Right Wing Nation

During the summer between my junior and senior years in high school, I attended an archaeology field school at one of the state universities. Every morning, we left the dorm before the sun came up, and got to the site around sunrise. The work was grueling and lasted all day. We got home in the early evening, ate supper, and worked several hours in the lab. There was nothing romantic about it, but it was fascinating. And that’s how I decided my major, before I even got to college.

As I stated before, the department was rather a rude awakening. The problem was that I was never a compliant student. I was that kid in class who wanted you to defend your statements, if I didn’t see how you got there. It makes for a good PhD student, but it’s not the best plan for an undergraduate, as I found.

I worked in the archaeology lab, and that’s where I first got myself into trouble. For the hundredth time, this pompous ass grad student who led the tours brought everybody past the stone axe in the case and said, “Here we have a ceremonial axe.” I’d heard it many times, and kept my mouth shut, but this time I couldn’t.

Here’s the problem. If it neighs, whinnies, shies, and gallops, you assume it’s a horse, unless you have some good reason to assume it’s a zebra. It neighed. It whinnied. It shied. It galloped. So I wanted to know why this pompous ass with the poofy hairdo was calling it a zebra.

“Why ceremonial?”

“What?”

“You keep saying it’s a ceremonial axe. What evidence do you have that it was a ceremonial axe, instead of, you know, an axe.”

“Er, that’s really not relevant.”

Of course, I could have shut my mouth, but I never do. I kept pushing.

“The identity and function of the object in the collection isn’t relevant?”

Anyway, my job at the lab was not to last long. I ended up working in the bioanthropology lab, working with teeny tiny bone fragments. Measuring them, identifying marks and pathologies, sexing them where possible, cataloguing them.

My point, of course, is that these people assume it’s a zebra because that fits their agenda, their pre-conceived notion of the way things were at the time, a notion they often assume with little (if any) real evidence. To their credit, when confronted with unassailable evidence to the contrary that they cannot ignore, most will grudgingly accept it (though there are still people who insist that the Tasaday were not a hoax). So the Austrian and German archaeologists were forced to admit that Ötzi was actually murdered (not violence, not in the in touch with nature neolithic!) when they found that arrowhead in his back.

Yet, they are not capable of learning from their mistakes. The agenda has not changed. They only shift the details to fit whatever inconvenient evidence may have popped up. The new explanation of the neolithic, now that we know at least one person at the time was murdered, is that because people were developing agriculture for the first time, we had the first private property, and poor starving people just had to kill other people for their food. The same Marxist tripe, and the same lack of evidence.

1. We have no evidence that pre-agricultural societies did not have the concept of private property. This is an assumption, based on nothing whatsoever, that anthropologists have cooked up again to further an agenda.
2. We have no evidence that murders did not happen in pre-agricultural societies, or that the frequency of murder increased from then to agricultural societies.
3. Even if we did have evidence that the frequency of murder increased as societies became agricultural (and it likely did, given the difference between violent crime rates in areas of different population densities today), there is no reason to assume that private property was the cause, particularly when the rise of agriculture was accompanied by larger communities and the rise of urban centers, specialized trades, massive building projects, and so forth.

So we have one more “fact” that is nothing more than pure speculation, one that isn’t even based on bad evidence, but no evidence. None. Nothing more than more academic moonbattery masquerading as knowledge.

Then, we started finding those fertility figurines in Europe, and the “matriarchal, in touch with Mother Nature, peaceful, loving, Goddess worshipping” Europe was born, a Europe that was overrun by those awful, bloodthirty, patriarchal, murdering, serial raping, penis waving, Indo-Europeans. Once again, they were assuming a zebra.

The figurines were just that: Figurines. They were poorly made compared to other objects of the same period, as if the crafter put little time or care into them. I don’t know about you, but that does not indicate to me that they were some sort of Mother Goddess idols, or that they were even very highly valued. And even if they were, the presence of a goddess does not in any way imply any of this feminonsense; after all, lots of patriarchal cultures had goddesses, the Greeks, for example. Then, the really ultra-moonbat types, such as Marija Gimbutas, started pointing to paintings of priestesses at Minos, and saying, “See! Mother Goddess worship! Matriarchy! Peace! Love! Social Justice! For the chil-dern! Long live Karl Marx! Revolution now! Abortion on demand! Angela Davis for President!”

Well duh. Okay, so how does the presence of priestesses imply all this feminonsense? Answer: It doesn’t. But nearly everybody in the field started drinking that Starhawk kool-aid.

One more time: If it neighs, whinnies, shies, and gallops, you assume it’s a horse, unless you have some good reason to assume it’s a zebra. Roughly made, pregnant figurines tell you nothing, other than there were pregnant figurines, and that they were poorly made. There is nothing to be “learned” from them. Nothing.

An axe is a weapon, unless you can use hard evidence to prove that it is not.

The other thing anthropologists either have conveniently forgotten or conveniently ignore is a basic principle of science: A lack of evidence for X is not evidence against X. Forgetting this is often a convenient way to keep one’s silly ideas even when over and over again, the evidence has shown otherwise.

Take as an example Caral, in Peru. Peru has a particularly violent cultural history, which archaeologists have had to admit time and time again, and each time, immediately forget. Caral is perhaps the oldest urban center found in the New World, dating to 3000 BC.

Caral is unusual in that the urban center pre-dates the development of ceramics. There is not a single pottery shard to be found. There is also an unusual lack of art. None. Yet, because there are no artistic representations of prisoners being mutilated as there are in other Peruvian sites, archaeologists now claim that Caral was a peaceful, in tune with Nature, hippie kinda place where everybody sat around and loved each other, took drugs, and played drums and had spirit dances. You know, in touch with Nature. Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll. Dennis Kucinich for President. That kind of place.

Well, a lack of evidence against X is not evidence against X. And given the level of violence in Andean cultural area, one cannot here claim that because there are no artistic representations of violence we can assume a “world peace and social justice and pass the bong, man!” culture existed there. Yet, they do. See the Wikipedia article, which says,

Unlike most cities, no trace of warfare at Caral has been found; no battlements, no weapons, no mutilated bodies. Shady’s findings suggest it was a gentle society, built on commerce and pleasure. [Of course, what they don’t tell you is that unusually little of anything has been found. A quipu. Several flutes. Cotton. Not much more. ]

Dude, where’d you get that rockin ACID! I am so TRIPPIN, MAN! Let’s have a PROTEST! Let’s get in touch with OUR FEMININE SIDES!

There’s a reason I ended up in bioanthropology: They do data-driven research. But these people will keep on insisting that horse is a zebra until they come down off that acid trip. They interpret all evidence through those drugged-out eyes, and as a result, distort their conclusions.

I trust anthrolopologists only slightly more than folklorists, and either of them only slightly more than defense lawyers — at least until I see hard evidence, which rarely exists.

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