from Hacker News

Ancient kids’ toys have been hiding in the archaeological record

by gruseom on 2/11/18, 10:33 AM with 27 comments

• by benbreen on 2/11/18, 10:18 PM

  Debate about whether or not artifacts are for ritual purposes always reminds me of a wonderful book by David Macaulay called "Motel of the Mysteries." [1] The publisher's description gives a good sense of it:

  "It is the year 4022; all of the ancient country of Usa has been buried under many feet of detritus from a catastrophe that occurred back in 1985. Imagine, then, the excitement that Howard Carson, an amateur archeologist at best, experienced when in crossing the perimeter of an abandoned excavation site he felt the ground give way beneath him and found himself at the bottom of a shaft, which, judging from the DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging from an archaic doorknob, was clearly the entrance to a still-sealed burial chamber. Carson's incredible discoveries, including the remains of two bodies, one of then on a ceremonial bed facing an altar that appeared to be a means of communicating with the Gods and the other lying in a porcelain sarcophagus in the Inner Chamber, permitted him to piece together the whole fabric of that extraordinary civilization."

  [1] Some images here: https://wearethemutants.com/2017/12/06/david-macauleys-motel...

• by happy-go-lucky on 2/11/18, 1:14 PM

  As kids growing up in a village, my friends and I played with button whirligigs and we made them out of broken pieces of clay pots discarded by our parents: Take a piece, rub its boundary on a hard irregular surface until it is smooth and discoid, make a hole in the center (take care not to break the object), pass a thread through this hole and keep the thing at the midpoint of the thread. Hold the two ends of the thread with your hands, spin it for a while and stop, and then immediately start whirling the thing by alternately pulling and releasing the tension on the thread.

  Here’s a wiki with some nice drawings:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whirligig#Button_whirligigs

  We also made ropes with jute, spinning tops of wood with an iron tip etc. We could not afford to buy things such as these. It was fun :)

• by dmix on 2/11/18, 3:49 PM

  Just wanted to point out that it's great seeing the "Citations" and "Further Reading" links to the actual studies at the bottom and within the article. If only more of those 'science' news sites did the same...

• by caf on 2/11/18, 11:12 PM

  Kids must have made those somewhat unevenly shaped jars and bowls, each easily held within a child’s hand,...

  I feel a certain knowing connection with these parents of 4,000 years ago, when I imagine them also with a shelf of inexpert yet earnest pottery.

• by megaman22 on 2/11/18, 11:32 AM

  > “Hey, what’s this?” asks the first guy. “I dunno, probably a toy … or a religious object,” says the second.

  > Archaeologists have long tended to choose the second option

  One of the many reasons archaeology frustrates me. If you can't figure out why somebody built something in the past, its always for ritual reasons, rather than more mundane reasons.

  For example, I went to Chichen-Itza last week. If something happened, and all the street vendors' stalls were abandoned, it's almost certain that archaeologists of a thousands years in the future would conclude that it was a major religious pilgrimage site, of a culture obsessed with miniature pyramids, obsidian miniatures, marble chess sets, and brightly glazed ceramic skulls. What they would make of the multitude of ceramic phallic hash pipes, I'm not sure I want to speculate about...