
Why did prehistoric Americans fashion the enigmatic bannerstones? - curtis
https://www.archaeology.org/issues/262-1707/features/5626-native-american-bannerstones
======
marcus_holmes
Arrghh... why can't archeologists ever just say "we don't know what this was
used for" instead of claiming "ritual purposes" for everything they don't
understand?

Ancient peoples were intensely practical, and most of the stuff they made had
definite utility. As in this case. Glad someone took the time and trouble to
understand what they were used for. I hope the idiots who speculated (with no
evidence) that they were purely ornamental feel utterly ashamed of themselves.

Archeology should impose a rule that if a digger claims an object was made for
"ritual purposes" then they should have to specify the ritual and the part
that the object plays in it.

/rant

~~~
jcranmer
"Ritual" is jargon. Any archaeologist would understand that referring to
something as "ritual" means "we can't explain what it is used for." It's
unfortunate that the jargon is extremely easy to understand for non-
practitioners, but that's not entirely unusual [1].

It should be noted that "ritual" doesn't exactly mean "we know nothing." It
presupposes that there was a reason for something to exist, but often we don't
have any insight into what that reason may be.

[1] The case that shows up in my work, writing compiler optimizations, is
"global" which refers to optimizations that apply to the entire function as
opposed to basic blocks or regions at a time.

~~~
marcus_holmes
Would it kill the profession to use "unknown purposes" instead of "ritual
purposes"?

The rant comes from my years as a re-enactor, when we were trying to
faithfully re-create historical finds and explain them to the public. "ritual
purposes" was a huge problem.

------
fuzzfactor
Because it was still the stone age and they wanted to be first to market
without having to wait for bronze age technology to make it out of the lab.

