This little stone figurine, which would fit in the palm of your hand, is a not uncommon archaeological find throughout southeastern Europe, Turkey, and the Middle East, going way, way back in time.
Archaeology is meant to be a science. When an archaeologist makes a claim, he is supposed to have evidence for it–inscriptions, pictures, whatever.
These figurines have long been thought to represent fertility goddesses. But in this month’s issue of Biblical Archaeology Review (November-December 2018, Vol. 44, No. 6), we have one from Catalhoyuk, a site in central Turkey which is billed as one of the oldest cities in the world, dating back to some 8,000 years ago. It’s more of a town than a city, with houses all jumbled together, no streets, cryptic paintings on some of the walls, and dead people interred within the floors.
We know very little about the people who once lived here. We don’t know what language they spoke, what they called themselves, what sort of gods they worshipped, what other people called them–hardly anything at all, beyond the mere physical remains of the town. It’s really hard to find out much about any vanished culture when they’ve left behind no writing.
But that doesn’t stop some of today’s archaeologists from generating a new “theory” that the figures represent “older women who had achieved a special status within their egalitarian agricultural community–with fatness as a sign of prestige and special respected status due to age.”
Whoa! We do not know any such thing. This is PC-infected archaeologists sweeping along in their search for a lost feminist Golden Age. Which they seem to have their hearts set on discovering, no matter what.
Wishful thinking and political correctness has become part of the scientific method, these days.
For all we know, the people of Catalhoyuk might have lived under a tyrant who told them when to go to bed at night. Maybe what we’re looking at is a lost civilization that really sucked to live in. Why did they bury their dead under the living room floor? We simply don’t know.
Take your “science” with more than just one grain of salt.
I can’t help but laugh at the artfully crafted stories these people come up with. I’ve seen this with all sorts of “documentaries” which purport to explain some archaeological or paleontological finding, and all of a sudden there’s a bedtime story to accompany it and, believe it or not, it is committed to video tape sounding like fact, not fiction.
The fact is, we know little about many ancient peoples and have to surmise a great deal. The fact is, much had been lost to history and the scant evidence available is just that, scant.
We know things about the Assyrians, for example, because they wrote a lot of their culture down and we can read their writing, plenty of it has survived; and we can also read what other people wrote about them at the time. But we would know none of that, without the writing. Take away the inscriptions, and you don’t have much. In the 18th century, when the only source of information about the Assyrians was the Bible, “scholars” were doubtful that such a civilization had ever existed. True, they should’ve believed the Bible. But that would require more humility than scholars have at their command.
Scientific speculation is fine if it is identified by its perpetrators as such, but true Science is based on evidence: observation and repeatable testing. For instance, true Science has no way to make scientific pronouncements on the origin of the universe, or even the beginnings of organic life. It is all speculation dressed up as true science. The long-age evolution speculation continues to be peddled as fact, and don’t you dare disagree with them or you will be labeled an outcast. All I can say is, “Outliers unite!!”
Awfully hard to observe and test evolution, etc.
What I want to know is how do they date these things? How can rocks and stones be dated? I’m always a little dubious when they throw out these numbers like they know for certain.
They date by context. It’s somewhat circular logic; they “know” the date of something because it was found in context with other items, but sometimes it just turns I to an educated guess and they decide whatever they want, because hard evidence is not easy to come by.
It’s not entirely spurious, if they find a trove of items in one setting they might have a pretty good idea of the date because they would know, for instance, that iron objects were not commonly used before a certain era, etc. Of course the problem is that at some point they had to make assumptions in order to come up with the baseline dates that they use to calibrate everything else. That’s where it can easily become circular logic.
At Catalhoyuk they’ve got a lot of bones and bits of wood, so they can use Carbon-14 dating, which isn’t too bad. But it can’t be used on anything that was never alive, so that lets out stones and metal.
“theory” that the figures represent “older women who had achieved a special status within their egalitarian agricultural community–with fatness as a sign of prestige and special respected status due to age.” LOL!!!!! Unhinged doesn’t begin to describe these whatchamacallits. Get the salt shakers!