Last night, the family and I watched a very interesting History Channel show. As usual, if it has anything to do with archeology (no second “a”, okay?), I tend to sit there spellbound and watch it from one side to the other. This one had to do with ancient Rome, a dread disease, small children, and modern science. One of the things I truly love about archeology and its “ists” are how they often use modern science to unearth ancient clues and then pursue the clues with even more cool technology. In this entry, an archaeologist (note the spelling is not mine), wondered whether malaria transmitted by mosquitos may have caused a rather severe outbreak back around 75 BC and forward. He had found small children with many signs of severe illness. In the same place, pagan ritual had been practiced which included the beheading of small dogs. Wierd? Not really when you consider that often prehistoric societies when they came up against a thing which defied normal rationalization would often resort to mystical or pagan explanations. Consider other larger than life disasters like weather, ecological disaster, disease. No one could offer some macro-scientific view on the why of things. The entire social structure was built on understanding and reaching almost mystical ties with living and non-living back then. But when one was out of whack… I could imagine this causing philosophical and psychological strain. I think people would revert to other beliefs. So did the archaeologist doing the work. Instead of living within their carefully defined and constrained world views, these people reached something they could not understand. Their hiers were dying at an alarming rate. Not a nice death either, one should conclude.
So when societies come up against this sort of thing, socieities probably respond in a myriad of ways. The history channel carefully pointed out the mixing of an isolated event with a trend back then toward large numbers of childhood deaths. Its the stuff that makes archeologists stand up and say “yeah”. People see how common threads can be picked up on and defined and re-defined.
In that context, perhaps we all are armchair anthropologists in one way or another. We all want to understand the diversities and mixes and how fact and fantasy and religion came to all together.
