Stone circles in the home are to keep newborn chicks from wandering

July 30, 2022 6:29 AM

My favorite historical "discoveries" are ones male anthropologists/historians just *can't* figure out for YEARS that are swiftly answered by a woman when one is finally given access. "But what could this ancient tablet of instructions even MEAN!" Woman: "it's a recipe". (short Twitter thread with many replies of similar "discoveries")
posted by Etrigan (36 comments total)

My wife Melissa and I have dug a bunch of privies as an unexpected side quest that spring out of buying an old house in Philadelphia, unearthing thousands of colonial-era artifacts (intrigued? Listen to The Boghouse podcast for more!) and among them, we kept finding clay marbles as we processed. The general feedback we got was, "these are probably just cheap toys made for kids" - after a while, Melissa gathered them up and said, "I'm pretty sure these are pie weights."

I enjoyed the Twitter thread and it's many replies.
posted by Leviathant at 7:25 AM on July 30, 2022 [35 favorites]

Babylonian recipes on clay tables.. I don't have Babylonian, but if the translations are literal, I don't see a lot of room for puzzlement.

Curious as to the who what where and when of knives in ceiling beams.

I get the concept, but for this kind of thing, I want citations. Like Leviathant's.

Here's another. An archeologist once told me of bafflement over a carved indentation next to an old Roman oven. Mrs. Archeologist identified it as useful for water to put on loaves before shoveling them into the heat. Makes for nicer crust. (That said, I've not been able to find pictures of said indentations.)
posted by BWA at 7:33 AM on July 30, 2022 [1 favorite]

Wow, the level of mansplaining in that very thread is … something.
posted by bjrubble at 7:33 AM on July 30, 2022 [15 favorites]

Fabulous thread but yeah so much mansplaining - makes one's eyes roll back in one's head.
posted by leslies at 7:38 AM on July 30, 2022 [3 favorites]

A great tongue-in-cheek reverse of this was on the show QI, on one of Sandi Toksvig's hosted episodes where Phil Jupitus was one guest. Sandi talked about the bone with 28 markings on it, and how it clearly was a calendar that a woman had invented as a period tracker - "because, think about it, what man is going to want to keep track of whether 28 days have passed?"

At which point Phil spoke up and said with mock horror, "oh, trust me, sometimes we do."
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:07 AM on July 30, 2022 [33 favorites]

I so love the "keep knives where the children can't get them" one. Like: duh. I'm a bloke. I don't have kids. I have, however, participated in child-proofing spaces.

(and, as always, @EalanorMorton is a fucking gem!)
posted by pompomtom at 8:14 AM on July 30, 2022

Nitter mirror for the non Twitter enabled.
posted by nat at 8:56 AM on July 30, 2022 [5 favorites]

At which point Phil spoke up and said with mock horror, "oh, trust me, sometimes we do."

I get super-creative right before my period. I could see how it might be hard to keep up.
posted by aniola at 9:11 AM on July 30, 2022 [10 favorites]

Aniola, I think Phil Jupitus was making some kind of tongue-in-cheek "guys getting scared they knocked a girl up" joke.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:16 AM on July 30, 2022 [2 favorites]

I thought it was more a "women be cranky that time of the month amirite dudes.

QI is a wonderful show and I wish there was much, much more of it.
posted by The otter lady at 9:48 AM on July 30, 2022 [9 favorites]

I hate to be That Guy but without specific instances from the literature being cited, this is just the liberal version of Marine Todd. I'm sure there are examples from real life of scholars whose positionality keeps them from seeing something that scholars from a different background might find easier to decode, but the idea that someone purely based on her identity as a woman might be able to understand what a knife on a roof rafter represents is fundamentally anti-intellectual and patronizing to the female scholars who would be making these objections. It's basically no different from the male scholars who, prior to the 1960s, would routinely read the gender norms of their time back into the archeological record (with respect to Viking burials for instance). Sure, a knife on a roof rafter can be a means of childproofing, but that could also be a just-so story and its actual function is as a protective ritual object.
posted by derrinyet at 9:58 AM on July 30, 2022 [41 favorites]

I hate to be That Guy but without specific instances from the literature being cited, this is just the liberal version of Marine Todd.

"....and then the sexist professor flushed red and stammered, and ran out of the lecture hall as the students cheered. And that student who proved him wrong? That was Marie Curie."
posted by fortitude25 at 10:08 AM on July 30, 2022 [18 favorites]

A previously where people who know about sewing and knitting and weaving are teaching archeologists.
posted by Bee'sWing at 10:36 AM on July 30, 2022 [1 favorite]

Don't blame too much on the when there is always a lot of puritanical museum speak: this "fertility symbol"... Mate, it's a wooden dildo.
posted by thegirlwiththehat at 10:44 AM on July 30, 2022 [12 favorites]

The period from full moon to full moon is 29 and a half days, not 28.
posted by heatherlogan at 10:47 AM on July 30, 2022 [2 favorites]

Ironically, it was a female anthropologist—Mary Douglas—who was one of the pioneers of a nonfunctionalist approach to the study of culture (for instance, she showed that Jewish and Muslim prohibitions on pork were not about food safety). That approach has been an unspoken assumption of almost all historical and anthropological scholarship since, like, the middle of the 20th century. "Why did X group do Y" is not a question that we answer today by thinking "Why might I, as a contemporary person from the global north, do Y."
posted by derrinyet at 10:51 AM on July 30, 2022 [16 favorites]

(Nonfunctionalist not being a reference to the functionalist school of anthropology, which was often much more immersed and nuanced than the food safety stuff, but rather to the sort of pop-functionalist explanations laypeople fall back on when they can't understand something about another culture. "Medieval Europeans valued spices because their meat was rotten" kind of stuff.)
posted by derrinyet at 10:59 AM on July 30, 2022 [2 favorites]

Month type Length in days
draconitic 27.212220815 + 0.000000414 × T
tropical 27.321582252 + 0.000000182 × T
sidereal 27.321661554 + 0.000000217 × T
anomalistic 27.554549886 − 0.000001007 × T
synodic 29.530588861 + 0.000000252 × T

Sure, thirteen times twenty eight is three hundred and sixty four. Pretty damn close for a lunar calendar. Change in length of days throughout the year and observation times and not putting to much on ancestors carving scratch marks keeps the seasons aligned rather closely. We're talking derivatives here and error accounting, Off by a day and a quarter when taking twenty eight is pretty good for tick marks.

27 - 351 days/year
28 - 364 days/year
29 - 377 days/year

Do you think they were stupid enough back then to not get close to reality of three hundred sixty five and a quarter and then a bit. Reasonable closeness.
posted by zengargoyle at 11:19 AM on July 30, 2022 [2 favorites]

I prefer the olden days when any object not clearly identifiable was a “religious artifact.”
posted by njohnson23 at 12:06 PM on July 30, 2022 [5 favorites]

This noun of action was derived by Cicero from relegere "go through again" (in reading or in thought), from re- "again" (see re-) + legere "read" (see lecture (n.)). However, popular etymology among the later ancients (Servius, Lactantius, Augustine) and the interpretation of many modern writers connects it with religare "to bind fast" (see rely), via the notion of "place an obligation on," or "bond between humans and gods." In that case, the re- would be intensive. Another possible origin is religiens "careful," opposite of negligens.

religion | Etymology, origin and meaning of religion by etymonline.

Religion minus the deity part is just a fragment of a retelling of the past. Take out the deity part and every artifact is a "religious artifact". Just another "bind fast" to the past.
posted by zengargoyle at 12:25 PM on July 30, 2022 [2 favorites]

draconitic

I'm disappointed this is not a calendar for dragons.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 12:27 PM on July 30, 2022 [19 favorites]

Where was that thread pointing out that "likely of religious significance" means "we have no idea what it is" and "ritual object" just meant "dildo"?
posted by Scattercat at 1:15 PM on July 30, 2022 [3 favorites]

The otter lady: QI is a wonderful show and I wish there was much, much more of it.
The QI researchers (listed in the credits as 'elves') have a podcast called "No Such Thing As A Fish"
posted by k3ninho at 1:24 PM on July 30, 2022 [4 favorites]

Also, look at trowelblazers.com, a website devoted to raising awareness of 'Pioneering women in archaeology, paleontology and geology - past and present'.
posted by eclectist at 2:54 PM on July 30, 2022 [1 favorite]

And I would sidle along that website with the book The invention of Jane Harrison by Dame Winifred Mary Beard, DBE, FSA, FBA, FRSL.
posted by NoThisIsPatrick at 4:09 PM on July 30, 2022 [2 favorites]

"because, think about it, what man is going to want to keep track of whether 28 days have passed?"

Trans men may need to, and definitely did before hormones were a thing. Sucks that people keep assuming trans people didn't exist in history.
posted by blueberry monster at 5:29 PM on July 30, 2022 [9 favorites]

The QI researchers (listed in the credits as 'elves') have a podcast called "No Such Thing As A Fish"

Live from the QI offices in Corvernt Garden.

(One of the elves is a little too rhotic. I will never not love the way he says "Chicargo.")
posted by ricochet biscuit at 6:37 PM on July 30, 2022 [5 favorites]

There's a bunch of examples of these where wives of Victorian archaeologists were able to provide verification of proposed trade routes by showing how complex embroidery stitches traveled from one end of the trade route to the other, suggesting sustained contact where the stitches could be learned.

But my favorite was how it was a mystery to NASA for 20/30 years as to why astronauts' vision decayed in orbit, but returned to normal on Earth. Was it radiation? It seemed not. But the same astronaut going up again would lose his vision AGAIN, and regain it AGAIN on Earth. It was a small but persistent mystery, why these fighter pilots with 20/20 vision went half-blind in space and then began to see normally again on earth.

30 years into the program, NASA had a female flight surgeon on staff, and this got brought up at a meeting (some time after Sally Ride had to tell them how tampons worked, IIRC). They were talking about this at a meeting, and she got a weird look on her face. "They all get stuffy heads, right?" "Right, because without gravity, their sinuses don't drain. The increased fluid pressure causes sinus pain and stuffiness." "So, that same increased fluid pressure is probably why they can't see. It changes the shape of their eyeballs." "WHUT." "It's a known side effect of pregnancy, the increased fluid pressure changes the shape of the eyeballs, so pregnant women tend to fail driving tests, or need different glasses. Once the baby's born, they go back to normal." "How do you know that?" ".... I was pregnant twice?"

Anyway, this appears to be broadly correct, that without gravity to pull fluid down, the fluid pressure in astronauts' skulls increases, and changes the shape of their eyeballs, causing temporary changes to vision. It's almost exactly the same mechanism that changes the vision of pregnant women; it's just that pregnant women have increased fluid volume due to the biology of supporting a fetus, while astronauts are missing gravity.

And it's a question that could have been solved at any point in the history of the space program if they had just had pregnant people, or obstetricians who care for pregnant people, on staff. And I'm sure that there were nurses and secretaries and so on who had given birth, but they weren't "experts" and so wouldn't have been listened to; it took an official military doctor who'd had babies herself to provide an excellent hypothesis IN TEN SECONDS.

And not only does it affect women when medical studies fail to include women and women's bodies, or gender non-conforming people and bodies, but it affects men too, because human bodies are weird, and it turns out that SOMETIMES you have to know how uterus-having bodies work to understand how non-uterus-having bodies work, as much as much of the medical establishment would like to choose cis male bodies as the human standard. They're not, and not only does it leave out more than half the species, but it turns out to leave out really important things about men's bodies too. Because I'm super-aware that a lot of the medical establishment will just shrug and say, "So what?" about the fact that medications are less-well-understood in women and non-conforming bodies, and work less-well -- but the instant it's a freakin' astronaut having issues, well, now we want to know how non-male bodies might inform that question. Maybe it'd be better to START from that position rather than arriving there 30 years late.

"I will never not love the way he says "Chicargo.""

Literally my favorite part of Obama's election was the international press corps descending on Chicago in unprecedented numbers and attempting to decide whether to say "Chicago" in their local accent, or the way Chicagoans say it. Everything about it was charming. Like, look, we're just excited you're here and talking about us. Don't put an "s" on Illinois and we'll all get along, okay? It was just so thrilling to be the foreign place with the exotic name that everybody was trying to pronounce properly! That's never us! We loved every oddball attempt because we were so excited to be important enough for the worldwide press to want to pronounce us!
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 7:04 PM on July 30, 2022 [37 favorites]

See also the "hairstyle archaeologist."
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 7:12 PM on July 30, 2022 [2 favorites]

When I read stuff like this I am always reminded just how much of the stuff we have today is simply a function of historically useful practices persevering beyond their need. There are all kinds of cooking techniques based on preventing the spoiling of food and veg that are largely unnecessary in the current universal refrigeration environment of advanced countries. That smoker in your BBQ setup? Historical artifact. Those canning jars? Historical artifact. The preservation of these practices well beyond their period of utility, even to the point of them doing actually harm like preservatives in meat and carcinogenic food preservation techniques, like smoking, is damn near a religious practice. I'd bet the majority of people don't even know why these practices existed in the first place anymore and this stuff is here in the present and still in use!
posted by srboisvert at 4:21 PM on July 31, 2022

> The period from full moon to full moon is 29 and a half days, not 28.


I wonder if this is relevant:


https://carta.anthropogeny.org/moca/topics/menstrual-cycle-duration

Menstrual cycle length is given as the time from the first day of bleeding to the first day of the subsequent event of bleeding. The human menstrual cycle is 28 days long on average, but it can range from 21 – 35 days. Great ape menstrual cycles appear to be more regular and generally longer compared with humans. Orangutans cycles are approximately 29 days, gorillas 30 – 32 days, bonobos 32-35 days and chimpanzees ~37 days, though it can range from 31 – 36.7 days in this species. The difference in cycle length correlates with the amount of time each great ape species is sexually fertile. Lack of cycling in orangutans over long periods is correlated with limited food supply. Cycling in all species is subject to influences from social stress and nutrition. Among the Old World Monkey species, the patas monkey cycles range from 24 – 27 days, vervet monkeys from 30 – 31 days, mangabys from 30 – 34 days and baboons from 30 – 35 days (Dixon, 1998 and references therein).

posted by sebastienbailard at 5:56 PM on July 31, 2022

So wait, lemme get this straight.

This is an FPP about how women were able to solve longstanding archeological problems simply by sharing insights gained from their own lived experiences. And yet, we have people in here who are hyperfocused on the accuracy of women reporting on their lived experiences when it comes to menstrual cycles.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:19 PM on July 31, 2022 [13 favorites]

In a related field, many of the most important 20th century discoveries in primatology were made by 3 women scientists, in part just because they were willing to go out in the field and make long term observations, but especially because they did not pre-suppose a patriarchal social structure with male interactions as the only important social interactions and instead observed female behavior, including female-female relationships and female-child relationships.
posted by hydropsyche at 6:53 AM on August 1, 2022 [7 favorites]

everything must be a sacred object!!

or must it?
posted by supermedusa at 8:59 AM on August 1, 2022 [1 favorite]

This thread reminded me of a piece I read the other day after following a link on Twitter. It's a transcribed sermon, about a woman whose discoveries about key passages of the New Testament for her PhD have profound implications for how they're interpreted and what they signify. I'm not religious, but had enough Sunday school as a kid to appreciate the implications even if I'm not immersed in that world; it's a perspective that would have altered Western history if it had been widely known. And another example of a discovery that only came about as a result of a woman's curiosity and insights.
posted by rory at 11:52 AM on August 1, 2022 [8 favorites]

Fabulous thread but yeah so much mansplaining - makes one's eyes roll back in one's head.
I'm trying to make myself believe that those are men without an understanding of humour trying to be funny. Not very successfully.
posted by dg at 7:38 PM on August 1, 2022