harpoon epiphany
manually crossposting this, because apparently last night's automatic crosspost was teh fail.
-----------------------------------------
So I'm sitting here in the archaeology lab, sullenly measuring harpoon heads, sick to death of this ridiculously large term-end paper I have to write, when the girl on the far side of the table suddenly says, "Argh, I think the person who made this knife was an idiot. Look at it."
And everyone went over to look and agreed that yeah, that was a pretty wonky-looking transverse knife. Meanwhile, I'm sitting in my seat, staring at my harpoon head, having an epiphany:
Somebody made this.
I mean, it seems obvious, right? And the first time someone handed me an artifact it was all I could think about: somebody made this, a very long time ago, and now I'm holding it. And you hardly dare breath, and you treat every little chip of rock like it's made of glass. But then you handle ten, fifty, a hundred, you handle stone and bone and ceramic and metal and, occasionally, actual glass. You stop thinking about what it is you're actually holding, and you start focusing on ascession numbers, and use-wear analysis, and was this made with a soft-hammer technique or with pressure flaking, and goddammit I still can't reliably tell the difference between antler and bone.
So I'm sitting there with this harpoon head in my hand and it's like I'm holding it for the first time again. I don't have dates for it, but it's pre-Dorset, which means that at the very youngest it's 2,500 years old. Two thousand, five hundred years old. At the youngest. I'm a medievalist; I'm used to dealing with stuff from 400-1600 CE, not stuff from 500 BCE.
So two and a half millennia ago, someone killed a caribou. And they ate it, probably, they they took its antler and then then someone - maybe the same someone, maybe someone else - spent fucking forever carving it into this ridiculously intricately harpoon head that I'm holding in my hand. And they weren't very good at it, actually, because look here: they drilled the line-hole horizontally from the one side, and vertically from the other, so they don't quite meet up right. Probably they were a young person, just learning to carve. And here you can see how the harpoon broke because they slipped when they were carving the socket for the harpoon shaft, gouged it too deep on the one side and weakened it. Maybe they got to use it in another hunt, before the antler cracked, or maybe they didn't.
And all of this - the caribou, the first hunt, the novice craftsman, the breaking, maybe the second hunt - all of this happened two thousand and five hundred years ago. Jesus was a distant dream, Muhammad even more so; the crusades not yet even possible to conceive. The Renaissance? Hah, nope. How can you have a snobby pseudo-Roman intellectual revival when Rome is less than a decade old?
Two thousand and five hundred years, guys.
Fuck. Never let me get this jaded again. Never let me start taking this for granted. I don't want to hold history in my hands and shrug; I want,always and forever, to be awed.
-----------------------------------------
So I'm sitting here in the archaeology lab, sullenly measuring harpoon heads, sick to death of this ridiculously large term-end paper I have to write, when the girl on the far side of the table suddenly says, "Argh, I think the person who made this knife was an idiot. Look at it."
And everyone went over to look and agreed that yeah, that was a pretty wonky-looking transverse knife. Meanwhile, I'm sitting in my seat, staring at my harpoon head, having an epiphany:
Somebody made this.
I mean, it seems obvious, right? And the first time someone handed me an artifact it was all I could think about: somebody made this, a very long time ago, and now I'm holding it. And you hardly dare breath, and you treat every little chip of rock like it's made of glass. But then you handle ten, fifty, a hundred, you handle stone and bone and ceramic and metal and, occasionally, actual glass. You stop thinking about what it is you're actually holding, and you start focusing on ascession numbers, and use-wear analysis, and was this made with a soft-hammer technique or with pressure flaking, and goddammit I still can't reliably tell the difference between antler and bone.
So I'm sitting there with this harpoon head in my hand and it's like I'm holding it for the first time again. I don't have dates for it, but it's pre-Dorset, which means that at the very youngest it's 2,500 years old. Two thousand, five hundred years old. At the youngest. I'm a medievalist; I'm used to dealing with stuff from 400-1600 CE, not stuff from 500 BCE.
So two and a half millennia ago, someone killed a caribou. And they ate it, probably, they they took its antler and then then someone - maybe the same someone, maybe someone else - spent fucking forever carving it into this ridiculously intricately harpoon head that I'm holding in my hand. And they weren't very good at it, actually, because look here: they drilled the line-hole horizontally from the one side, and vertically from the other, so they don't quite meet up right. Probably they were a young person, just learning to carve. And here you can see how the harpoon broke because they slipped when they were carving the socket for the harpoon shaft, gouged it too deep on the one side and weakened it. Maybe they got to use it in another hunt, before the antler cracked, or maybe they didn't.
And all of this - the caribou, the first hunt, the novice craftsman, the breaking, maybe the second hunt - all of this happened two thousand and five hundred years ago. Jesus was a distant dream, Muhammad even more so; the crusades not yet even possible to conceive. The Renaissance? Hah, nope. How can you have a snobby pseudo-Roman intellectual revival when Rome is less than a decade old?
Two thousand and five hundred years, guys.
Fuck. Never let me get this jaded again. Never let me start taking this for granted. I don't want to hold history in my hands and shrug; I want,always and forever, to be awed.