The "6,000 Year Old Crown", or, Caution is Boring

The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University is mounting an exhibit titled Masters of Fire: Copper Age Art from Israel that features some of the wonderful artifacts from Nahal Mishmar. Among them is this object, which their propaganda calls "a 6,000-year-old crown." Now I love the Nahal Mishmar artifacts, and I would love to see this exhibit, but as a pedant with a Ph.D. I feel compelled to point out that although these objects are often referred to as "crowns" most archaeologists think they were actually stands for pots with pointed bottoms.

And this is the problem with being careful and precise as an archaeologist. Caution and precision are boring most of the time, and when it comes to archaeology their tedium is magnified by the uncertainty that surrounds everything. We don't know what half the stuff we dig up really was, or who left it where we found it or why. So every sentence by an archaeologist ought to read something like this:

If the excavators successfully found the edge of the feature -- which is especially doubtful when they are students at field school -- and the artifacts were put in the right bag and not switched around during washing and labeling, and they were actually put in the hole by the people who dug it and not somebody else from a different culture who left them on the spot centuries earlier or wandered by years later, and the charcoal really came from the pit fill and not some later root or rodent hole, and wasn't already five hundred years old when it got into the pit, and was correctly dated by the lab, and our subjective notions of how to define spearpoint types or pottery styles have any validity, and our judgments about these particular artifacts are more sound than usual, then it may possibly be that this site represents an intrusion into this area by people from somewhere else who were probably ethnically distinct from the people they replaced -- not that we have any idea what those ethnicities might have been or what these people called each other -- but on the other hand many other explanations are possible.

And who would read that?