Archaeologists do it in holes: Tales from the stratigraphy

[Maladict]

Yeah and if we dug up Athens without knowing anything else about it and found the Parthenon with the huge statue of Athena in it we might also think ancient Athens had progressive social values.

If we dug up Athens without anything else, we wouldn't know about the statue at all 

[Valmy]

There are still big statues of women up there.

But anyway in this hypothetical situation Ancient Athens got buried and we forgot about it.

[crazy canuck]

This discussion would be so much better if people actually read the article that was linked.

[The Brain]

What earlier finds related to the El Argar society made people think that men exclusively exercised state power?

[Valmy]

This discussion would be so much better if people actually read the article that was linked.

It just wouldn't be a discussion about an article without CC completely baselessly claiming nobody read it.

Does this kind of nonsense make a conversation better? I guess you think so since you never get tired of saying it.

[crazy canuck]

This discussion would be so much better if people actually read the article that was linked.

It just wouldn't be a discussion about an article without CC completely baselessly claiming nobody read it.

Does this kind of nonsense make a conversation better? I guess you think so since you never get tired of saying it.

The fact nobody has referred to anything in the article was the basis upon which a reasonable inference can be drawn.  Combine that with a track record of those involved not reading links and just making comments based on their own limited knowledge and the basis for the inference becomes that much stronger.

[viper37]

Yeah and if we dug up Athens without knowing anything else about it and found the Parthenon with the huge statue of Athena in it we might also think ancient Athens had progressive social values.

the Nat Geo text is much more detailed, with some criticism on the theory that it was a women-ruled society.

However, so far, of the tombs they recovered, all females tombs were richly decorated compared to the male ones.  It's evidence, but not definite proof until they find more about this society.

@Tyr:Somewhere else, I read that there was evidence that ancient European cultures were matriarchal and it only changed after the invasion from steppe-originating cultures.  So yeah, it's nothing new, really, just something a lot more specific to a very specific region.

[Valmy]

Yeah I am not saying it is not wrong, and in fact that is the orthodoxy I was always taught, I just wish we had better evidence than archeological evidence as that can be misleading without more context. But sometimes it is all we got.

[Malthus]

Reminds me of the "Motel of the Mysteries". That's a book about future archeologists uncovering a perfectly preserved motel room from the 20th century, and making plausible sounding but totally wrong interpretations of everything they find inside. 😉

[HVC]

Reminds me of the "Motel of the Mysteries". That's a book about future archeologists uncovering a perfectly preserved motel room from the 20th century, and making plausible sounding but totally wrong interpretations of everything they find inside. 😉

everything has a religious or spiritual connotation. This was shamans medicinal pouch which he used to commune with nature. Nope, that's jerry's shroom bag. he just liked to get high.

[Legbiter]

Reminds me of the "Motel of the Mysteries". That's a book about future archeologists uncovering a perfectly preserved motel room from the 20th century, and making plausible sounding but totally wrong interpretations of everything they find inside. 😉

Yeah.

Although since 2010 there's been a revolution in ancient genomic research with wholesale sequencing of entire genomes from various ancient cemeteries giving us excellent snapshots of the various migrations into Europe in the last 14000 years. Modern European populations seem to be 3 way hybrids between the old hunter-gatherers, the first Neolithic farmers moving out of Anatolia and lastly the massive steppe migration of the Yamna proto-Indo-Europeans.

Iberia is interesting because it seems there was a massive turnover of Y chromosome lineages, almost 100% of the old Copper Age male lineages went extinct around 2500-2000 BC.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/363/6432/1230

[Maladict]

Reminds me of the "Motel of the Mysteries". That's a book about future archeologists uncovering a perfectly preserved motel room from the 20th century, and making plausible sounding but totally wrong interpretations of everything they find inside. 😉

It's the running joke among archaeologists, labeling anything not instantly recognizable as religious/ceremonial.

[grumbler]

Reminds me of the "Motel of the Mysteries". That's a book about future archeologists uncovering a perfectly preserved motel room from the 20th century, and making plausible sounding but totally wrong interpretations of everything they find inside. 😉

The Sacred Headband with the mysterious message "Sanitized for your protection."

[Maladict]

Cool video on the Antikythera device, and the latest research.

https://vimeo.com/518734183

[PDH]

Having read the articles posted, and having not jumped in earlier, I have to say I am not totally impressed by the Iberian findings pointing to a society governed by women.  The big problem, as others have pointed out since, lies with the cultural elements given the the physical remains.  There does seem to be (at least among the elites) a definite gender differentiation in the types of ornamentations: The women more decorative/fancy, the men more practical and possibly warlike.  The assertion that the men are buried without "symbolic objects" is quite a statement, especially since such meaning was given to what types of things males and females were given in burials and we really don't know the symbolism involved.

It seems a common theme that even societies without gender stratification (think here the smallest scale examples that had been studied), there is gender differentiation of roles - women's roles and men's roles.  As societal complexity increases, these can and do lead to symbolism being placed on the roles as they get more formalized - often thought by some to be the roots of stratification.  However, even some fairly complex societies showed a more level approach to gender ranking than what happened in the Middle East and the Far East.

Having a society from 4 kya that displayed gender differentiation of burial goods is not terribly surprising, and the fact that these seem fairly rigid also is not too unusual.  What is unusual is the leap to the notion of Women ruling and Men enforcing the rules.  Without more links to the group, saying such things as the men's burial items are not "symbolic objects" signifying rulership is a bit of a stretch.

Just as Maladict's jokes about any unknown being labled as religious - so too other things are interpreted through a cultural lens too often.  This society could well have been Matrilineal (tracing ancestry through the female line), and far less gender-stratified than others given the amount and division of burial goods, but other ideas may well tread into leaps of faith rather than those supported by the evidence.