Forum Archaeology
Posted: Mon Dec 10, 2012 8:21 am
Do you think future historians will go back to web forums and analyze what people have posted to glean topics about history?
Another day in the Universe
https://www.onthenatureofthings.net/forum/
https://www.onthenatureofthings.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1484
Perhaps so. It would be interesting to see. I am very curious about how the nature of 'sourcing' will alter. Maybe some historian will lock onfo some forum, say this one, and find some theories outside the mainstream of his field and make it a school of historical thought.YMix wrote:It should at least give them an idea about our delusions.
In April, OR Books published Tweets from Tahrir, a book of tweets sent from Ground Zero of the democratic revolution that played out in Egypt last year. The book, its promotions declare, "brings together a selection of key tweets in a compelling, fast-paced narrative, allowing the story of the uprising to be told directly by the people in Cairo's Tahrir Square. History has never before been written in this fashion."
But tweets are fragile things. A year after the Tahrir's tweets were posted, much of the information they first shared has gone missing. According to a study conducted by Hany SalahEldeen Khalil, a phD student in computer science and Web preservation at Old Dominion University, a third of the images initially included in Tweets from Tahrir -- 7 out of 23 -- seem to have disappeared entirely from the Web. A small slice of the historical record, gone -- archived not digitally, but in the pages of a book.
Those tweets, though, were lucky. Most social media content doesn't have the luxury of paper-bound back-up. Services like Storify have risen up not only to curate social media, but also to archive its content; those services, however, rely on third-party partner relationships -- they refer to media assets, rather than storing them -- and so work as archives only in the broadest sense.
On Storify, in SalahEldeen's sample, 222 of the set's tweets pointed to external resources like images, videos, and links. Today, only 198 of those tweets retain those external assets -- a loss of nearly 11 percent.
(To remove the possibility of transient errors skewing the results, SalahEldeen and his colleagues repeated their experiment 3 times over a period of three weeks before finally declaring a resource to be missing.) Overall, SalahEldeen found, a whopping 10 percent of the social media documentation of the Egyptian revolution -- for the study's purposes, the stretch between January 20 and March 1, 2011 -- has disappeared.
5,000-Year-Old Moon-Shaped Monument Found in Israel
By: Shira Kipnees
An enormous crescent-shaped stone structure has been discovered just a few miles northwest of Israel’s Sea of Galilee. The monument, which dates back to between 3050 B.C.E. and 2650 B.C.E., is almost 500,000 cubic feet in volume and approximately 492 feet long. Originally, archeologists thought that the structure was a part of a city wall. However, when Ido Wachtel, an Israeli doctoral student at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, found out that there was not a city around the “wall,” he realized that it was a stand-alone monument.
“The proposed interpretation for the site is that it constituted a prominent landmark in its natural landscape, serving to mark possession and to assert authority and rights over natural resources by a local rural or pastoral population,” Wachtel wrote in a presentation for the International Congress on Archaeology of the Ancient Near East.
Wachtel told Live Science in an email that the monument’s crescent shape stood out in the landscape and that the shape may have had symbolic importance, since the lunar crescent is a symbol of an ancient Mesopotamian moon god named Sin.
An ancient town called Bet Yerah (which translates in English to “house of the moon god”) is only a day’s walk from the moon-shaped monument Wachtel found. Due to this, the monument may have helped to shape the town’s borders. Despite the fact that the monument is in walking range of the city, it is too far away to be an effective way of fortifying the city.
“The estimation of working days invested in the construction [of] the site is between 35,000 days in the lower estimate [and] 50,000 in the higher,” Wachtel said in the email to Live Science.
If the lower estimate is right, it means that a team of 200 ancient workers would have needed more than five months to build the structure, a task that would have been hard for people who depended on crops for their livelihood. “We need to remember that people were [obligated] most of the year to agriculture,” Wachtel said.
According to the Archeological Institute of America, Bet Yerah, which is also “Khirbet Kerak” in Arabic, was a fortified city that existed throughout the Early Bronze Age, which was around 3000 B.C.E. Despite the fact that the town’s name seems to indicate some type of association with the moon god, and thus, a connection with the monument, it is unclear whether or not this town was known by this name 5,000 years ago.