[Sca-cooks] Images of Dining in Ireland 1581
Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius
adamantius.magister at verizon.net
Tue Aug 22 04:45:33 PDT 2006
On Aug 22, 2006, at 5:36 AM, Huette von Ahrens wrote:
> --- Susan Fox <selene at earthlink.net> wrote:
>
>> 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.
>>
>> Tell me about it. This is the age where Reliable Sources taught
>> that a
>> giraffe was a cross between a camel and a leopard. Give me
>> archaeological evidence any day. People lie, dirt does not.
>>
>> Selene
>
> And just the other day, someone was looking at a museum site in
> Egypt, which
> had a item which was labeled "a small ceremonial mace" which was in
> fact a
> drop spindle... So sometimes archeologists can be clueless also.
This can happen to anyone working outside of their field (and
sometimes in it, I guess), as with the pattern-welded Viking sword
the Metropolitan Museum of Art guys say is inlaid, and, conversely,
when a well-known manuscript specialist notes that a period recipe's
instruction to take a pen and blow air into the neck of a capon to
separate the skin from the flesh, may mean to baste it with a
feather. Well, okay, that's an oversimplification, but it happens all
the time, not just to archaeologists, and sometimes common sense
needs to override an expensive education.
However, what I've been talking about all this time has been in no
way an indictment of relying on physical versus textual/graphical
evidence to understand how people of the past lived: a conscientious
scholar uses both. My concern was for instances of people saying
things like, "Oh, I don't pay any attention to the recipes... I'd
rather work from the archaeological evidence," -- and then proceeding
not to do so. I think we get a little more of that in the SCA than we
do of people citing fake quotes from an imaginary MS Kaflooey 2346.
Although I'm sure that has happened, too.
Adamantius
More information about the Sca-cooks
mailing list