Intellectual hooliganism topic: Middle Earth Archaeology

[Faramir Jones]

Originally Posted by Annalaliath

Yay for dredging upld topics....

While waiting to toast the Professer this year a few of us from the UNM Hobbit Society started talking abkut archaeology in Middle Earth... Again. I never got around to writing the paper, school, and work happened instead.
Some of the topics that were brought up:
1. The people burried in the dead marshes, and the implications of living friends and family not wanting to have them dug up and studied.
2. Geology
3. With those that live so long, who cares about archaeology, you can talk to an eye witness...

But that would be sometime after the war of the ring, rather than a future society that might evolve later.

Regarding topic 3, I still think there would be people who would want to check on the accuracy of some of the eye witnesses' accounts. It's not that they believe that the relevant people lied; it's that the accuracy of their accounts might be affected by other factors. We see this in the growth of the discipline of battlefield archaeology:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlefield_archaeology

http://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/humanit...ldarchaeology/

We can see this issue discussed on page 3 of a document on the discipline:

How this archaeological evidence is studied and more importantly, how it is interpreted, is of the greatest importance. It can and should be distinguished from the historical literary evidence, which is usually based on personal accounts of the event and is not always necessarily reliable. Few, if any of those at a scene of conflict, can give an accurate account of the entire event, as sites of conflict are by their very nature traumatic and confusing places. They also often cover large areas of ground. The observer might not even have known how large the conflict was, or how many casualties were taken on another part of the field. The larger picture of the conflict therefore depends upon a general overview and this was usually supplied by one of the leaders of one faction. Apart from the bias inherent in such a view, it also relies upon an interpretation of the event, rather than an objective account.

In order to gain a more accurate understanding of the event, such as its scale or the number of dead, an account should ideally be obtained from something or someone who would not provide, or profit from, a distorted version of it - someone who would provide a neutral viewpoint. Although on a practical level this could be done by analysing the residue - the concentrations of artefacts left on the ground after the conflict - on a personal level, this is an almost impossible task, as the notion of conflict is often distorted by an inability to distance
oneself from most of its forms.

http://www.bajr.org/documents/bajrbattleguide.pdf