Friday, October 14, 2011
Why make sense of the past?
When looking at the pictures in the text and reading about the cave paintings, I can't help but wonder why is this so important? I know it's interesting to know that humans were artistic during prehistoric times and that they had a creative outlet, but why should there be scientists that dedicate their time and energy investigating and researching these paintings? I see graffiti in odd places, freeways, bridges, sewers, stair cases, bathrooms, benches and I wonder if hundreds of years from now will archaeologists come across these writing or drawings and study them? After seeing the power point from lecture the other day I had a revelation! I have loved anthropology since taking my first anthropology class years ago at my community college, I fell in love with the subject. I even thought that I can claim it as my major but realized I was a little too old. The point is I understood why we need to make sense of these paintings, we as humans are curious and we feel the need to know all aspects of past, present and future. It makes perfect sense to want to dissect and understand people that lived before us. One of my favorite parts of biological anthropology was learning about Neanderthals and other different hominids and how they scavenged for food and hunted for their families. I thought about this after reading the text and I imagined the early stages of human life creating, painting, fulfilling their need to express themselves. How they survived weather conditions and traveled across the earth. I wish we would have more images of what they left behind and more information on how they would past time. It's more clear to me now that previous humans had some sort of artistic outlet weather it be making art or painting on cave walls. However, we will never truly know what they are depicting in those paintings but it is fun to try and figure it out. The possibilities are endless.
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The array of things that people choose to dedicate their careers to, sometimes makes one ask oneself what the point of it all is. I do see patterns in the researchers studying the past and it is that they are searching for truth; whether it be universal truth in the evolution of humans or piecing together events in a hazy line of cause and effect, I think we (as intellectuals) believe that the more we learn about our past, the more information we have to juxtapose to our current world and from this we gather what we can to see our future. It's no wonder that our most fascinating study is the one we do of ourselves because we are in fact one of the most complicated beings to understand as a constant because of our vast variation.
ReplyDeleteI've often thought about everything we leave behind in this world, and wondered how that will play into future archaeological studies. I think we have enough written information about our culture for confusion to be minimized, but what happens if something is dug up that is mundane to us today but has no written explanation? It feels weird to think that our culture might be misinterpreted down the line, it would be amazing to "compare notes" with other cultures we have reconstructed ethnographies of. George Carlin had a piece about aliens visiting Earth and seeing a teenage mother throwing her baby in a dumpster. Since so much of the news is the negative aspects of our society, what will our tracks say about us in the future?
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