![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Aaaarg, spare me!
"Secret Passages" on the History International channel is currently doing an episode on a megalithic monument in New Hampshire, and the narrator is all "OOoooOOOoOOooOOo it's quite like many prehistoric megalithic monuments in Europe!" And NO! NO IT'S NOT! THE ONLY THING THEY HAVE IN COMMON IS THAT THEY'RE MADE OF STONE! At least the narrator mentions a theory that the farmer who "discovered" it actually built it, and there's a couple of archaeologists who explain that the Native Americans of the area didn't work in stone.
I'm suffering an overload of stupid, as I caught an episode of "Bone Detectives" last night, having forgotten that it's the one I watched a few months ago and sporked. This episode was about a 2000-year-old skeleton of a young man found in Orkney, buried near a metalworker's area, with a facial injury that broke his front teeth. And the interpretation is ungodly awful, using so much speculation, that it's insane. Hey! It's a warrior society, even though there's no evidence of war*, and the dentist who looked at the skull has seen teeth broken just like that by bullets, so IT MAY BE that he was killed by a metal-tipped arrow in a training accident, then was brought to the metalworkers by concerned family members because they may have believed smiths to have healing powers, and then buried in the area where he died because he had scoliosis (although it didn't affect his movement, as the muscle attachments were strong), so the family hoped the magical smith power could make him whole and hale in the next world!
...Yeah. I'm going back to The Unthinkable.
* Lots of defensive buildings, but little evidence of large-scale fighting.
I'm suffering an overload of stupid, as I caught an episode of "Bone Detectives" last night, having forgotten that it's the one I watched a few months ago and sporked. This episode was about a 2000-year-old skeleton of a young man found in Orkney, buried near a metalworker's area, with a facial injury that broke his front teeth. And the interpretation is ungodly awful, using so much speculation, that it's insane. Hey! It's a warrior society, even though there's no evidence of war*, and the dentist who looked at the skull has seen teeth broken just like that by bullets, so IT MAY BE that he was killed by a metal-tipped arrow in a training accident, then was brought to the metalworkers by concerned family members because they may have believed smiths to have healing powers, and then buried in the area where he died because he had scoliosis (although it didn't affect his movement, as the muscle attachments were strong), so the family hoped the magical smith power could make him whole and hale in the next world!
...Yeah. I'm going back to The Unthinkable.
* Lots of defensive buildings, but little evidence of large-scale fighting.
no subject
no subject
no subject
Any suggestion that maybe big rocks and the forces of gravity have a logic of their own independent of culture? Oh, no, they'd maintain, there's no such thing as a coincidence, it's all connected! Yeah, certainly these kinds of *theories* do seem connected, considering that they mostly involve white people/space aliens/time travelers voyaging great distances just to lord it over brown people who apparently can't figure out how to pile one stone on top of another without plenty of help. :P
no subject
Oops, hit capslock, but am too lazy to retype that.
It just drives me nuts when people claim that any group of "primitive" people couldn't have built something on their own.
And speaking of which, I'm in the middle of Ronald Hutton's The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles: Their Nature and Legacy, which contains all the actual information known about prehistoric British monuments at the time of publication (1991). I wish I'd known about this book when I took my archaeology of landscape course in grad school a few years later, because it would have come in REALLY handy for my paper on British megalithic architecture. He definitively busts the notion that Stonehenge et al were built with a focus on astronomical points ... or that they were even perfect circles (it seems that eyeballing circles were good enough for the prehistoric Brits, and they didn't bother to lay them out with stakes and ropes XD).
no subject
no subject
no subject
Worse, it's expanding. I read a sci-fi "novel" (thank GOD I didn't pay for it) where von Danikenism was brutally forced upon the reader as an explanation for the following civilizations: Minoans, Mycenaeans, and (mentioned in passing) Mesopotamians and Kelts. *pukes*
no subject