The Archaeologist And The Oil Drop
“Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It’s a little bit off, because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It’s interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of the electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bigger than Millikan’s, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
Why didn’t they discover that the new number was higher right away? It’s a thing that scientists are ashamed of—this history—because it’s apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan’s, they thought something must be wrong—and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number closer to Millikan’s value they didn’t look so hard.”
Richard Feynman, “Cargo Cult Science”
In 1963 an archaeological survey partially excavated limestone pillars on a Turkish hilltop. The archaeologists believed these were medieval tombstones dating to the Byzantine empire. 30 years later, the archaeologist Klaus Schmidt recognized clues that the site was likely much older and excavated it more thoroughly. There, at Göbekli Tepe, he discovered a neolithic monumental complex thought to be 11,500 years old. What had initially been identified as tombstones were merely the tops of massive 18-foot pillars.
According to the generally accepted timelines, Göbekli Tepe was built thousands of years before the invention of agriculture. As such, Schmidt believed this massive site was built by nomadic tribes, who would visit it briefly for religious rites without interrupting their wandering ways. In contrast to the usual theory, that civilization came into being in tandem with agriculture in the Fertile Crescent, Schmidt argued that Göbekli Tepe proves hierarchical and state-like social organization predates agriculture, since the pastoralist nomads were able to able to recruit, organize, and feed the vast manpower needed to construct such a site.
Since Schmidt’s death in 2014, continued excavation has discovered evidence of domestic settlement and large-scale cereal processing at Göbekli Tepe. A 2019 paper by Dietrich et al. documents 7268 tools for grinding grain at the site. Rather than seeing this as evidence of sedentary agricultural life, the authors remain muted in their interpretation. “As no large storage facilities have been identified, we argue for a production of food for immediate use and interpret these seasonal peaks in activity at the site as evidence for the organization of large work feasts.”
It seems more likely that Göbekli Tepe was simply an agricultural city. The reason the architecture looks like a normal agricultural civilization, and does not look like anything we confidently know was built by nomads, is that it was a normal agricultural civilization rather than very unusual nomads. Schmidt estimated that only 5% of the site had been excavated shortly before he died in 2014, so continued investigation may someday uncover the “large storage facilities” whose absence was so persuasive to Dietrich et al.
Agricultural civilization is very likely older than is generally accepted. Our present archaeology has probably not identified the first-ever agricultural society, and perhaps we never will. On this hypothesis, the consensus for the beginning of agriculture will continue to be pushed earlier and earlier, first to 11,500 years ago and eventually further than that. Like the physicists Feynman describes, historians are being reluctantly dragged in a predictable direction by a predictable pattern of evidence. In 2015 a team of archaeologists published evidence of “small-scale trial cultivation” and “proto-weeds” 23,000 years ago, at a site twice the age of Göbekli Tepe.
“Beware lest you fight a rearguard retreat against the evidence, grudgingly conceding each foot of ground only when forced, feeling cheated. Surrender to the truth as quickly as you can. Do this the instant you realize what you are resisting; the instant you can see from which quarter the winds of evidence are blowing against you”
Eliezer Yudkowsky, “Twelve Virtues of Rationality”
Rearguard actions are not always so steady and incremental. In 1912 Alfred Wegener published a paper arguing that the continents move. He noted that the coastlines and geological formations on opposite sides of the Atlantic line up nearly perfectly, and that fossil remains of ancient creatures were found on opposite sides of the ocean which they could not possibly have crossed, among other arguments. Wegener’s proposed explanation for how the continents move was wrong, but his explanations of apparent geological and biological mysteries which only made sense under continental drift are now considered correct.
At the time Wegener’s work was mostly dismissed, on the basis that continents moving sounds completely bananas. Only a small fringe of geologists continued to develop the continental drift theory. It was not until half a century later, when a separate research tradition discovered the theory of plate tectonics and provided a convincing mechanism for how continents could move, that continental drift rapidly became the scientific consensus.
More on this in a forthcoming article from Elizabeth Van Nostrand.
A thousand years ago, the inhabitants of what’s now the eastern United States were building cities and megastructures. The grandest of these sites we’ve discovered is the Cahokia complex of earth mounds, including the famous Monks Mound, whose base is the same size as that of the Pyramid of Giza, and the infamous Mound 72, which contains the remains of a mass human sacrifice of 53 young women who appear to be captives taken from a foreign ethnic group. Other mounds, smaller than Monks Mound but clearly large enough to require organized labor forces, are scattered throughout the Mississippi Valley and the eastern United States.
We don’t know why these cities collapsed, and probably never will. We don’t even know what they called themselves. Archaeological evidence shows it disintegrated well before Europeans and their diseases arrived. We have found no writing from these people, and whatever oral histories of their collapse may have existed in 1492 did not survive the European contact.
While the evidence is not in dispute, academics generally avoid calling this civilization a civilization, and speak of the “Mississippian culture” or the “Mound Builders”. They admit that the people lived in cities at the largest sites. They admit that there is clear evidence of hierarchical social structure with differentiated social classes and professional administrators—they insist on describing this political structure as “complex chiefdoms” rather than “city-states”. They admit that larger cities ruled over weaker cities nearby—this was “settlement hierarchy”, not “imperialism”. Most scholars admit that the mounds were clearly built by large-scale mobilization of labor, probably on a corvee basis, although occasionally there are implausible proposals that the mounds were built by disorganized individuals bringing a single basketful of earth when they happened to visit the site, or other silly ways to deny the obvious evidence of well-organized labor mobilization.
Everyone knows that the Native Americans—or at least the North Americans—were noble savages who lived in harmony with the earth and could paint with all the colors of the wind. To say that the land was once inhabited by a civilization whose lives were closer to the Aztecs or the Mayas than to the small tribes who the Europeans encountered sounds as crazy as the idea of moving continents. There may be undisputed facts which cannot possibly square with the popular view, but these facts are unknown to most Americans. They are spoken only in euphemism and whisper, where it will not intrude on civic mythology.