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| August 26, 2001 02:52PM |
<HTML>Avry wrote:
1. 'Pottery analysis, a staple in archaeological analysis' is a mode of dating bordering on wishful thinking. Style or firing properties can easily be attributed to the level of expertise of an individual artist in any age of history, and cannot possibly tell the age of the pottery. This 'Petrie' method should, for the sake of honing archaeological science, be dropped once and for all. It is useless.
My reply:
This will come as a shock to archaeologists, who have been successfully dating sites with pottery (again, just ONE method among many) for over 150 years. What is remarkable is how this "useless" method has been so successful, how new sites in various cultural spheres yield the same respective pottery styles in the same chronological contexts (as determined by any of the other dating methods in the nexus) again and again and again. How, essentially, pottery-analysis has been verified in this predictive sense: once a style has been found in assocation with absolutely dated material, it is found in other places with other absolutely dated material and, guess what? The dates are in the same range at all the other places that pottery shows up.
By the way, so far no 10,000 BC pottery, or C-14 dates or anything whatsovever, for that matter from Tiwanaku.
It strikes me as remarkable how often tried and trusted methods in archaeology are blanket-dismissed by the alternatives and their mouthpieces. It seems to me you have to do a lot more than just assert pottery-dating useless for it to be so. I dare say one or two ceramic experts might object, as well.
In any case, I'll take the ceramic evidence over what the alternatives have to offer from Tiwanaku to support there case: nothing at all.
Avry wrote:
2. With admitted statments such as
"The interpretation of this distribution is unclear..."
"Further work may help..."
"The collapse of the Tiwanaku state is also something of a mystery..."
"Thus, our state of knowledge about Tiwanaku is pretty good, but not perfect."
...how can Prof. Fagan make any kind of substantial counter? Sure, Mr Hancock (and/or others) may well be wrong, but what kind of alternative power does the archaeological unsurity provide?
The above quips were summed up later by Prof. Fagan with:
"This is a situation entirely typical of "conventional" archaeological investigations..."
Agreed. It most certainly is typical. Archaeology may draw on multiple resources, but to state the conclusions as anything less than conjecture is foolhearty. It is 'best guess' only, given what they know, but what they know comes from mostly unbalanced data. Look at pottery dating; chronological dating(piecing together written accounts); and C14. Of these, although the better of the three, C14 is not without error parameters. As noted, C14, even if it does give a range of +/-200 (or 400, or even 1000) years, this is extremely distant from 10,000yrs. So on this latter point, I'll agree that Tiahuanico is not this old, regardless of other dating techniques or proposed astronomical 'alignments'.
It's not so much that I am rebutting Prof Fagan argument v Mr Hancock, but more to the point of questioning archaeology. I'll continue in that vein in the next point.
My reply:
Avry falls into the same trap so many do: because archaeologists don't know <i>everything</i> they know <i>nothing</i>. I think my statements in the article are honest and self-explanatory and, in conjunction with what I woite in the "three Principles" piece, their meaning should be clear to any reader. In all cases, new evidence may force a revision of a prior conclusion. It is wise to admit this and not to speak in absolutes. Avry tries to present this a weakness of the discipline. I see it a strength of archaeology. It is always willing to change in the face of new data.
However, Avry resorts to an old alternative rhetorical trick that equates an historical hypothesis with a "guess" or "conjecture"(Hancock prefers "opinion"). But all conjectures are not alike. There is a world of difference between between a baseless conjecture (such as Hancock's, founded in no evidence but on outmoded "theorizing" almost a century old) and one based in the evidence at hand. Rhetorical sleight-of-hand can't change that fact.
Avry wrote:
3. "In the case of Tiwanaku, one possibility is that a famine induced by drought crippled the irrigation system and led to internal turmoil."
Hmm. Based on....what?
My reply:
Based on an analysis of the evidence at hand (can you believe it?): the presence of the irrigation system that was evidently the bulwark of intensive settlement in the region (no such is possible under current, non-irrigated conditions), climatological analysis that suggests a protracted drought in the region ca. AD 1100, known parallels where famine/plague leads to social and political upheaval, and so on. It's a hypothesis, Avry, based on the evidence and trying to make sense of it. It wasn't pulled out David Copperfield's hat, if that's what you're suggesting.
Avry wrote:
Sure, Prof Fagan followed with, "More work is needed to test this hypothesis, however," then I ask, how can such a hypothesis be made in the first place? Intuition? A 'feeling' for possible political, social, or environmental change? Isn't this the same mode he levels against the accused?
My reply:
See above. Far more than "feelings" are involved. (Nice try, by the way
).
Avry wrote:
By the way, and speaking of not checking all the possible resources, why didn't Prof. Fagan mention the problems encountered with the C14 samples from Tiahuanico, how they were handled, where they were sent, the condition of the labs, the errors made in the log books (more clerical than the data itself), and that the re-calibration efforts have yet to be fully administered to the data? Not to mention reporting how long ago these samples were taken.
Uh hunh. But accuse another of not digging up and presenting a contextual argument? Hmm.
My reply:
The C-14 evidence is fully covered in my C-14 articles on this site. They were taken in three phases ranging from the 1950s to the 1990s. That's three separate excavation campaigns, conducted by different people and using ever more sophisticated techniques. Yet the C-14 dates (themselves analyzed with ever more sophisticated techniques) came out to the same time periods. Remarkable, isn't it? Independent confirmation from three digging campaigns, three sets of C-14 material, three sets of tests. Same date ranges. (Nothing from 10,000 BC, by the way.)
In any case, I gave full reference in my C-14 articles to the publication that discusses all the issues pertaining to these samples. The dates are reliable, however. I aks Avry to please provide bibliographic references or links to the documentation of the problems so profound as to require abandoning them altogether.
Garrett</HTML>
1. 'Pottery analysis, a staple in archaeological analysis' is a mode of dating bordering on wishful thinking. Style or firing properties can easily be attributed to the level of expertise of an individual artist in any age of history, and cannot possibly tell the age of the pottery. This 'Petrie' method should, for the sake of honing archaeological science, be dropped once and for all. It is useless.
My reply:
This will come as a shock to archaeologists, who have been successfully dating sites with pottery (again, just ONE method among many) for over 150 years. What is remarkable is how this "useless" method has been so successful, how new sites in various cultural spheres yield the same respective pottery styles in the same chronological contexts (as determined by any of the other dating methods in the nexus) again and again and again. How, essentially, pottery-analysis has been verified in this predictive sense: once a style has been found in assocation with absolutely dated material, it is found in other places with other absolutely dated material and, guess what? The dates are in the same range at all the other places that pottery shows up.
By the way, so far no 10,000 BC pottery, or C-14 dates or anything whatsovever, for that matter from Tiwanaku.
It strikes me as remarkable how often tried and trusted methods in archaeology are blanket-dismissed by the alternatives and their mouthpieces. It seems to me you have to do a lot more than just assert pottery-dating useless for it to be so. I dare say one or two ceramic experts might object, as well.
In any case, I'll take the ceramic evidence over what the alternatives have to offer from Tiwanaku to support there case: nothing at all.
Avry wrote:
2. With admitted statments such as
"The interpretation of this distribution is unclear..."
"Further work may help..."
"The collapse of the Tiwanaku state is also something of a mystery..."
"Thus, our state of knowledge about Tiwanaku is pretty good, but not perfect."
...how can Prof. Fagan make any kind of substantial counter? Sure, Mr Hancock (and/or others) may well be wrong, but what kind of alternative power does the archaeological unsurity provide?
The above quips were summed up later by Prof. Fagan with:
"This is a situation entirely typical of "conventional" archaeological investigations..."
Agreed. It most certainly is typical. Archaeology may draw on multiple resources, but to state the conclusions as anything less than conjecture is foolhearty. It is 'best guess' only, given what they know, but what they know comes from mostly unbalanced data. Look at pottery dating; chronological dating(piecing together written accounts); and C14. Of these, although the better of the three, C14 is not without error parameters. As noted, C14, even if it does give a range of +/-200 (or 400, or even 1000) years, this is extremely distant from 10,000yrs. So on this latter point, I'll agree that Tiahuanico is not this old, regardless of other dating techniques or proposed astronomical 'alignments'.
It's not so much that I am rebutting Prof Fagan argument v Mr Hancock, but more to the point of questioning archaeology. I'll continue in that vein in the next point.
My reply:
Avry falls into the same trap so many do: because archaeologists don't know <i>everything</i> they know <i>nothing</i>. I think my statements in the article are honest and self-explanatory and, in conjunction with what I woite in the "three Principles" piece, their meaning should be clear to any reader. In all cases, new evidence may force a revision of a prior conclusion. It is wise to admit this and not to speak in absolutes. Avry tries to present this a weakness of the discipline. I see it a strength of archaeology. It is always willing to change in the face of new data.
However, Avry resorts to an old alternative rhetorical trick that equates an historical hypothesis with a "guess" or "conjecture"(Hancock prefers "opinion"). But all conjectures are not alike. There is a world of difference between between a baseless conjecture (such as Hancock's, founded in no evidence but on outmoded "theorizing" almost a century old) and one based in the evidence at hand. Rhetorical sleight-of-hand can't change that fact.
Avry wrote:
3. "In the case of Tiwanaku, one possibility is that a famine induced by drought crippled the irrigation system and led to internal turmoil."
Hmm. Based on....what?
My reply:
Based on an analysis of the evidence at hand (can you believe it?): the presence of the irrigation system that was evidently the bulwark of intensive settlement in the region (no such is possible under current, non-irrigated conditions), climatological analysis that suggests a protracted drought in the region ca. AD 1100, known parallels where famine/plague leads to social and political upheaval, and so on. It's a hypothesis, Avry, based on the evidence and trying to make sense of it. It wasn't pulled out David Copperfield's hat, if that's what you're suggesting.
Avry wrote:
Sure, Prof Fagan followed with, "More work is needed to test this hypothesis, however," then I ask, how can such a hypothesis be made in the first place? Intuition? A 'feeling' for possible political, social, or environmental change? Isn't this the same mode he levels against the accused?
My reply:
See above. Far more than "feelings" are involved. (Nice try, by the way
).Avry wrote:
By the way, and speaking of not checking all the possible resources, why didn't Prof. Fagan mention the problems encountered with the C14 samples from Tiahuanico, how they were handled, where they were sent, the condition of the labs, the errors made in the log books (more clerical than the data itself), and that the re-calibration efforts have yet to be fully administered to the data? Not to mention reporting how long ago these samples were taken.
Uh hunh. But accuse another of not digging up and presenting a contextual argument? Hmm.
My reply:
The C-14 evidence is fully covered in my C-14 articles on this site. They were taken in three phases ranging from the 1950s to the 1990s. That's three separate excavation campaigns, conducted by different people and using ever more sophisticated techniques. Yet the C-14 dates (themselves analyzed with ever more sophisticated techniques) came out to the same time periods. Remarkable, isn't it? Independent confirmation from three digging campaigns, three sets of C-14 material, three sets of tests. Same date ranges. (Nothing from 10,000 BC, by the way.)
In any case, I gave full reference in my C-14 articles to the publication that discusses all the issues pertaining to these samples. The dates are reliable, however. I aks Avry to please provide bibliographic references or links to the documentation of the problems so profound as to require abandoning them altogether.
Garrett</HTML>
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