mia638•6mo ago

Working at the Ness of Brodgar dig made me stop trusting old textbooks

I was on site in Orkney last summer when we found a polished stone axe head in a layer dated to 3200 BCE... but the textbooks said that style didn't show up for another 400 years. The whole site team had to sit down and basically throw out the old timeline for Neolithic tool development in the area. Has anyone else had a find that just broke the accepted story for a region?

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craig.rose6mo ago

That's a cool find, but I'm not sure one axe head means we throw out the whole book. Couldn't it have been an early one-off, or maybe the dating on that layer is a little fuzzy? Textbooks get things wrong, but they're usually wrong in a general way, not completely upside down.

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ivanb416mo ago

A single solid find can absolutely shatter a whole theory.

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christopher675mo ago

@craig.rose points out that my own theories tend to be proven wrong by the simplest kitchen screw-up, so who am I to judge? Maybe the axe head was just having an off day, like my GPS when it tells me to drive into a lake.

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