
Indigenous Cultures Have Archaeology Too - Hooke
https://www.sapiens.org/archaeology/archaeology-oral-tradition/
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DoreenMichele
The sad little title really doesn't do this justice. This is a piece
(primarily) about Papua New Guinea. In the west, we tend to hear bad things
about the place, like about high rates of poverty and violence.

But:

 _Papua New Guinea is one of the most culturally diverse countries in the
world. As of 2019, it is also the most rural, as only 13.25% of its people
live in urban centres. There are 851 known languages in the country... Most of
the population of more than 8,000,000 people lives in customary communities,
which are as diverse as the languages. The country is one of the world 's
least explored, culturally and geographically. It is known to have numerous
groups of uncontacted peoples, and researchers believe there are many
undiscovered species of plants and animals in the interior._

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papua_New_Guinea](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papua_New_Guinea)

It is also a place where 97 percent of the land is held in traditional tribal
or communal commons arrangements. This creates challenges for modernizing and
developing because you can't sell the land, which means you can't mortgage it.

[https://thediplomat.com/2016/03/papua-new-guinea-where-
prope...](https://thediplomat.com/2016/03/papua-new-guinea-where-property-is-
more-expensive-than-manhattan/)

I'm not done reading the piece under discussion here, but it's a really
fascinating piece. Please don't be put off by the lame and vague title. They
are probably trying to be respectful. My general understanding is that
"Indigenous" is a preferred term, but it's really vague and doesn't seem to
mean much to most Westerners (which is another problematic term, but I don't
know a better one and I think most people will know what I am trying to say,
never mind the inaccuracies).

PNG is just really fascinating stuff and I would love to see more pieces like
this one exploring this interesting place and the peoples who live there,
their culture and history and so forth. I think we have just so much to learn
and haven't yet scratched the surface.

Edit: The latter part of the article also talks about other places. This is
not "just" about PNG, but a part of it is about PNG and it's really
interesting.

~~~
drnchhdhvcd
I think the title might be inspired by the recent discussions about
ethnomathematics. The idea is that indigenous cultures don't just have their
own art and (vernacular) architecture, but also their own valid analogues of
science, history, philosophy etc. _however basic these activities might seem
to western eyes_.

Is 'indigenous' really a vague and obscure term?

~~~
DoreenMichele
Indigenous is sort of like European or African or Asian. Stories about Asian
Peoples aren't that interesting. If you want to hook someone, put China or
Japan or Korea in the title.

It's extremely broad and covers a great many peoples and tells you next to
nothing about who you are talking about. So, yeah, I think it is pretty vague,
personally.

/2 cents

~~~
toomanybeersies
I've always taken it to mean in relation pre-colonial ethnic groups or
cultures.

It's specific in its vagueness. It's not meant to describe a specific culture
or population, but a class.

~~~
DoreenMichele
I know what the word means and what it is intended to describe.

I also write for pay and titles are hard and words like that don't tend to do
well in titles.

------
205guy
Not really "indigenous" but one of my favorite stories of history within
history is the unearthing of the classical Greek/Roman statue of Laocön in
Rome in 1506. It was witnessed by Michelangelo and immediately recognized as a
lost masterpiece from Latin texts that were known and still studied. So in a
sense, the scholars at the time (can't really call them scientists, but
essentially the experts of the time) knew they were looking at a significant
masterpiece that they knew of only through the historical record.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laoco%C3%B6n_and_His_Sons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laoco%C3%B6n_and_His_Sons)

------
DiogenesKynikos
While it's interesting to learn how indigenous cultures interpret
archaeological sites, this article blurs the distinction between scientific
and pre-scientific understanding of archaeology. It presents "Western science"
(which should be referred to as "science," an international pursuit that
happens to have begun in the West) as just another means of interpreting
archaeological sites, alongside myths, folk beliefs, etc.

Reading this article (and looking at some of the other articles on the site)
reminds me of what I've heard elsewhere about the deep rift in anthropology
between the physical and the cultural anthropologists. It appears to me to be
a conflict between a scientific worldview and an increasingly subjective,
politically influenced worldview. One manifestation of this is the decision by
the American Anthropological Association to remove the word "science" from its
mission statement.[1-2]

1\.
[http://blogs.nature.com/news/2010/11/hold_the_science_says_a...](http://blogs.nature.com/news/2010/11/hold_the_science_says_anthropo.html)

2\.
[https://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/10/science/10anthropology.ht...](https://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/10/science/10anthropology.html)

~~~
BurritoAlPastor
Although archaeology is certainly informed by scientific theory and uses the
work of scientific fields like geology, it’s not truly a science. Crucially,
archaeological excavations are not reproducible, and archaeological theories
are not experimentally falsifiable. The same is true of cultural anthropology.

~~~
DiogenesKynikos
Many sciences are not reproducible, in that they don't have reproducible
experiments. The key is the integrity of the data and clear explanation of the
analysis methods.

But archaeology most definitely does have experimentally falsifiable theories,
and it is undoubtedly a science.

~~~
BurritoAlPastor
What's a scientific field with non-reproducible experiments? I'm hard-pressed
to think of any field with the kind of no-do-overs issues that archaeological
excavations have.

~~~
skissane
I don't think the term "science" has ever had a single unified definition.
When people say "Physics is a science" and "Archaeology is a science", I'm not
convinced those two sentences are using the word "science" in exactly the same
sense (although of course they are using it in somewhat related senses).

Wittgenstein famously argued that there is nothing that all "games" have in
common – there is no single common element to board games, card games, ball
games – there is a "family resemblance" ( _Familienähnlichkeit_ ) in which
every "game" has some things in common with other "games", but there is no one
thing that all games have in common.

Maybe something similar is true for sciences as well.

