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At the heart of this attempt at erasure lies a fundamental disagreement over archaeology’s purpose. While modern researchers cloak their liberal progressive worldview in the trappings of objective science, the fact is that archaeology is predominantly about telling human stories, and with that, stories of different peoples. The roots of archaeological scholarship lie in the antiquarian past, where intellectually curious men (it was mostly men), worked to piece together foundational narratives about their country and kin. From William Camden’s Britannia (1586) to Flavio Biondo’s Italia illustrata (1474), European scholars were concerned with connecting their nation’s past to the present. But since the Second World War, the trend in Western archaeology has increasingly been to “debunk” or “critically assess” national origin stories: to illegitimate vulgar emotional attachments to roots or claims to exclusive heritage. And yet the public are not stupid; it is obvious that these sentiments are political and inconsistent. Compare these two quotes:
“As sensible anthropologists and sensible historians have reminded us: cultures are always in the process of changing and reconstituting themselves, sometimes in almost unrecognisable, qualitatively different ways. There is no culture that has existed ‘since time immemorial’ and no people that is aboriginal in terms of their contemporary culture with a specific piece of real estate.”
“Indigenous Australians belong to the oldest continuous culture on earth. Ancient artefacts from Lake Mungo help show us what people ate and how they lived thousands of years ago. Today, the Paakantji, Mutthi Mutthi and Ngyimpaa people of the Lake Mungo region continue their close connections to the land.”
The first of these is from Nationalism, politics, and the practice of archaeology in the Caucasus (1995) by Philip L. Kohl and Gocha R. Tsetskhladze, the second from the National Museum of Australia. One takes aim at the people of the Caucasus identifying too strongly with their ancestors, the second happily accepts that modern Aboriginal Australians are the owners of, and descendants from, 40,000-year-old fossils found at Lake Mungo. The official acceptance that these Pleistocene skeletons are the sole preserve of the Aboriginal people and not the common inheritance of humanity has been securely acknowledged.
From the Patterson piece:
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By a “dark age”, I do not mean that all modern beliefs are false. The earth is indeed round. Instead, I mean that all of our structures of knowledge are plagued by errors, at all levels, from the trivial to the profound, periphery to the fundamental. Nothing that you’ve been taught can be believed because you were taught it. Nothing can be believed because others believe it. No idea is trustworthy because it’s written in a textbook.
The process that results in the production of knowledge in textbooks is flawed, because the methodology employed by intellectuals is not sufficiently rigorous to generate high-quality ideas. The epistemic standards of the 20th century were not high enough to overcome social, psychological, and political entropy. Our academy has failed.
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Rather than grapple with difficult concepts, nearly every modern intellectual is trying to avoid embarrassment for themselves and for their social class. They are trying to maintain their relative position in a social hierarchy that is constructed around orthodoxies. They adhere to these orthodoxies, not because they thought the ideas through, but because they cannot bear the social cost of disagreement.