RE: memetics-digest V1 #1299

From: Vincent Campbell (VCampbell@dmu.ac.uk)
Date: Mon 03 Mar 2003 - 16:15:01 GMT

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    Hi,

    Experimental archaeology is one of those things I would live to do if I ever had a career change. There was a great show recently on UK television about attempts to try and build some of Da Vinci's inventions- the bird-wing shaped glider was brilliant and worked too.

    Such work answers questions about how things might have been done, and what the effort involved says about the people who constructed ancient devices and monuments, and what a good idea of what importance those things had to those societies.

    I think, particularly for pre-literate societies (or those where no writing survives) all we have are their artefacts, but they can tell us loads about their culture.

    With literate societies we only know more about them because we have the artefacts that convey their stories, beliefs, laws, histories etc.

    Vincent

    > ----------
    > From: Grant Callaghan
    > Reply To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
    > Sent: Monday, March 3, 2003 3:44 PM
    > To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
    > Subject: Re: memetics-digest V1 #1299
    >
    >
    > >> If you reproduced one of the artifacts
    > left by an Indian tribe to the degree that it couldn't be distinguished
    > from
    > the original, wouldn't you have received the information contained in the
    > making of it?
    >
    >
    > >No. Please explain how I could? Xerox is not culture.
    >
    > I didn't see where anybody claimed that it was. On the other hand, xerox
    > is
    > an intimate part of modern culture.
    >
    > But if you were talking about an artifact such as a clay bowl or a stone
    > ax
    > head, for example, and you went out and gathered the same kind of clay and
    >
    > formed that clay in the same way and decorated it with the same designs
    > and
    > fired it at the same temperature, you would have learned a thing or two
    > about how the tribe accomplished the task themselves.
    >
    > There are anthropologists today who study the art of working stone to
    > produce the same artifacts they find in the earth in order to understand
    > the
    > culture that produced them. I guess you would say they are wasting their
    > time and aren't likely to learn anything about that culture.
    >
    > As you might guess, I disagree
    >
    >
    > Grant
    >
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    =============================================================== This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing) see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit

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