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Hot take: that 3,000 year old 'ritual object' from a dig site in Norfolk last month is probably just a kid's toy
Last month a team in Norfolk pulled a carved bone handle out of a pit and the headlines instantly called it a ritual artifact, which drives me nuts because I saw the exact same shape on a toy rattle catalog from 2019. Every weird little object gets stamped 'ritual' when the boring answer is usually just something a kid chewed on or a bored farmer whittled. Why do archaeologists keep reaching for the spiritual story when 'somebody's toddler dropped it' fits the wear marks way better?
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the_eva14d ago
The "exact same shape on a toy rattle catalog from 2019" bit is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, and that's where it kinda falls apart. A shape matching doesn't mean the function matches, and archaeologists are way more careful than you'd think about that. They look at wear patterns, where it was found, what else was in the pit, residue, all of it. And honestly the "ritual" label is often the cautious move, not the lazy one, because when you don't know what something is, calling it a toy is a bigger claim than calling it ritual. Plus loads of stuff we'd call ritual today was also just everyday life back then, the line between the two wasn't where we put it now. So a bored farmer's kid chewing on a charm while mom did a ceremony? All of that can be true at once.
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