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stone, bronze, and iron [chat]
ronya
Arrrrrf.the ivory tower's basementRegistered User regular
Arrrrrf.the ivory tower's basementRegistered User regular
In 1807 the kingdom of Denmark was unsure of its propspects for survival. Defeated by Britain, threatened by Sweden, and soon to abandoned by Norway, it looked to its glorious past to reassure its citizens of their greatness. Plans for a National Museum of Antiquities, the first of its type in Europe, were developed and promoted. The Royal Cabinet of Antiquities quickly acquired vast collections of artifacts that had been plowed or dug from the ground under a newly expanded agricultural policy. Amateur collectors among the country gentry, and quarrymen or ditch diggers among the common folk, brought in glimmering hoards of bronze and boxes of flint tools and bones.
In 1816, with dusty specimens piling up in the back room of the Royal Library, the Royal Commission for the preservation of Danish Antiquities selected Christian J. Thomsen, a twenty-seven-year-old without a university degree but known for his practicality and industry, to decide how to arrange this overwhelming trover of strange and unknown objects in some kind of order for its first display. After a year of cataloging and thinking, Thomsen elected to put the artifacts in three great halls. One would be for the stone artifacts, which seemed to come from graves or sediments belonging to a Stone Age, lacking any metals at all; one for the bronze axes, trumpets, and spearsof the Bronze Age, which seemed to come from sites that lacked iron; and the last for the iron tools and weapons, made during an Iron Age that continued into the era of the earliest written references to Scandanavian history. The exhibit opened in 1819 and was a triumphant success. It inspired an animated discussion among European intellectuals about whether these three ages truly existed in this chronological order, how old they were, and whether a science of archaeology, like the new science of linguistics, was possible. Jens Worsaae, originally an assistant to Thomsen, proved, through careful excavation, that the Three Ages indeed existed as distinct prehistoric eras, with some qualifications. But to do this he had to dig more carefully than the ditch diggers, borrowing stratigraphic methods from geology. Thus professional field archaeology was born to solve a problem, not to acquire things.
It was no longer possible, after Thomsen’s exhibit, for an educated person to regard the prehistoric past as a single undifferentiated era into which mammoth bones and iron swords could be thrown together. Forever after time was to be divided, a peculiarly satisfying task for mortals, who now had a way to triumph over their most implacable foe.
from https://samzdat.com/2017/06/08/scraps-ii/, quoting David W. Anthony’s The Horse, the Wheel, and Language
ronya on
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I was gonna choose bronze. It's shiny.
The rise of poll chat marks the downfall of general society
The most dangerous eggs.
That's a real good excerpt at least.
. . .and it's still jerking it to pictures of vikings to this day!
the author is good friends with my old teachers from Indo-Europen linguistics at Copenhagen University, who have been doing a lot of collaboration with archaeology and genetics in their research of the proto-IE ancestors
nope, I am not quite so lucid
>.>
<.<
"No. Stay here, hoomin. Is warm. You give scritch, I give snuggle. Is good deal."
I felt a little bad. He has to go back to his kiddo in a few days.
hm yeah I guess I understood way too much of what was on the blog for that to be the case
I didn't realize your cat was Slav.
in fucking deed
Pretty sure the housing co-op's rules allow it, but I would feel bad
someday though
are you feeding it and keeping its' box clean and letting it sit on windowsills and playing with it?
0%
Even though it's twenty past five.
how would you deal with the yolks then?
Apparently my fiancée hallucinated that I'd screamed at her to get out of the house and that I was breaking up with her
And, honestly, I'm going to say that that was a good call there Delusion Burnage.
"Bro, you stay here, bro. Is good snuggle bed. Be shame if bad thing happen to bro's bed."
"Goddammit, cat, stop misgendering me."
"Is okay, bro. Is gender-neutral."
I'm very much at a loss for what to do to help here
The police system is corrupt and dangerous and wholly enabled by an entire political wing of the US
The underlying bias of police interactions against black men is separate from the system that allows cops to royally fuck up and be shielded from prosecution.
I'm not really sure how to bring more punitive actions against bad cops without complete overhaul and reform countrywide.