A note about interpreting the past:

How accurately can humans of the present age interpret the past? The question of how people a thousand years from now would interpret our current society based on objects found in our lives has, believe it or not, crossed my mind before this week's class. How accurate could they be? Given that we have written language and record many aspects of our lives it might be easier for people of the future to interpret things in our society, provided that people are still speaking English or at least able to interpret English. But if they no longer spoke English or had access to any of our written language, would they be accurate in assessing the purpose of something like a toilet seat or a cellphone? You can look at the past and say that we have accurately assessed equivalent objects in the past, but how do you know that people have assigned the appropriate task to an artifact? In some cases, especially when dealing with prehistory and cultures that had no written language, it is sometimes impossible to ever know for certain. People of the future might mistake completely secular symbols as being religious in nature, perhaps monuments and statues may be seen as all being images of idols or gods that are to be worshiped, a plausible explanation but a flawed one nonetheless. Similarly, in considering paleolithic art that we talked about last week, I couldn't help but wonder: how do we know for certain that cave paintings were an element of prehistoric people's religion and not someone simply practicing drawing forms of cattle and bison in a secluded spot for fun or perhaps an ancient form of graffiti? How do we know that Indian mounds are tied to the religious views of the people who built them and not just a place to dispose of  their dead and then heap a whole bunch of dirt on top of it? Maybe when people got sick of the monotony of conical shaped mounds they started making cool designs and pictures of animals out of the mounds instead, for pleasure  rather than out of necessity.
Now, I realize that some of these ideas seem far-fetched or exaggerated and I'm not trying to discredit the evidence that archaeologists have found that support their claims about the purpose of the mounds or the cave art. In the case of the mounds it seems very plausible that the world views held by those who built the mounds and the belief system of the time is very closely tied to the mounds especially since they have found symbolism similar to that of the mounds pertaining to the upperworld and lowerworld depicted elsewhere on other Native American artifacts. Our current perceptions of the ways that people lived in prehistoric times may shape our own beliefs about the purposes of their artifacts. We may discredit them as being less intelligent and more primal than current humans, striving only for survival, but can we know for sure? The explanations that modern humans come up with to explain the past can never be completely accurate because there are many missing pieces. Perhaps we can't conceive of the original purpose of some artifacts because we no longer hold the same ideas and beliefs and conceptions of the world or because some elements have decayed and cannot be retrieved. I know it is impossible to have the whole story about how people of the ancient past really lived but it is all the more reason to take the conclusions of experts with a grain of salt.
Nevertheless, our tendency to try to explain the past and give meaning to things we don't know or don't immediately understand further proves our proclivity to making religions, to make up stories to explain the unknown.