[Sca-cooks] Images of Dining in Ireland 1581

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Aug 21, 2006, at 1:50 PM, Jadwiga Zajaczkowa / Jenne Heise wrote:

>> Well, we've talked about this pretty extensively, but mostly, AFAIK,
>> from within the dread, murky realm of "archaeological
>> evidence" (which is usually a SCAdian euphemism for no
>> documentation ;-)  ).
>
> Whereas, bizarrely, in the real world, the "archaeological  
> evidence" dug
> up out of the ground is considered rather more reliable than textual
> evidence.
>
> For instance, Thomas Hill may give me textual evidence that cucumbers
> were grown in long glass tubes to give them an attractive shape; but
> Hill also gives me a number of recipes for soaking seeds in various
> waters to make the resulting fruits taste or smell of the water. So,
> should archaologists find a shattered glass tube containing  
> fragments of
> cucumber skin and seed in layers that date to our period, I can  
> consider
> that reliable archaelogical evidence corroborating the textual  
> evidence.

Oh, I have no beef with the evidence that archaeologists have  
uncovered, or with people who use it effectively, doing so. It's just  
when the phrase is thrown about by people who haven't done their  
homework at all, or who have read three pages of a book they found  
too boring to read in full, but will go on about the tons of  
archaeological evidence that suggests X. Generally, when asked to  
produce said archaeological evidence, they can't or won't.

And then there's the possibility that archaeologists don't always  
know any more about what they've uncovered than, say, you and I.  
Wasn't there something a year or two ago where somebody uncovered a  
stone vat, and there was some confusion as to whether it had been a  
vivarium or a garum vat, but on the slimmest of evidence they  
concluded that fish was a food reserved only for the very wealthy?

Adamantius, playing with new stove today, which Evil Spawn has  
proclaimed "pimpin' " (I believe the meaning of that word has changed.)