> Archaeology has historically assumed that European civilization was more significant and advanced than others, a view possibly rooted in ethnocentrism and racism, but findings like these challenge that assumption.
Please just say what you want to say without pasting a bunch of fluff from a chat bot.
It amounts to this decade's version of talking in a robotic monotone.
The truth is that classical archaeology is often just easier, because we have a lot of writing from that time period telling us where battles happened etc.
I’m sure archaeologist would love to open up a whole new front, but it takes time to find stuff that’s hard to find.
Most of the "foundations of western civilisation" is not actually european and that's a well known and accepted fact. Yes, greeks and romans sure, but where did the greeks take the alphabet? It's not controversial, everybody knows that europeans didn't invent writing nor civilization.
It's also unsurprising that the first ancient civilizations to have been discovered by europeans were a) closer to europe (at least in the same continent) and b) not covered by jungle.
If there are people in Europe who are ignorant of that, well that's unfortunate. But the world won't become a better place if all we do is to shame those people with self-flagellatory insinuations that they should re-think their place in the world or whatever. That doesn't work. The natural tendency of people who are looked down upon is to react and entrench themselves even deeper in their positions.
I'd vastly prefer if we just teach to marvel at the beauty of our world and hopefully people who are willing to open up their minds will be attracted to the diversity and depth of our collective human experience and become less and less parochial.
Do you _actually_ feel shamed by the researcher, or by reading the researcher's opinion? Why feel shame over something you think is wrong? There were no admonishments or moral proclamations -- from whence cometh your shame?
Also, there's some irony that you say "if all we do is shame people..." --- Don't lump me in with you! Isn't that your problem with the quote to begin with?
I personally know people who do feel that kind of rhetoric to be a personal attack on their tribe. I don't personally belong to that tribe or even like that tribe but it exists and they're being energized by all those attacks. I like liberal values and I'm saddened by the rise of reactionaries. If I want to protect liberal values I know that being a jerk against conservatives is counterproductive. I don't care if it feels good, it's not effective.
EDIT: I don't think the researcher or the journalist or you or anybody in particular is at fault here; we all react to the incentives around us. My dig is against the pattern and the perverse incentives that are creating this environment in the first place.
1) Western europeans are probably the people least in need of that reminder. They’re probably the least ethnocentric culture in the world, having voluntarily adopted a Mediterranean civil society (from the Romans) and Middle Eastern religion. They’re NPCs in some of their own most important stories.
Maybe it’s different in Europe, but American kids spend inordinate amounts of time learning about other cultures (native Americans, Mesopotamians, Egyptians) and comparatively little time learning about their own. European history isn’t even a part of most American curricula.
2) Which cultures invented rockets and sent people to space?
It seems to me that none of the time students spend on subjects like Mesoamerican History are "inordinate", since students take history for a fixed, small number of semesters. You can definitely ordinate the time here.
I was born in India, and the best resources I have to learn about the history of my ancestors were written by German anthropologists in the 1920s and 1930s. Just because they came from an increasingly xenophobic society, does not mean that categorization should automatically apply to them and their work. The most biased historical perspectives, interestingly enough, seem to come from Indian scholarship - usually by claiming the authors of the Vedas knew everything there is to know about science and the natural world.
The reason I take the time to even write a response here is because propagating a biased view of history can harm people. A vast majority of Indians believe that Ayurvedic remedies are more effective than modern medicine, and many pay for engaging in this widespread anti-colonial perspective with their lives.
You say archeology isn't 'deeply entwined' with white supremacy and yet use 1920s/30s german/nazi archeologists as your example of non-white supremacists? Modern archeology developed in the 1800s along with social darwinism and white supremacy. That modern archeology and white supremacy was 'deeply entwined' is well established.
> Just because they came from an increasingly xenophobic society, does not mean that categorization should automatically apply to them and their work.
They were white supremacists. White supremacy was backed by science then ( social darwinism ). Pretty much all european scientists/academics/etc believed in white supremacy. So the categorization does apply. But that doesn't mean the quality of their work is bad or it should be dismissed out of hand.
I am not saying you're incorrect - for example, the German Anthropologie school (largely centered around the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute from 1927 onwards) was famous for its pseudo-scholarship on racial disparities. However, this is by no means a blanket statement on European scholarship - one notable exception that comes to mind is Max Müller [1], who was famously accused of being anti-Christian for his admiration of Eastern cultures, and was "deeply saddened by the fact that these classifications later came to be expressed in racist terms".
Likewise, there are several German authors whose books sit on my parent's bookshelf that provided objective anthropological history of India (e.g. on the Kuru kingdom and PGW civilization) without editorializing a white supremacist narrative onto it.
Also, the Nazi party only came to prominence in the 1930s, after they had sufficiently terrorized the population to go along with their racial policies, and forced academia to go along with their unscientific ideology - a notoriously similar trend is going on in America today.
The roots of Eurocentrism can be traced back to ideologies like white supremacy, which historically asserted the superiority of white Europeans over other races. This belief in racial hierarchy, unfortunately, influenced various scientific and cultural fields, including the interpretation of archaeological findings. For instance, the concept of phrenology, now discredited, was once used to claim inherent intellectual and moral superiority of certain races over others, particularly to justify the superiority of whites over other races.
It's crucial to understand that human civilization has a rich and diverse origin, much of which began in regions outside of Europe. The earliest known civilizations and significant cultural developments originated in various parts of the world, including Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The reluctance to acknowledge the contributions and advancements of non-European civilizations often stems from a reluctance to challenge the long-standing narrative of white supremacy.