"Question: how can archaeologists translate ancient scriptures or languages? Answer: ‘It’s basically a giant jigsaw puzzle.’ "
Does the author actually think this is a good answer? I don't see how it tells you anything at all.
Why would you conclude that the author thinks this is a good answer vs. just an answer to help the reader understand the subreddit?
With that said, it does tell you something if you’re open to it. To me, it says: “there are a lot of pieces (often literally), and an archaeologist has to put those pieces together”. Is it an oversimplification? Of course. But remember the age the answer is supposed to target.
A family member of mine works in the space academically, and they really have giant catalogues with pictures of fragments, and they experiment with different arrangements and what they would mean to their translation efforts. Unfortunately I don't have a link. :/
EDIT: a random CS paper that talks about automated solutions to the pure assembly part of this (without the text translation): https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.10553
“It’s like a puzzle” at least tells me there are a bunch of pieces to assemble, and gives me some insight and a basic mental model to start with.
> It's basically a giant jigsaw puzzle.
> You find some rock that has the same text in two languages (the rosetta stone for example helped decipher old egyptian)
> Then you read more and more texts and reconstruct new words from context. Often you have multiple possible interpretations but then new texts are found and you can improve your old assumptions with a new context.
https://old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/myt3dc/e...