Making sense of life

Adam Hossack

It's often been said that strange times make for strange bedfellows. I've never been much of a quoter of wise sayings before (who under the age of forty is?), but in this case I just can't resist since the mating of topics I'm about to initiate could probably be featured on a Jerry Springer Show titled "Unnatural Unions."

A friend of mine, a gentleman in his early twenties, whose wit and courage I respected, passed away suddenly. As the reality of this event settled in, many ideas about the nature of the human experience have been shaken out of the woodwork. Maybe the most surprising to me however, were the parallels between this experience and some concepts expressed in papers I've read lately for an archaeology course.

This may sound a little strange or pathetic; it may even be a symptom of spending the last seventeen years in various classrooms. The more I think about it, though, the more the abstract and usually abstruse theories and arguments of archaeology seem to apply to everyday life. It really is just a study of people after all, no matter how long they've been gone.

I hope these articles will help me understand just what all these positions, procedures, and debates really mean to me, and will give you food for thought (or at least something to mop up that spilled coffee with). Regardless, I'm stuck in AR460 and you're stuck with this article.

Back to last week's papers. The subject was analogy, which isn't surprising as all archaeology involves using such nifty little mental devices. We don't know what we're looking at most of the time, so we compare it to things we know about that seem similar.

Then, through analogy we try to figure out what it is we have (ie. if you find a strangely shaped glass bottle on your front lawn one Saturday morning, you might conclude that it once held alcohol since you yourself are fond of putting one back on the way to the bar and chucking the empty on somebody else's front yard).

One of the big debates here is whether you need to show that the groups of people you're drawing an analogy between were actually related to one another. It'd be pretty silly after all, to say that a painting of a bald eagle would have the significance to a Canadian that it does to an American. Though we live in similar environments and share a similar culture, one culture has not (arguably) grown directly out of the other.

The point (finally) is this: You can't really understand a situation without a real connection. Big concepts like mortality can't really be understood until we're confronted with them either personally (not really practical in this case, because, well, you'd be dead) or through someone near enough and similar enough that we have a good analogy. Up until this point in my life the "mortal" part of this mortal coil had only seemed, in my heart of hearts, to apply to those far older or far distant from myself.

Now, in the comfortable society in which we live our first and most well-reinforced lessons on big ideas like morality, love and mortality are those taught by film and T.V.

With the prevailing trend in the media towards value determined by entertainment potential, most of these are fictional or sensationalized; a process that we are aware of. Since these big issues are first taught through such bad analogies (situations we know to be false or slanted) they become almost trivial. Only through a direct connection to us do they take on real meaning, and that connection thus takes us unawares. They often hurt.

As archaeology rare and difficult to make as direct historical connections between cultures are, it is often asked if they are really necessary as they're cracked up to be. Real-life connections to big issues are also rare and usually difficult. Are they really worth it?