The fact that construction and some planning took place seems to just be evidence that some planning and construction took place.
It's very plausible journalists (including university PR teams) care more about social elitism than the archaeologists which is why it's the HN headline. The archaeologist is just using the only evidence they have which is some pipes, a cemetery, and few remaining structures to extrapolate about the community.
Anyway, with this specific article social stratification is one of those things with little ability to extract a narrative from a single data point, but whose importance emerges when collated with others. And it does sound a bit editorialized for modern narratives, but that's probably not intended by the researchers.
That's why finding their garbage or where they emptied their latrines is often more insightful than finding yet another written record.
Have a look at very old newspapers or magazines. It's almost irrelevant today who won the latest elections or what scandal happened to whom; the old ads are typically the most fascinating part.
Similarly, we have a treasure trove of old clay tablets with complaints, mundane contracts, letters by normal people etc. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-n%C4%81...
Those are much better at shining a light on how people lived, then the typical drivel about 'important' events we get in most early writing.
Generally, archaeology is interested in knowing information about past societies.
Poors - WTF do I want a pyramid for?
For instance, if you saw evidence of a successful space program you'd assume that it requires government. That's because there are natural difficulties with these enterprises that require some degree of coordination because you have free-rider problems, transit provider problems, etc.
The coordination mechanisms can be a whole bunch of things: we use markets very effectively today, but we also use governments or religions.
And yes, it could be another mechanism but someone has to postulate one such mechanism and find tests that it does not fail.
What's interesting is that the evidence pointed overall to one mechanism and now it points to another.
This sort of low-brow stuff fills people who read this stuff so much. "the elites", god.
I don't think these archaeologists are interested in worshipping society's elites. Maybe hundreds of years ago when you had to be an elite to be an archaeologist.
The trouble with the present Chinese state is the manner in which it governs and the deeply flawed presuppositions about society, the state, and the individual that it is founded on. And so in this sense, it is clear why they would want to emphasize centralization to argue in favor of their particular vision of statehood, a kind of Tsarist, or as Koneczny would say, Turanian domination.
Societies do need a state, but it does not follow that they need something like the crushing behemoth that bears down on China.
It usually means a bureaucratic, meritocratic, and stable administration.
China supposedly developed the first state as a result of constant warfare early on.
A friend once received a 10 email tirade over several hours by making some benign metallurgical observations that some bronze was likely imported, because it contradicted this narrative for a given location.
Since you’re using a British Egyptologist as an example and we’re speaking English let’s stick to Great Britain.
The divine right of kings was considered on a significant decline by the Glorious Revolution in the late 1600s so that’s off by several centuries for the genesis of early/gentlemen archaeology began.
The last witch trial in England was also in the late 1600s so again off by several centuries.
And while you are correct about Howard Carter and women’s voting rights I think it’d be important to note that in 1902 parliament had not even given the right to representation for men who weren’t property owners either which was a significant if not majority of men.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_archaeology
Following a few links - William Harvey (b. 1578, graduated from Cambridge 1593) both conducted excavations at Stonehenge, and was a prominent skeptic of allegations of witchcraft. But it was 70 years after his death that the last "legal" execution for witchcraft was performed in the British Isles (Janet Horne, 1727).
Meanwhile, Wikipedia also credits Robert Filmer (graduated from Cambridge 1604) with being one of the most famous exponents of Divine Right, and notes that that issue was pretty much settled - at least in Britain - by the English Civil War (1642-1651).
Lots of things aren't published because they don't confirm the author's pre-existing narratives. And on the other side, there's lots of cherry-picking for stories and papers that do confirm a hypothesis, even if they're outliers or extremely rare or the author is clearly reaching for their desired hypothesis.
It's very Soviet-esque and should concern us all.
Do you have sources that compare pre/post or show how non-conforming but equally significant news did not make it? (The "because of their prejudices" is the hardest thing to prove, you super-rarely get proof-of-intention in such matters, so just these facts should help the seal the case.)
It's pretty useless to compare the post-blog/social media era journalism with old newspapers to compare biases.
Today we have journalism that will shameless give into their journalists personal biases, without editors calling out their bullshit. Quite the opposite, the editors probably want to dig in hard into the journos biases BECAUSE they feed into the reader's biases which get Twitter/FB clicks.
And they recruit based on that ability too.
Now that journalism is a low paying job that pretty much only attracts upper middle class kids who spent way too long in some University liberal arts degree and can afford the low paying early years of writing enough to get a gig at a REAL journo job at NYTimes type places (the few left where some basic level of fact checking and editorial professionalism is done)... which would be the type of orgs you're comparing it to historically.
...idk I feel like comparing the orgs to historical journalism simply on their adherence to bias/academic+journalistic integrity is waste of time. The job, market, and orgs have changed too much to go one-to-one.
It's more a realization that we only have a hierarchical, male dominated point of view on history and that there's a ton of backfill work to do because of that limitation.
> A friend once received a 10 email tirade over several hours by making some benign metallurgical observations
Welcome to science? If they were meeting in person someone would have bounced a muffin off his head. People take what they're doing really seriously.
The problem was that they conflicted with a political narrative someone wanted. If someone takes that more seriously than following the evidence where it leads, they suck and should get out of science.
Be careful to over generalize. There's a clear distinction in political divides between STEM departments and the humanities. But both even have inner differences. As an example, if you study Country X, you may or may not have certain conditions required to gain access to historical documents that are controlled by said country. Even if you don't live in that country and aren't leaving, those documents are on loan from said country and they control access.
Long story short, stop over simplifying things and google Simpson's Paradox.
The sample size of the people I've interacted with is admittedly very small.
Our union doesn't give the STEM departments much respect. They seem to particularly hate CS and the Economists...
Admittedly my sample size is small, but it gives evidence that we shouldn't aggregate beliefs about people. I'll admit, I'm frequently frustrated when people hear I'm in grad school that they immediately think I want to lick Stalin's boot. Such an interaction happened just yesterday on here where a user called me a communist when I was calling meritocracy a fool's errand. They didn't see the irony and somehow those comments got removed. Rare occurrence here...
CS and Economics are the departments least influenced by left wing ideology from what I've gathered. I assume Math and Physics are similar in that respect.
If we trace the latter back through Unix and Bell Labs, both of these come together in the person of Alexander Graham Bell, though his vision of communications technology infrastructure was, of course, quintessentially top-down.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/barbed-wire-telephone-...
(I'd put programmers in with the biologists, roughly.)
Reaction: If the site is "walled" (and not somehow occupied after the builders simply abandoned it), then obviously the engineering skills and social organization for large-scale infrastructure construction do exist.
> The level of complexity associated with these pipes refutes an earlier understanding in archaeological fields that holds that only a centralized state power with governing elites would be able to muster the organization and resources to build a complex water management system.
Reaction: That "understanding" sounds very comfortable and convenient, if you are an archaeologist with elitist social biases, or dependent on support from members of a social elite, or who is a member of his society's social elite. Wealthy and powerful people rationalizing that poor and oppressed people somehow "needed" them was already an old trope when the first pyramid was built.