Artifact Context...
Entry posted by Pantagathus
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"Artifact Context" - This is an issue that has always nagged at me. However, while researching one of my current lines of investigation, the whole concept of artifact context and how it's used (and abused?) has begun to really bother me.
This unease is by no means a mark of me joining the 'Orthodoxy Disparagers' club... however, in regards to common practices related to artifact context I really have to take issue.
I've tried to find recent papers on the subject (because it's been a while since I went over this topic in college) but it's not widely discussed outside tightly established archaeological circles. My problems right now mainly boil down to these issues:
1. Seeming lack of accounting (or failure to account) for human collector impulse when giving a date(range) to a given strata
2. Limited efforts associated with segregating out possible out of context artifacts from a particular stratum
3. Pre-Carbon14 timidity in dating artifacts much beyond the era of written record (what I call the Early 1st Millennia BC pile-up); the problem is exacerbated now that artifacts are truly out of context: in museums & private collections. Obviously, this leads to potentially corrupt dates being unverifiably orthodox in the mind of the community.
4. Specialization barriers degrading the abilities of excavators to recognize out of context artifacts.
5. Arbitrary rejection of Carbon 14 dates that fall outside expected ranges.
I get so frustrated with these things, even with archaeologists and researchers that I highly respect. To give you a couple of examples of things I've come across lately:
- In Barry Cunliffe's the Fantastic Voyage of Pytheas the Greek he discusses the offshore (near Cornwall) find of a sunken cargo of tin ingots. When the timber remains around the ingots were C-14 dated, they yielded a date that placed them in the late 5th Millennia BC (~4000 BC); He said the investigators were disappointed and dismissed the timbers as not belonging to a ship but remains of a Neolithic coastal forest...
*Second*
- In the photo gallery section of Lionel Casson's book Ships & Seamanship of the Ancient World there are a number of Greek
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