34
Speaker
Welcome to the archaeology show. Over there is Rachel. And over there is Chris. Hey. That's the dumbest thing I've ever done. That's the worst intro ever. We're never doing that again.
00:00:43
Speaker
Oh, my God. So we're rewriting human history
Challenging Historical Narratives
00:00:47
Speaker
today. Oh, are we? Which is our favorite thing to do in articles. I'm so excited. Yeah. The fact that I could find at least two articles that literally had that in the headline within a few weeks of each other. Like exactly those words of rewriting human history. Yeah. Yeah. That's a little bit stupid. Yeah. And I'm guessing everybody can guess what one of these topics is going to be because it has been all over everywhere. Yeah. All right.
00:01:13
Speaker
The first one, at least one of the articles we found, is titled, A Prehistoric Pyramid May Have Just Rewritten Human History. And let me start by saying human history, right?
00:01:26
Speaker
At least two of these take one site in one tiny corner of the world and rewrite all of human history. It's a bold claim. That's a lot of humans. That's a lot of humans. Yeah. Yeah. Why are you rewriting all the history? Why not just like the history of that area? Right. Now, this particular one is pushing back or attempting to push back.
00:01:45
Speaker
something that is quote, one of the oldest dot, dot, dot. Right. So I guess in that sense, you're, you're putting a period on humans and you're saying, Hey, humans have done this a long time ago, even though it was just right here. So if it's the oldest thing, then I'll give them that, but it's probably not. Right. So apparently the existence of a pyramid older than the Egyptian pyramids means human history needs to be totally rewritten in this particular case. Uh-huh. Yeah.
00:02:09
Speaker
And the pyramid we're talking about here is Ganang Padang in Indonesia, which you may remember is episode one of the ancient apocalypse show by Grand Hancock that aired on Netflix about a year ago. And there's new research out. And first off, Graham Hancock tweeted out or exed out or. Yeah, what do you call them now? They're still tweets, right? He won doubt. He won a musk. He must. Yeah, he must.
00:02:39
Speaker
He must that this pyramid, well he first, he mentioned the pyramid, he said, hey, this is episode one of my show, and the archaeology mafia didn't like it, and then he said now he feels vindicated, and posted an article from Science Alert.
Credibility and Criticism in Archaeology
00:02:55
Speaker
Yeah. Now, this article is from, well, Science Alert mentioned an article that was in a journal called Archaeological Perspective, which is just like a small peer-reviewed journal. Yeah, scientific publications. Yeah, it's fine. Whatever. Nothing about that journal, except for that they let this article through. Yes. Without really solid peer review, it seems like.
00:03:11
Speaker
But anyway, this is from a geologist over in Indonesia and his team. And they've basically come out and saying that this pyramid, based on some of the dates they took from primarily radiocarbon dating, is at least 16,000 years old, which is 10,000 years older than the oldest pyramid in the world, which is allegedly the pyramid of Dozier in Egypt.
00:03:30
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, they're even saying that it could be up to 27,000 years old based on. Yeah. So they're really putting big dates out there. Right. They've got different phases of building. Yeah. And the prehistoric portion of it in their quote says sheds light on the engineering capabilities of ancient civilizations during the Paleolithic era or what's known as the Stone Age.
00:03:51
Speaker
And this is, Graham Hancock's entire ancient apocalypse show was oddly enough, not about aliens, but about an advanced civilization that is now gone, that rose up and is somehow gone now, which I guess, you know,
00:04:08
Speaker
Technically, you can't rule it out 100%, but you can't rule it in unless you find evidence. And the only evidence he has is things like this that say, well, the people 26,000 years ago didn't have the technology to build something like this. And therefore, dot, dot, dot, somebody else did. And they left literally no evidence otherwise of their own presence.
00:04:25
Speaker
Yeah. And like, this is a lot of like reaching too. It's like, it's like taking a hypothesis and trying to force the evidence to fit what you want it to be. The actual pyramid is really a pyramid shaped mound of terrace earth that has shaped stone on it. And it was built on top of an extinct volcano.
00:04:44
Speaker
And we know that it's old. Most estimates put it at just under 2,000 years old. It might be one of the oldest examples of this type of structure on a hill in Indonesia. So that makes it a really important and significant archaeological site. But what they're trying to do, these researchers, is make bigger, grander claims about it and also bring in the geology of the hill and claim that the geology, the shape of it,
00:05:12
Speaker
The terrace scene on it, the natural terrace scene, is not natural. It was built by man. And that's where the problem comes in. And even the thing is, let's say people, because there are definitely people in this area 26,000 years ago. I mean, that's not a joke. That's actual real things. It's not like saying 26,000 years ago in northern hemisphere of the United States, or sorry, North America.
00:05:35
Speaker
Because that's subject to some debate. There's still a lot of conversation there, yeah. But in Indonesia, I mean, we have existence of Java Man came from Indonesia. It did, yeah. Dating back a few hundred thousand years, right? So we know that people have been there for an incredibly long period of time. They've been living there, dying there, making civilization there, and doing all their things. So it's not out of the realm of possibility that they could have built some mound-like structures, put up some dirt together, and done some things. Sure, go ahead. Why not? Yeah.
00:06:04
Speaker
I just, we just don't think the evidence is really there and that really there was some, some solid prehistoric structures, maybe a few thousand years old built on top of this natural formation that maybe could have been terraced or shaped or something like that, but, but almost certainly wasn't built.
00:06:20
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, definitely. So yeah, this Indonesian geologist, Danny Hillman, Nada Wajia, Nada Wijia? Nada Wajaja? Nada Wajaja? I don't know. So another place to get some good information about this is the pseudo-archaeology podcast that Dr.
Incorporating Local Perspectives
00:06:36
Speaker
Andrew Kinkela did. And we'll link to that in the show notes. But he went over this in depth as well. And he pronounced it, Nada.
00:06:42
Speaker
not a with Jaja. So let's go with that. Yes, and he is a doctor. He is a doctor, so you must believe everything he says. He is an archaeologist of note and part of the mafia. And actually, I'm totally joking because you should definitely not always believe people because they have credentials in front of their name, although Andrew's pretty good. Yeah. But yeah, so this Danny fellow, he's an...
00:07:08
Speaker
I'm so skeptical of him. He is a native person, Indonesian person. So I always wanna like, when you have somebody who is native to the area, you always wanna take in their views because sometimes they have a bigger knowledge that people coming in to do the work don't have. Like Native Americans just have a more interesting perspective on archeology in this country than white archeologists do.
00:07:35
Speaker
It's just true, but you do have to draw a line somewhere between what is like fiction and what is fact and what is maybe like a little bit of nationalist pride here too. Like it seems like he kind of just wants Indonesia to like have this crazy old pyramid and look what he did. He made a huge splash with this article. So I mean, I guess he's getting what he wants in that respect.
00:07:55
Speaker
It's like a pilled down man in England, the people, the perpetrators of that, or at least it's estimated, because I don't think the actual person who put it together was ever found. But it was speculated that they wanted to put England on the map as the birthplace of humanity and all of civilization. Right. Yeah. Because that's England. It's like that nationalist pride thing. So nationalism is a really dangerous thing. I mean, not to go into that too much, but really the whole thing is just a really dangerous
00:08:23
Speaker
But one of the things here from their article, first off, the author says that it proves the prehistoric age was not primitive. Again, one thing does not prove that, even if this was all true. Also, primitive is relative. We know that prehistoric peoples were doing some amazing things.
00:08:40
Speaker
The article specifically states that the oldest part of the pyramid are 27,000 to 16,000 years old, based on a number of tests, including electrical resistivity, tomography, that's mapping using electrical resistivity, ground penetrating radar, seismic tomography, another mapping technique, and more sampling and others. And they did some radiocarbon dating and stuff as well. We're not refuting really any of that. What they tested
00:09:06
Speaker
You know, those tests do show things that are that old and can map things at all. We're just not saying what they actually mapped and tested and saw was actually created by humans. Yeah. Like the jury's still out on that. The geology is good, right? Like they tested all these geological
Methodologies and Timelines
00:09:21
Speaker
things and found, made these conclusions and that's all good. But like if you don't have evidence that people were doing things with the things that you're dating,
00:09:31
Speaker
And I guess we can kind of get into that a little bit now because one of the things they're saying is that the reason we can say that there is human activity is because of the building that they did and the terracing. It's just that most archaeologists have looked at that and said, well, it just could be natural the way that that happened. And also there's supposedly like tunnels and caves underneath the hill that they found evidence of using these various techniques. But this is like a volcanic
00:09:57
Speaker
lava tube situation, right? Like where you have these natural holes under the ground that don't mean manmade caves. They just mean volcanic tubes and craters or whatever.
00:10:09
Speaker
Yeah, and the thing that gets me, too, is the lowest part and the oldest part that they're called Unit 3, which was actually exposed by a little bit of a landslide, and they can see that. They say it was constructed during the timeframe of 25,000 to 14,000 years. I mean, what kind of coordinated effort could work over the span of 11,000 years? Yeah, that is so long. That is a long time. I mean, they were hard pressed to build a pyramid in a couple generations, right? I mean, like in Egypt, I mean. Yeah, yeah.
00:10:38
Speaker
I mean, how can you get people to just continuously construct this thing? And if they were so advanced, why did it take 11,000 years to build a hill? Civilizations just do not last for that long. But Cahokia did it in the span of a generation again, too. And Cahokia in the United States here, massive mount, definitely man-made, huge pyramidal structure. And nobody refutes that. And yet, while it was difficult to build, it didn't take 11,000 years. No, it didn't. So that's definitely suspect immediately.
00:11:05
Speaker
And then there was a hiatus apparently for about 6,000, 7,000 years. And then unit three was buried around, after that, around 7,900 to 6,100 BCE. And then a few thousand years later, 6,000 to 5,500 unit two was built. Again, this construction timeframe just makes no sense. Yeah.
00:11:24
Speaker
And then there was another 3,000 year hiatus and then another construction phase. And Unit 2 was actually excavated and then filled between 1393 and 1499 BC. Wait, so they were doing archaeological work on their own lake? That doesn't mean archaeological. I know, I'm joking. Just being dug out. I'm joking. Yeah, reutilized. Now that I believe.
00:11:44
Speaker
Yeah, that's true. I mean, we saw evidence of that in the Parthenon, right, where they were burying and unburying things all the time there. Yeah, why not? And maybe those guys visited Greece and saw the Parthenon and were like, hey, that looks like a good idea. So anyway, it just means that
00:12:00
Speaker
someone had advanced construction techniques before agriculture was adopted is what they're trying to say. That's what they're trying to say. But again, there's no other evidence of that. And why didn't they leave something else around? If they had these advanced construction techniques and stone carving and stuff like that, where's the rest of their stuff? It wasn't all wood and fabric. Where's the rest of their stuff?
00:12:23
Speaker
It's interesting you say that in the Hot Cup of Joe article that we're going to link to, he talks about the one artifact that they do report on and they call it an amulet, right? It's like this round thing and you can see some sort of wavy shapes on it, right? And they call it an amulet.
00:12:41
Speaker
researchers around the world who have been given access to this have looked at that and said, no, no, no, no, no. That's a coin. It's a coin that was made between 1914 and 1945. Here's one in perfect condition. And they even have, he's even got this little like map thing, like lining up the points where it matches. And you can see that the design on this supposedly
00:13:03
Speaker
I think he said like 20 something thousand year old amulet is actually just this coin. So the one, it's again, it's, it's going into this, having a hypothesis, a view, what you want this to be, finding something that is legitimately old. I mean, it's at least 50 years old, if not a hundred, right? And deciding that that fits
00:13:26
Speaker
your many, many, many more thousands of years older idea and just like forcing it into that box. And that's the problem with this research and this study for sure. Yeah. And the only thing that really dated was some charcoal stuff from carbon 14 dating. Yeah.
00:13:42
Speaker
And again, not knowing whether or not that was actually human created or not. But even in the scientific peer-reviewed article that they wrote, they had serious doubts about their own carbon-14 dating. Did they? Yeah. They said that there's a lot of sources of potential contamination. Yeah. They admitted to that. Yeah. And so they're not saying that there wasn't. It's just that that little side bit of, hey, this could be completely wrong.
00:14:06
Speaker
has been forgotten by the media, by Graham Hancock, by anybody who wants to latch onto the fact that they came up with these dates. And for any true scientific research to be validated, somebody else needs to go out there and really kind of just do this study again and validate these results. It does.
00:14:21
Speaker
But you know what? In a lot of scientists like physics, chemistry, that is what people do, especially in physics and chemistry. If somebody says, I'm going to make this huge claim and I'm going to write a paper about this, there are labs around the world jumping at the gun to replicate those results because that's how that research gets verified. But nobody ever verifies archeological research.
00:14:40
Speaker
It's a destructive science. How can you? It's either already been destroyed, like you said, and excavated. So you've got to take their word for it. And there's nothing left. Or it's hard enough to get funding for your own projects, let alone go out and get funding to go do somebody else's work all over again. Yeah, totally. Maybe some grad student will go out there and try to do this all over again and come up with different results. But it's doubtful. Yeah, for sure. It's doubtful we need to continue talking about this.
00:15:04
Speaker
Wait, one more thing. Not to completely throw them under the bus, but the journal that it was published in, Archaeological Perspective, I definitely read that there's another review going on now of this article by either Nature or somehow in combination with Nature. So potentially there'll be a retraction or at least a critique of it published at some point.
00:15:27
Speaker
So that should be coming. And the question now is like, how did this even get through and get published? Because the entire archaeological community has been like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Like, this is not not real archaeological science. So anyway, we'll see how that goes and what shakes out from that. All right. Well, we're going to forget about that and then go rewrite history in Central Europe back in a minute.
00:15:52
Speaker
Welcome back to The Archaeology Show, Episode 244, where we're rewriting pretty much everything we know about archaeology based on three different articles. And this next one is central Europe this time, so we're moving over a little bit.
New Discoveries and Their Implications
00:16:06
Speaker
Nothing ever rewrites human history in the Americas, which is interesting. That's because we're babies over here. I know.
00:16:14
Speaker
So anyway, there was apparently a highly complex prehistoric society that thrived in a region that was thought to be abandoned in 1600 BCE. Yeah. So the people lived here and then it was abandoned and they were like, okay, nobody lives here anymore. But now they found evidence that people did live there and that rewrites all of human history.
00:16:34
Speaker
Well, at least that part of Europe, maybe. Yeah, well, definitely that part of Europe. This claim is a little bit smaller than the other claims, right? Yeah, they did say rewrites history. They did, yeah. Not human history, so I'll give them that credit. So not all of it, potentially, just a little bit of it. Yeah.
00:16:51
Speaker
This was actually reported as one of the major cultural centers of Southern Europe. This area, it apparently had regional scale influences across the continent and into the Mediterranean based on things that have been found here. And this is all in what's called the Pannonian Basin. It's in modern-day Hungary and has influences, again, from multiple nations across Central Europe. This whole area is kind of a crossroads, if you will.
00:17:16
Speaker
There was a Bronze Age society there that was complex and influential, and they lasted centuries before abandoning, quote-unquote, the area in 1600 BCE. And they did it somewhat suddenly, apparently. Right, which is always garbage. Like, why do people actually believe that? Somebody was doing research and excavating out there. Again, probably one person over the course of an academic career or something was in this area.
00:17:43
Speaker
I don't know, they have dates going up to, you know, or at least evidence going up to around 1600 BCE. And then for whatever reason, they haven't found anything else that dates to after 1600 BCE. So then it's like, why was this abandoned? Now, places do experience a collapse when some of the resources or maybe they were all killed by a rival, you know, whatever.
00:18:05
Speaker
You might have evidence of something like that, for sure. But then there are some places where you don't really have the evidence. Like Easter Island, for the longest time, nobody could figure out why they A, built all these heads, and then B, disappeared completely. And well, it's probably because they used up all their trees. But we don't really actually know that.
00:18:22
Speaker
If you want to use words like collapse and abandon, you have to have actual evidence to back up those things happening, like a fire or a war, like you said. But if you don't have the evidence, you have no evidence at all, you can't assume that that's what happened. Like the absence of evidence doesn't prove that that's what happened. It just means we haven't found it yet. There's a great book.
00:18:43
Speaker
that's actually full of garbage by Jared Diamond called Collapse. He wrote Guns, Germs, and Steel, which is probably his most famous book that came out. But then after that, he wrote Collapse and deals with the collapse of civilizations around the world, notably Easter Island, the quote unquote Maya Collapse, which is not a collapse. It's not a collapse. The Roman Empire Collapse, which kind of was a collapse, but again, not really. But not really, because the people aren't gone. They just
00:19:05
Speaker
No, and that's the whole point of all this, is the people are generally still there, but maybe the political organization that was around them and structured did collapse and change. I mean, that does happen. And therefore, that really visual influence that they create all these big things and they do all this stuff, maybe that died out a little bit. But the people are still like, yeah, I'm just going to be beaten maze. They're just living their life. What was that chocolate drink they drink down there? Or was that Peru?
00:19:32
Speaker
In Peru, there's a couple, yeah, I don't know. They're having fun. They're enjoying life. Yeah, they are. And they live in Cancun for Christ's sake. They're just partying it up. I think I just struggle with the word collapse in general because it does make it sound like all of a sudden society ended, everybody died. But that's just not, it's just so much more complicated than that. It's such a simplistic way to look at what happened.
00:19:55
Speaker
Part of this so-called abandonment of this area is supported a little bit by previous research suggesting a regional scale collapse and an abrupt end of the dominance of the area, I guess, culturally, after decades of depopulation. So the fewer and fewer people, and then all of a sudden, it was just unsustainable. So then the current research, though,
00:20:20
Speaker
Again, they're still there. They just kind of adapted to a new normal and intensified their long distance networks and complexity actually. But it almost sounds like what they were trying to say is people weren't necessarily coming through here anymore as this cultural center. They kind of stopped for whatever reason or slowed down and then these guys were just going out and branching out.
00:20:44
Speaker
So there's less evidence of other stuff in that high quantity being here and coming here and showing these large scale influences because they were traveling out and trading at a distance. Yeah, which makes sense because the power, it transitions all the time between places around the world. That's a common pattern. So because it transitioned from one place to another doesn't mean that all of a sudden it collapsed and people were gone. Yeah.
00:21:11
Speaker
One of the lead authors on here says that they knew all along the societies in Europe at this time were interacting at a continental scale. That's one of the things Jared Diamond actually talks about in Guns, Germs, and Steel is the rise of Europe and how it's geologically based and how
00:21:28
Speaker
because of the nature of how it's situated, it made it easy for people to interact with each other. And that's one thing that actually is true. And the researchers knew about material and symbols from the area and that they were influential in Europe. They just didn't know where it all came from, some of these other things. And this changes that, providing somewhat of a missing link. So when they started expanding out their network rather than people coming through here,
00:21:54
Speaker
Again, they just didn't know where all that stuff came from. They've seen evidence of cultures from this area around, but they didn't really know where it came from. And now they've got evidence that it came from here. Yeah, it was probably just dispersed rather than concentrated in one complex or something like that. Interestingly, they identified 100 new prehistoric sites using Google Maps.
00:22:12
Speaker
And you know what, I love maps and sometimes when we get into like a travel binge we're planning, I'll just like look at someplace and then I'll just zoom in real close on the satellite and just kind of scroll around. Yeah, you just kind of start scrolling and all of a sudden I'll be like, what are you doing over there? You're like looking at the mountains nearby or something. I know.
00:22:30
Speaker
But the crappy thing is, I won't know if I'm seeing something that nobody else has seen. Right. Unless you do the research and you say, oh, you know. And you have the map of all previously recorded sites and that kind of stuff in front of you. Yeah, you need the previous research. Yeah, exactly. He was like, oh, this looks interesting, but is it just something everybody knows about or something people don't know about? Just because there's a satellite image of it doesn't mean people know about it. Right. Yeah, satellites are dumb. They just take pictures. Yeah, totally.
00:22:55
Speaker
So, the sites are in an area that encompasses 8,000 square kilometers and the evidence says these small settlements spread out from former centers that were abandoned and it's a shift from intensive to extensive settlement patterns. So, intensive in one spot as opposed to these smaller spots that are, there's more of them spread out around this area.
00:23:18
Speaker
They were harder to find up until now because they're more flat settlements, so to speak, like literally flat, with ditches around them instead of ramparts, which are built up and more easily identified using other methods. Right. You can't visually see them probably as easily from the ground, maybe. Not from the ground, not even from a lower altitude. It takes that satellite imagery to really pull it out. Right.
00:23:39
Speaker
So the satellite imagery that they used to find some of these sites initially, they backed up with random excavation. I mean random sampling on some of those. They also say that climate change in the region could explain some of this. They said it could also be just what was happening and not necessarily a cause, but there was climate change happening.
Climate and Societal Development
00:24:00
Speaker
So they might have just adapted and overcame, but it may not have had an influence on
00:24:06
Speaker
the growth or decline of the society one way or another. Because you don't know, in most cases, we do now because we're aware of it, but we don't know that climate change is happening when it's happening, even on a generational scale. You might think back and say, oh, grandpa said it was really warm here or really cold back in this time, but I don't know.
00:24:24
Speaker
you're just not really aware of it. So what's really new is the way everything fits together to reveal a complex and well organized society. And it seemed to downplay hierarchies too. So just like totally different from what it was before this time. Yeah. The excavations that are revealed that sites
00:24:44
Speaker
that were bigger than others and had management by a smaller group. So there were spaces that not everyone in the community could enter. So they were saying there was just a different sort of political organization, I guess, than previously thought. Oh, yeah. So like government kind of spaces where not everybody's allowed to go, basically. OK, yeah.
00:25:02
Speaker
Yeah. And they noticed in burials too, that there was not very many prestigious burial goods and a lot of them were really similar. It was communism. Well, oh my God. Yeah. They were all wearing gray and they had like bread. It was weird. Yeah. Sure.
00:25:17
Speaker
Yeah. They did conclude that there was a complex political order and not everyone was treated the same, but that this was downplayed and such divisions weren't that important. I'm interested to know how they actually know that. Yeah, me too. Yeah, it was really explained very well. Yeah. And I wonder if, so they found all these new sites by using the aerial images and then I'm sure they were probably looking at previously recorded sites as well and kind of picking out the details from them.
00:25:39
Speaker
When you do this kind of work, I think you have to be very careful to not just pick and choose what you want to see and what fits your hypothesis. Kind of like what we were talking about in the last article, although I am in no way comparing them because this seems like it's good science and it is really truly helping fill in a picture in an area where we didn't have one before. However,
00:25:57
Speaker
It would be interesting to know how much of what they were taking from these previously recorded sites and from the new sites they found, how much is actually fitting this image and how much doesn't fit. And they sort of set it over here for later analysis maybe, I don't know.
00:26:17
Speaker
All right. Well, now that we've rewritten the history of Europe or at least Central Europe, we're going to go down to Spain and challenge some archaeological assumptions.
Gender Roles in Ancient Societies
00:26:25
Speaker
And, you know, they didn't say this in the article, but we're going to possibly see the 3000 plus year old history of the LGBTQ plus community. Oh, nice.
00:26:35
Speaker
Welcome back to the archaeology show where we are rewriting human history for episode 244. This article is kind of rewriting human history, more like human assumptions of what, it's more like rewriting modern assumptions of what people were and weren't in the past based on. Which is, I feel, what literally every article does. Yeah, true. It presents new evidence and rewrites everything. So isn't archaeology like always rewriting something? Always. Like every article.
00:27:05
Speaker
You know the thing about archaeology is I think some of the people who are a little bit archaeology adjacent like Graham Hancock and try to say there's the archaeology mafia and things rigid and we all believe this it does seem that way when you write a textbook that says this this this and this happened in the archaeological record right you never really say maybe could have I think it did you just say based on the evidence this is what happened
00:27:30
Speaker
And then we have no problem saying when new evidence shows up, OK, based on the evidence, now this is what happened. You just don't have a problem doing that. But literally, the rest of the world does have a problem, because they're used to things that are more hard sciences. When the Large Hadron Collider finds a new particle, that's not up. Maybe we found a new particle. No, that is a new particle. And you can replicate that result.
00:27:51
Speaker
And there's examples of this in non-archaeological sciences, like Pluto, I think is a really good example. Like the public would not let go of Pluto being a planet, right? It's because most people grew up with Pluto being a planet. You grew up that way and you just did not want to stop saying that there were nine planets and Pluto was the
00:28:07
Speaker
Smallest one, you know, it is a planet again though, isn't it? I don't know. I don't even know. I'm with the other grass Tyson though. He's the one that actually came out and said it's actually not a planet. And the fact that it was even called a planet before was made by definitions that people assigned to the word planet and all astrophysicists did was they basically tightened up their definitions a little bit and Pluto no longer fit the definition of a full fledged plan. Exactly. You know, so it's just, it was an arbitrary designation to begin with.
00:28:38
Speaker
I feel like that kind of stuff happens in archeology all the time too because a lot of times you're just making, you're just drawing conclusions based on what you have in front of you and then you have new stuff in front of you and you have to change the conclusions, change the parameters sometimes. That's just science, it is what it is, Graham.
00:28:58
Speaker
Well, let's talk about a little bit of gender fluidity in southwest Spain. So this was a 3,000-year-old funerary stone slab that was found. And again, it's challenging, longstanding interpretations of gender and social roles in ancient societies, and specifically around here because, well, first off,
00:29:16
Speaker
the article says in ancient societies and I'm like all ancient societies or just like right here, right? Well, yeah. I mean, you can only apply it to the, the culture that this is found in specifically, but it's difficult to apply it elsewhere. I would say it should make you think if you're not already doing that about your assumptions in other places, but you definitely should. And that's what gets archeologists in trouble is when you again, go in with an idea and don't think outside of your assumptions or the box or whatever. So yeah.
00:29:44
Speaker
Well, these stone slabs are called stele. Generally, anything that's like a long, tall stone slab, whether it's standing or laying down, it's called a stele. I'm not really sure where that word comes from. I don't know the origin either, yeah. I think it's Latin, but I'm not really sure. Anyway, they're common in cultures all over the place, including Egypt and Central America. I mean, everybody's taken long pieces of stone and carved on them. Well, they get gravestone be considered a stele, kind of? I guess technically it would be. Kind of, right? But since that has
00:30:12
Speaker
more of a defined purpose. It does. We call them headstones or gravestones. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So there's also footstones too. Would those be stelae? I don't know. Maybe. Yeah. I don't know. Anyway, often stelae are gravestones, as they say in the article, and they're usually decorated with engravings, text, and often painted as well. And sometimes they depict important people. So there's an actual figure carved onto the stelae.
00:30:38
Speaker
This one was found in the burial complex of Las Campayanas. In Canaveral de Leon. That's what the area is. And it includes engraving of a human figure with a detailed face, hands and feet. And the person has a headdress, necklaces. Okay, great. Maybe a lady, right? And also two swords. What is going on here?
00:31:06
Speaker
Ladies can't have swords. Ladies can't have swords. Guys, come on. And it was found by Durham University archaeologist Dr. Marta Diaz-Gordamino. Does that trigger you a little bit, Durham University?
00:31:21
Speaker
No, Durham is a place. Duke is a university that I hated. So, because I went to Chapel Hill. I hated all universities in the triangle there that weren't Chapel Hill. No, we did not. Honestly, it's been so long since I was in college. I don't have any hate for anybody at this point. So, apparently, we used to think that Coelade depicting the headdress and necklace would represent a female, like I was just joking about. And then weapons, of course, would be assumed to be male.
00:31:45
Speaker
But you know, not always true, right? The figure on the stelae has clear male genitalia. So there you go. Not always true.
00:31:56
Speaker
And I was kind of making the joke about the whole LGBTQ plus thing. But you know, honestly, gender fluidity has probably been a thing for a long time in many, many cultures. We just have different terms for it these days and people identifying as something or maybe even not even identifying as something other than what they were born or what their genitals say they should be.
00:32:21
Speaker
I think there was, in a lot of cultures in the past, there was probably a lot less stigma around women doing one thing, men doing another thing, a man wearing a headdress, for example, or having some sort of female garments on or something like that. Maybe in some of these cultures, there just wasn't that stigma against you. That hard line. Yeah, you have to wear this and you have to wear that if you're a man or a woman.
00:32:44
Speaker
that hard separation between what women did and what men did, that's definitely possible. I think another thing that's interesting too, and I just heard a podcast about this, the roots of the trans, not the trans movement, but just trans people in history. And it goes back so much further than you would think it does. There are many people who have
00:33:07
Speaker
who were born and didn't feel like they belonged to the sex that they were born into, and they chose to live their life in the opposite sex. So the story I heard was about a person who was born a woman and lived their entire life as a man, because that's how they felt. And that was 150 years ago that this article was talking about, or maybe not quite that long, maybe 100 years ago.
00:33:30
Speaker
But either way, we know that that happened in the past, and that very well could have been what this person was, you know? Like maybe it's an early example of a trans man, or like you're saying, maybe it's more of a less emphasis on what men could wear and what women could wear. So who knows? Who knows? All right. Well, with that, we're going to go erase the entire back catalog of this podcast because we've
Conclusion and Reflection
00:33:52
Speaker
rewritten history. Oh, we just rewrote it. Yes.
00:33:56
Speaker
We got 243 other episodes to record. Does that mean we're going to rewrite it every time and there's only ever going to be one episode of this podcast available? Every episode of this podcast will be episode one. Oh, man. Yeah, well, that's what we do. We rewrite things. Indeed. All right, well, we're going to rewrite ourselves out of this podcast right now. So that was terrible. That was awful. OK, we'll see you next week. Bye.
00:34:26
Speaker
Thanks for listening to The Archaeology Show. Feel free to comment and view the show notes on the website at www.arcpodnet.com. Find us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at arcpodnet. Music for this show is called, I Wish You Would Look, from the band C Hero. Again, thanks for listening and have an awesome day.
00:34:50
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Cultural Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Rachel Rodin. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archapodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.