AmericanDagda commented on ‘Over Deep Time’ Nov-1-2019 4:22 AM UTC

Unfortunately my sarcasm was missed. Text is such an awful medium.

As to the point my objection is really just to the use of the term "scripture". Havin' grow up in the halls of academia that's just hyperbole and does a disservice to your point. Is there institutional pressure to support or suppress certain narratives? Certainly but the whole of a discipline, much less the whole of the academy, is not a cult that executes nonbelievers though it might deny them access to resources they pursue somethin' unpalatable.

1 - More free time - This one is really situational. The farmer might break his back at plant and harvest but if nothin' else his labor undeniably frees up a percentage of population to pursue somethin' other than subsistence.

2 - Better nutrition - I'm not familiar with the book you're readin' but I doubt it has the reach of say National Geographic which, if anything, is the public gospel on "science". Well Nat Geo ran a special a few years back, I'll try to find a proper link, in which they claimed that the move to agriculture was so malnourishing that humanity lost an entire foot in height and lower life expectancy by 10 yrs. It also humorously turned a bunch of sleek subsaharan spear chuckers into a race of hairy disgruntled paleface dwarves in their dramatic reenactment sequence.

3 - Better explorers - Last time I checked humanity is supposed to have descended upon every corner of the globe to slaughter mega fauna with sharpen sticks long before anybody thought to cultivate wild grasses. If you're familiar with another mainstream narrative you'll have to point me to it.

4 - Better sailors - I thought your citation of Australian aboriginals in the Pacific countered your own point here but I think I begin to understand that your speakin' in particular of European hunter gatherers bein' incapable of such feats without the introduction of miraculous bread.

If that is your point then the closest thing to gospel, which is really an externally applied socio-political pressure, in the archaeological community isn't any of your assertions but simply that the legitimacy of the AmerIndian as the sole inheritor of the American continents must not be challenged and that no legitimacy may be given to the European dominance of them. You can call that a distinction without a difference but I'll have to disagree. Devil's in the details Mr LaFond.

Scripture yes!

They killed a Mexican archaeologist on a dig in the 70s to suppress evidence of greater Pre-Columbian antiquity! I reviewed this documentary about a month ago. Checkout that, Mallory and Keeley, on how one cannot keep a job in this field and earn the sacred bred of life without towing the line. Scripture, bro, scripture, and where does it come from, an atheistic desire to overturn cataclysm narratives that dove-tail with ancient scripture and replace it with graduated change narrative—secular humanist scripture. Try denying Global Warming in front of an Antifa clubhouse and see if you are not stoned.

Scripture!

Also, postmodern media scripture is typically enforced by ostracism, note killing. Example—they fucking blew JFKs brains out, while Trump suffers daily character assassination.

#1: The farmer, like the Roman slave who stocked the massive Roman ships wrecked off Brazil [which exist in reality but not in scripture] gets you cargo and massive ships for hauling cargo. He does not get you nautical range.

#2: Of course there are admitted truths like this, but they have not taken the sheaves of grain off of state seals, changed the food pyramid, or, most importantly, changed the view of the profession in question that grain cultivation is necessary for great works. Yes, authors such as Hancock, Carlson and Bourque [an actual academic] do offer a counter argument, but it is not accepted by the mainstream. The great thing about magazine formats like Nat Geo is that monolithic narratives are regularly fissured with alternatives. Survey the comments on this article for a taste of the inculcated slave worship of grain in our current society:

#3-4: Dude, academic opinion is that they all walked, not sailed, except Eskimos and Aborigines are permitted to have sailed by stone age means to far lands, with Europeans—even farming, steel forging Romans—thought uniquely incapable of doing this despite the Atlantic being less broad than the Pacific. Look at the Siberian Land Bridge theory. Despite Fagan's work 30 years ago it is still the monolithic means of explaining the peopling of the Americas.

My use of the term Gospel is certainly hyperbolic—got me—and meant as a jab at the general sentiment in this nation, in and out of academia, that European Americans are evil, and all the evil they did is—and this is the Good News—being redressed through immigration, affirmative action and other aspects of progressive politics, scholarship and culture. But, I am not an academic, never even passed a single year of high school, and as a writer, I favor style over footnotes, especially when writing on a subject I have hit maybe 30 times in five years.

I suggest reading War Before Civilization by Keeley. He describes how one has to tip-toe through his profession like a Labadist heretic tiptoeing through a Jesuit seminary. The religious take is all mine, of course, not his. Bourque, in the book under review actually obscures many of his findings to get published and veered away from evidence in a documentary interview I also reviewed here.

My larger point is that we are, as a society, in a state of worship of our knowledge base, and academics are behaving increasingly like priests.

Thanks for the chance to clarify.

I'm really fine with disagreeing on the points above.

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