Hacker News Reader

Comment by AlbertCory | Hacker News Reader

The ideology of this piece is overwhelming.

> ‘Prehistory’, like so many categories that we use to frame the past, is not only a convenient label, but a deeply problematic inheritance.

I'm all for learning everything we can from unwritten sources. The problem is that they're unwritten. Tools, coins, ruins ... all those survive and can be analyzed. But what you notice from the analyses of those is: they're pretty tenuous. Writers make inferences that are, well, open to question, but it's all they can do.

As for "oral cultures" : yes, absolutely, if they survive. But AFAIK no Native American culture has any legend on how they came over from Siberia, nor do Australian aborigines "remember" how they migrated from Asia and Indonesia. Yet we know that they did.

View on HN

> But what you notice from the analyses of those is: they're pretty tenuous.

Why do you think this is any less applicable to literary analysis? How many centuries of biblical scholarship was done under the assumption of mosaic authorship?

Different types of sources simply have different characteristics. You use what's useful for the questions you're researching, you don't need to privilege one as "the true history".

You must have missed that I didn't say other forms of history were NOT tenuous. But they're not all equal, either.

> You use what's useful for the questions you're researching

indeed. However, usefulness depends on how reliable that particular piece of evidence is.

The idea of "equality" doesn't really apply here. They're simply different kinds of data. If you want to research ancient near eastern "Social history" (term of art), looking at stelae and king lists is not going to be particularly helpful. If you want to look at classical pan-hellenic identity, looking at the primarily attic corpus we have today is again not the best source of information.

Material culture is often significantly less affected by these innate, unavoidable authorship biases because it's typically looking at the unconscious habits of statistically significant numbers of people.

You specifically called out the issue of researcher interpretation though. Although the mosaic authorship issue illustrates how severe this problem is in literary analysis, it is a fundamental issue in archaeological work as well. You might not know this, but there was a movement in archaeology to completely eliminate any need for "interpretation" called processualism. This movement is generally considered a failure today, in large part because it was realized that the issue of interpretation is fundamental to all historical research. It's not a "better or worse", it's "every type of source will have all the same issues and we have no choice but to confront them". Modern archaeologists are generally two generations beyond this into a sort of ambiguous modern synthesis, to borrow the term from biology.

You clearly know more about this than I do. I have a generally low opinion of "modern" approaches that care more about "equity" than "truth." So maybe we should just stop here.

Note that you are quoting one of the five mini articles contained, and it’s worth reading the rest, although I generally agree with you here

the fact that I didn't quote something from each of the five doesn't mean I didn't read them.

sometimes scientists can do isotopic analyses on teeth to see what foods people were eating, or show that a particular material had to have been imported from far away. The Bronze Age relied on tin, which was only found in a few places. All those facts from "pre-history" are really valuable. But some of it does seem to be "collective imagination," as someone else here called it.

To say "tenuous" is to wildly understate the problems.

IMO, history is tenuous - even recent history. 'Prehistory' is just an act of collective imagination from licensed historians.

I think it's not even just 'recent history' - it's current reality (let the whinging about Continental Philosophy commence).

The past decade has taught me that Robert Anton Wilson's "reality tunnels" is a very real phenomenon and far more powerful an explanation of the "reality" of the (socially constructed) world that I would grow up in than I ever suspected.

Yes. The socially constructed world is not the actual, personally-experienced world. The stories you believe determine the reality you can consider.

Yup. "an act of collective imagination" describes it pretty well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com