And the journals quickly recognized her expertise. John Humphrey, the editor of the Journal of Roman Archaeology told the Wall Street Journal: ”I could tell even from the first version that it was a very serious piece of experimental archaeology which no scholar who was not a hairdresser—in other words, no scholar—would have been able to write.”
Interests, professions, hobbies, and traditions all bring valuable insight that cannot be ignored in historical research. For archeologists and historians, to reach out to a specialist is wisdom; to have a specialist reach out to you is a blessing.
This is why reenactors, who are generally frowned upon by desk-only historians, serve a useful purpose.
You can’t pay someone to try out a tool or method for a couple of months, you need some kind of very special idiot who will not only do it for free, but who will also look at it critically and go “this sucks, let’s do X instead”, and then continue having fun with it.
You can fucking swear on the Internet.
That’s fucked up
You can also choose not to.
Sure. What you shouldn’t do, though, is try to hide someone else’s swearing. It’s just stupid. Why are they afraid of words to the point they need to hide them?
I know it’s all because of the algorithm and social media who don’t like swearing, to which I say fuck them.
Soooooo many things have been unchanged for thousands of years in blacksmithing, masonry, farming, and leathercraft.
There are tons of idioms (in English, I’m sure there are ones in other languages) that originate from one of these things, or other old professions.
I remember seeing a tiny single-blade “arrowhead” at a more local historical museum, and the historical society with all their degrees and (in all seriousness) hard work putting everything together, non of them actually knew what it was.
Their best assertion was that it’s an iron arrowhead made some time in the last 500 years, I can’t remember the exact date but I want to say mid 1600s.
Its… A utility knife. Incidentally also used in leather. The wooden handle had long since rotted away when it was found, I’m sure.
But I’ve seen people use the same small utility knife for cleaning fresh hides as well as cutting/scoring the produced leather.
Basically one of these but instead of it being solid through the handle, it tapers into a rat tail in about an inch.
So they thought “ceremonial/specialized arrowhead” because none of the people who worked there had access to the internet and reverse image searching at the time, and nobody there was into those kinds of hobbies and recognized it.
Of course, nobody gives a shit what a stupid dumb idiotic teenager says, they’re just children who know nothing. I did, however, know someone who likes reenacting colonial American things, and it’s one of his hobbies so he got ahold of them and got the information corrected within a few months.