Will determine the conclusions you come to. These words including the title are a mild paraphrase from the book Dismantling the Big Bang and are found on pg. 16 of that work.
Those words are true and apply to both archaeology and anthropology. We find many examples of the application of those words in the book The Practical Archaeologist. We will take some quotes from its pages to show how true those words are.
For many years, scholars speculated that the Polenysian islands of the Pacific might have been colonized from SOuth America.
However, the idea was generally rejected because the boats available to the South Americans at the time of colonization was supposed to have taken place were not considered capable of long ocean voyages (pg. 148)
There are actually two assumptions in this quote. The first is that there may have been boats capable of long ocean voyages in South America which led to the speculation the Polynesian islands were colonized from that continent.
The second is the assumption there were not these boats and colonization had to take place from another geographical starting point. Thor Heyerdahl with his boat The Kon Tiki proved the first assumption true. The boats available could make the voyage.
The first assumption brought a successful conclusion but the second made everyone look elsewhere for how the Polynesian islands were colonized.
In a pioneering studystudy in the 1970s,the Canadian archaeologist Robson Bonnichsen examined a Canadian Indian camp that had been abandoned reltively recently; he interpreted the archaeological evidence he recovered in term sof activities that took place there aand the number, ages, and sex of the inhabitants (pg. 149)
His conclusions, while short-lived, were drawn from the assumptions he made through his interpretive skills and ideas about the camp. However, when he talked to an Indian woman, Millie, who had once lived in the camp and asked her to tell him what the inhabitants did, and about the inhabitants themselves, her answers contradicted many of Mr. Bonnichsen’s conclusions (also pg. 149).
Mr. Bonnichsen’s assumptions drew him to faulty conclusions about the Indian camp. However, there is a drawback to his methods. It seems he only asked one person, relying on her memory and not any verifiable facts, to see where he went wrong.
This was an unreliable experiment filled with too many errors that may have distorted the results and brought further erroneous information to it. This experiment was not conducted very well and of course, we are missing more information on how it was conducted, but the point is there, what one assumes, determines the results. Then we have the following:
Raymond Dart’s battle from the 1920s to have his Australopithecus accepted as hominid… encouraged him to search for evidence of specifically human behavior, in particular the manufacture of tools and the regular consumption of meat.
Baboon skulls discovered in caves near the Austrealopithecus sites in southern Africa had depressions in them that Dart considered had been caused by blows from clubs.
That implied to Dart that Australopithecus hunted and killed game. Furthermore, the caves did not contain complete baboon skeletons but only certain bones. Dart concluded that those had been retained because of theirpotential usefulness as tools (pg. 153)
Dart’s assumption that his discovery was close to being human led him to the results that they acted like humans in certain ways. He came to these conclusions regardless of the fact that the caves and the skeletons had no connection to Australopithecus.
What he did was read into his discovery what he wanted to be there in order to prove his assumptions correct. He also did not apply real scientific fact to the discovery of the skulls as the missing bones could easily have rotted away like bones do.
They may not have been used for tools and even if they were, there is no way Dart could verify his claims. He started out with an assumption and then sought what he could to support them even though nothing supported those ideas.
If the Australopithecus lived 3 million years ago as Dart and other anthropologists claim, then the baboon skulls could have come a million or more years after the Australopithecus and never encountered them.
As other studies have shown with other animal bones, the missing bones could have been food for dogs, lions, and other wild animals. There is nothing to indicate those baboons were hunted by a creature thought to be part human and part ape.
The assumptions go even further as those scientists who studied the teeth of the few examples of Australopithecus came to the conclusion that that creature was a vegetarian. But there is no way to truly prove that conclusion is true as there are many reasons why the teeth may have been so clean from meat evidence.
The assumption that evolution is true leads many scientists to the faulty conclusions they hold today.
Another, by Professor Lewis Binford…proposed that Mousterian man constructed basic ‘tool kits’ that vaired according to the specific task to be performed.
Binford and his wife Sally used a computer to analyze which artefacts tended to be regularly associated with each other, forming tool kits. (pg. 155)
It is not a surprise that their results produced between 5 to 14 such tool kits depending on the area in which the Mousterian Man lived. There would be no need to use a computer as common sense would tell anyone that ancient humans had different tools for different tasks just like today.
However, they may not have been compiled into a ‘tool kit’. Again, trying to verify these conclusions is impossible as no ancient records provide any corroborating evidence to support that professor’s assumptions or conclusions.
But he started with a specific assumption and got the results he was looking for even though there is a wide margin for error:
Of those (tools) that do survive, only a proportion will be found by archaeologists digging a small part of the site. SO the variations in the Mousterian assemblages could be purely due to chance (pg. 155)
In other words, the conclusions and results reached may not be accurate or true because of the minute representation uncovered and other factors.
The Tsomkwe Bushmen of Nambia are nomadic hunter-gatherers whos elifestyle has change d little over thousands of years. Their pattern is to migrate to different areas as food supplies vary according to the season. By studying the life patterns of such primitive tribes, archaeologists are able to gain valuable insight intomany aspects of prehistoric communities (pg.156)
There are several assumptions made in that short quote. The first is that this tribe remained in the same lifestyle for thousands of years. With no written records or any other evidence that cannot be proven true.
A second assumption would be that the elders relating their history were remembering it correctly or were taught the truth. Societies and histories change over the generations.
A final assumption is that archaeologists believe that by studying present-day primitive tribes they will get information about ancient tribes. That is not so as there is no telling what differences there would be between modern tribes and ancient ones.
Life would be different as the ancient world may not have had the exact same environment as the one modern primitive tribes live in. You cannot study the present and know what took place in the past.
Archaeological assumptions often lead archaeologists on wild goose chases. Unfortunately, those archaeologists will not know this and may never find out even if opposing assumptions are presented based on the same evidence.
One of the aspects of archaeology is that everyone has the same evidence. No one has a smoking gun hidden in a closet somewhere. The problem is that archaeologists and other researchers have different opinions which cloud the past.
They look at the same evidence, and the same data and draw their conclusions based on their assumptions about an event, people, or era. Those researchers who hold to an evolutionary history will draw evolutionary conclusions despite the mounting evidence that the theory is wrong.
When archaeologists strive to prove their assumptions correct, they are missing out on the truth because they focus on their assumptions instead of looking for the truth. They do not have a clear idea of what took place in the past as their conclusions are the result of their beginning assumptions.
We cannot trust what most archaeologists and anthropologists conclude because those conclusions are not based on fact but on what they want the evidence to say. When looking at ancient physical remains like burial sites (pgs. 160-161), there are a myriad of reasons why things were found in the way they were.
Without ancient contemporary written verification, any one of those myriad assumptions could be true. But only one can be true, it is very difficult to find that one true idea, especially with so many assumptions and opinions floating around the archaeological world.
If you are not looking for the truth, it is virtually impossible to find it because you are looking in the wrong places after traveling down the wrong roads.
theoarch 