Dear Cornelius,
At first glance uour experiment seems rather stupid and pure nonsense.
But it is not. It makes one think about, and that is good enough. For an
archaeologist it seems to have no meaning, and indeed it has none, at
least no social meaning expressed in the tread of acts that led to the
deposition of the dish. The actions you describe and your intentions in
doing them are very particular andd idiossincratic and so would be
unretrievable to a future archaeologist excavating your site (unless you
have started a fashion amomg archaeologists that would systematically
repeat, in their backgrounds, the kind of action you did). But it does
not follow that your site would be totally irrelevant to future
archaeologists. The dish is, as it seems, a industrial product, it has a
certain kind of technology incoporated in it, it was produced at a
certain place and the future archaeolgist could compare it with other
dishes, determine if local or imported production, examine its details
for decoration, find patterns among other contemporary materials. The
way it was buried, flat on a smoothed ground and covered by a
homogeneous laeyr of earth, would perhapes indicated that the incavation
was set on purpose, perhaps a ritual one (and what you describe of your
actions sounds very like the report of a ritual), although it would be
impossible to determine the real purpose (that is, none). You did a
symbolic act, prive to yourself, and this symbolic dimension could be
retrieved, but not the symbolic meaning in itself. So, I think, let's
not be so relativistic about archaeology, we can give scientific
meanings even to apparently meaningless acts. We are limited, the tread
of action that led to the final act of enterment are obviously lost for
ever, but objects and their contexts are still goods documents about
their past. We just have to put the possible answers to them, and not
asks for impossible ones,
Cordially
Norberto Luiz Guarinello
Departement of History
University of São Paulo
Brazil
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