From: Grant Callaghan (grantc4@hotmail.com)
Date: Fri 28 Feb 2003 - 16:13:48 GMT
>Again, there was no-one in the Tlingit tribe that came to Harvard to
>examine their own tribe's artifacts that had any idea what several of them
>were for. The information that helped to form this artifact is gone. It is
>not only not invariant, it is absent, and no-one, even from the culture
>that created it, had any information about it.
The information is still encoded in the artifact. Just because no one still
has the cultural tools with which to decode it doesn't mean the information
has vanished. Just as diligent study has revealed the information stored in
ancient Egyptian glyphs and Sumerian clay tablets, enough scholarly effort
will reveal a certain amount of the Tlingit tribe's information. Just
because it won't reveal everything doesn't mean it reveals nothing. Just
the material it's made of implies a lot about the culture it came from. The
craftsmanship used to make it is part of the information encoded in an
artifact. The level and type of civilization also becomes obvious. What a
particular person designed and used the object for is just a small part of
the information it is capable of transmitting.
Grant
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