What HappensWhen Students Are PreventedFrom Doing Novel Research?
"Marshall McLuhan, half-length portrait, standing, leaning
on television set on which his image appears."
on television set on which his image appears."
There are 3 realities of Marshall McLuhan in this picture.
1) A photograph on a film strip (see the sprocket holes left and right),
2) The man himself learning on the TV, and
3) An electronic image of him on the TV screen.
1) A photograph on a film strip (see the sprocket holes left and right),
2) The man himself learning on the TV, and
3) An electronic image of him on the TV screen.
A huge obstacle to research about the prehistoric era has been entrenched opinions and inaccurate preconceptions. Many incorrect assumptions have been made by respected authorities that prevented discussions and research, for example.
If an idea or school of thought is off the table, it has a chilling effect. If a student wants to explore a controversial idea, he or she is often marginalized. Even good papers that discuss unpopular ideas are given lower grades. Then other students may not want to be associated with that person, original research will be discouraged, and funding will be out of the question. In brief, a student's entire career may be at stake, and who is willing to risk that for an idea that may or may not be useful or true?
When I started to write this particular article about this subject, I realized I had a personal example from my years in college.
In 1970 I started graduate school in media. I was getting my Master's Degree in Communication at the Department of Radio, TV, and Motion Pictures known as RTVMP at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
And almost from the moment I arrived, my classmates and I were told that we would not read, discuss, or be allowed to write papers on the ideas of Marshall McLuhan, the popular writer who had original and challenging ideas about modern media. We were told that he was not a serious thinker [their exact phrase]. Admittedly he was controversial, but he was also supported by many in his field.
I had been in school long enough to know, that "you can't fight city hall" so it would have been pointless to argue. But I had read several of McLuhan's books by that time and believed that his predictions about the future had merit.
So the department prevented any discussion of McLuhan's ideas about the future of human culture being electronic, that computers and digital technology would be available to just about everyone, and that people would be interconnected worldwide in a global village (his phrase).
There was an earth-shaking change in media and we were not allowed to even discuss it.
And this was a department in media!
Now today, of course, McCluhan is seen as a visionary thinker who not only understood the coming electronic world but helped to shape it.
Back then I knew what my teachers said was nonsense but I held my tongue.
Yet now I wonder what we missed as graduate students at that time. We should have had spirited discussions and taken part in the media revolution which was just around the corner. We were there at the right moment in history but prevented from following through. Our entire culture and the world's cultures would be affected and we should have been at the forefront of this change. Instead, we were shut out and on the sidelines.
BTW: When I was teaching English Composition at a local college, I made the point that my opinion about a subject would never affect a student's grade if they disagreed with me. What was important was the evidence they had found and the strength of their argument. For example, I am totally opposed to the death penalty as innocent people are at times executed. But I made sure the students understood that if they were in support of the death penalty I would grade their papers on its merits and not on whether they agreed with me.
About ten years later, I bought my first inexpensive personal computer, a Radio Shack Color Computer known as the CoCo. So I was able to use a simple word processing program that FINALLY did what I wanted when it came to editing and revising my work. I could cut and paste, for example, I could move sentences around, I could spell check. I could spend hours tweaking my text until it sounded right instead of having to type and retype draft after draft as I had done with a typewriter. As a person who spent a lot of time revising, I now had the right tool to polish my work -- and it took a computer to let me do that. And this was part of what Marshall McLuhan had predicted. He believed that new electronic devices would have flexibility and power never seen before. He also predicted that they would be widely available, affordable, and not difficult to use.
Now, to be fair, there are plenty of unusual ideas that probably are not worth pursuing. But if a student or researcher can make a good case, backed by evidence and supported by some respected thinkers, they should be allowed to follow these ideas.
In the case of McLuhan, we students had plenty of evidence that technology was evolving toward an electronic future as McLuhan predicted. When I started graduate school it had been eight years since the Telstar Communication Satellite had been launched in 1962, followed by 4 others (up to 1970). Video was already electronic. Electronic sound recordings, i.e., tape recordings, had been around for over 20 years. And newspaper writers had begun to use basic word processing software in the mid-sixties.
LEFT: Telstar 2 satellite. First launched in 1962 this class of satellites relayed electronic television pictures, telephone calls, and telegraph images, plus live transatlantic television feeds.
RIGHT: World coverage of a later Telstar satellite.
But our teachers were definitely old school, although they were helpful and skilled. They were locked into an outdated point of view and they did not see the writing on the wall.
I say all of this in this blog because my articles about prehistory often involve an explanation about why an early idea had been rejected. And why, now, that early idea has been accepted. More often than not, an incorrect assumption has been one of the barriers.
While I will do a full article about this, here are examples of two major assumptions that have affected the study and research of prehistory.
----- A GENERAL FALSE ASSUMPTION -----
THE EVOLUTION OF HUMANITY WENT FROM SAVAGERY TO BARBARISM TO CIVILIZATION
Lewis H. Morgan wrote, more than a hundred years ago, that he believed the evolution of humanity went from savagery to barbarism to civilization, meaning that the Neolithic cultures were barbaric and Paleolithic people were savages. And for many people, this attitude has remained.
This is clearly a modern-centric point of view that sees civilization as superior and the pinnacle of human development. This point of view ignores the constant warring between nations, warring that started at the same time that civilization took hold, (Mesopotamia had regular wars), and ignores massive turmoil such as the two World Wars in which perhaps a hundred million people were killed or dislocated. It also ignores problems with overpopulation and the worldwide damage to the environment.
It is interesting to note many of civilization's greatest achievements had a dark side. Isaac Newton's insights that led to the Industrial Revolution were also used to make artillery and other weapons more accurate, powerful, and lethal. And Einstein's famous e=mc2 equation led directly to the atomic bomb.
But old ideas and attitudes are hard to shed.
The first task is to rid ourselves of outdated ideas about 'stone age', 'primitive', 'savage', and 'uncivilized' people. This needs to be done before we can tackle more specific biases. Many ideas about primitive technologies, for example, have prevented our understanding of stone age skills and their precision, such as the exact alignment of the Neolithic passageway at Newgrange Ireland with the sun's position at the time of the winter solstice.
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Bushmen hunter in Africa.
While this may look primitive from our modern point of view, imagine the skill needed for this kind of life. The Bushman made the bow which had to be flexible and not break while holding the extreme tension of the bowstring. Then he needed to find straight shafts for the arrows, make arrowheads, attach the arrowheads to the shafts, make the twine for the bowstring, and then bend the bow to attach the string, along with a container for the arrows -- followed by a day of hunting, butchering and then cooking while not being attacked by wild animals.
According to anthologists, Homo sapiens 50,000 years ago were just as smart and skilled as people today. They made the most out of the technology they had while living in rugged dangerous conditions and coping with diseases and very short life spans.
----- A SPECIFIC FALSE ASSUMPTION -----
BASKETRY AND WEAVING COULD ONLY HAVE BEGUN IN THE NEOLITHIC ERA BECAUSE IT REQUIRED A SEDENTARY LIFESTYLE WITH TIME FOR A LABOR-INTENSIVE SKILL
This one assumption set the study of basketry and woven-fiber technology back about 100 years.
"The conventional wisdom has been that a time-consuming task like weaving would only be practiced by sedentary, agrarian cultures. [ED: i.e., Neolithic societies]" said Dr. Adovasio in an interview with Discover Magazine.[1] However, this was only an assumption that the evidence did not justify.
After reading an almost forgotten book by noted French archeologist Gustave Chauvet, Dr. Paul Bahn wrote in 2001 that, “It is a long overdue development that, 90 years after Chauvet’s publication, prehistory seems ready to, at last, accept the probably HUGE IMPORTANCE OF BASKETRY [ED: my emphasis] and simple weaving in the Upper Palaeolithic.” [2]
Known as the Venus of Brassempouy, she was found in France in 1894 and is about 25,000 years old. She is carved out of ivory and has what appears to be a woven headdress or braided hair.
Other 'Venus' figurines with much more detailed head braiding that clearly showed weaving were also found from the same time period at other Upper Paleolithic locations. This weaving, however, was not recognized by male anthropologists. It took many years before women anthropologists, who came later, pointed this out. So this example shows that a form of weaving did exist in the Upper Paleolithic era and that the evidence was available around 1900. In addition, the ability to do this kind of weaving suggested that weaving with fibers also existed at the same time.
It is now understood that basketry and woven-fiber technology may have been a key early technology in addition to stone tools. But because of this incorrect assumption, research, archaeology, and theorizing were prevented.
The study of basketry languished for about a hundred years because evidence of Paleolithic baskets had never been found. People in authority insisted that there had to be clear physical evidence even though all agreed that evidence, which was older than the Neolithic, would have decayed. But at the same time, everyone also agreed that there must have been a plant-based technology in addition to stone-tool-making since Paleolithic people were surrounded by plants.
In other words, the 'possibility' of basketry should have been allowed which might have led to an earlier discovery of evidence.
Finally, at last, with the discovery of impressions of basket weaving on clay, it was definitively established that sophisticated weaving was present 27,000 years ago. Moreover the skill and advanced level of the weaving surprised everyone.
And there was more. New studies showed that the original assumptions were wrong to begin with. A study of contemporary hunter-gatherers and horticulture societies (similar to the Neolithic) showed that hunter-gatherers had more free time than sedentary farmers. [3]
Moreover, basketry was well suited for nomadic hunter-gatherers because it could be made from a wide variety of local plants, well-made baskets lasted generations, and baskets were light, strong, easy to carry, and the technology was extremely versatile. It even included baskets for cooking and carrying water. [4]
Also, indirect evidence had been found in the 1800s but it was not recognized. Many awls were discovered in caves and awls were often used to make baskets. This was clearly stated in Smithsonian publications about Native American Indian basketry that were published around 1900. Many of the Indian tribes were nomadic hunter-gatherers who lived a lifestyle quite similar to European Upper Paleolithic people. [4]
All of this suggested that basketry or woven-fiber technology had begun much earlier than previously thought, reaching as far back as the Lower Paleolithic era or millions of years ago. But since research had been prevented, the study of basketry is today far behind what it might have been if anthropologists had been allowed to consider it as a Paleolithic technology.
"Wichita Indian group building a lodge."
This construction may look primitive from our modern point of view but these buildings were strong, comfortable, and made with great skill from natural materials. Using a basket-like internal structure, the sides were then thatched, a technology still in wide use today in Europe.
[1] Menon, Shanti. "The Basket Age." Discover Magazine, January 1996 Issue. https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-basket-age The author of this article in Discover Magazine wondered if the Paleolithic (Old Stone Age) should be renamed the Basket Age -- since baskets may have been more important.
[2] Bahn, Dr. Paul. (2001). "Palaeolithic weaving – a contribution from Chauvet." Antiquity, 75:271-272.
[3] The University of Cambridge. "Farmers have less leisure time than hunter-gatherers." ScienceDaily, 21 May 2019. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/05/190520115646.htm>. Accessed 09/23/2020.
[4] Aboriginal American Basketry: studies in a textile art without machinery. Contributors: Mason, Otis Tufton; Coville, Frederick Vernon. Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution; Report of the U.S. National Museum. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904.
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