The importance of setting order to “place, dates, sizes and shapes” is essential for cultural identification and for the greater sake of interpreting their stories. Those who start with this order and work towards creating a fictional past have no true facts that give reason to such artifacts mainly because humankind hasn’t given reason to why they came about to begin with. This made me wonder which came first, the functional craft or the unfunctional expression. Each school has their own strengths and yet none without the other. Gregory Curtis paints a French author and pre-historian by the name of Annette Laming-Emperaire in circles as “everything that came before leads directly to her; everything that came afterward proceeds directly from her” (Curtis 139) like her Paleolithic study and the reflection of her life. When comparing ethnographies from Laming-Emperaire and another pre-historian, Max Raphael, it was noted that ethnographies were going through a “continuous process of transformation” (Curtis 140) as the cultures they identified. The impact in which artifacts have in the world can be deciphered in two ways from their current reflection of time or from the perspectives of the artist’s period. Each point needs a beginning in which archaeology has no solid answers for because there is always more to uncover.
When I was younger, my sister and I would play this game when we were bored, waiting and people-watching. We would start with a series of events that would give reason to why that person we were looking at was there. Eventually, we would lead into a mad-libbed stream of their thoughts or ridiculous conversation that would normally end with stitches in our sides. The stories never fit the people’s actual words, but from our perspective they fit what we wanted to hear. Creating possible explanations and orders for artifacts would be a lot easier than creating artifacts from orders because by process of elimination, this makes most sense to me. Although there is no sure sense with any suggested story, the possibilities all lead to the same object or point in time.
People do tend to attach their own view to the unknown. I suppose it's easy for us to use our own thoughts and orthodoxy as a reference point so when looking at mysterious objects out of context it almost is natural to give the object false/temporary context to make it easier to relate to. I like your example about you and your sister.
ReplyDelete"Impact in which artifacts have in the world can be deciphered in two ways from their current reflection of time or from the perspectives of the artist’s period."
ReplyDeletelol, it seems as half the work of anthropologist are identifying and 'correcting" the explanations of others! did you ever analyze the stories you guys made up to explain the situation and try to see from what part of your thoughts/current life situation it related back to?