[HN Gopher] Chinese archaeologists are striking out along the Si...
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Chinese archaeologists are striking out along the Silk Road
Author : oboes
Score : 42 points
Date : 2024-08-04 14:50 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wsj.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com)
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| If your goal in research is to p-hack your way to a conclusion,
| you will always succeed.
| wheelerwj wrote:
| P-hack?
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| https://statisticsbyjim.com/hypothesis-testing/p-hacking/
| opinion-is-bad wrote:
| In statistics, the p-value is shorthand for "how unlikely was
| this result." Smaller p-values indicate less likely results,
| which in turn creates evidence of a relationship between
| variables. Many naive approaches to statically analysis place
| an almost magical value on the 5% threshold, but that's not
| actually a rare event if you run dozens of tests. P-hacking
| generally refers to running tests and discarding the values
| that do not support what you want to be true. It's a big
| problem in academia.
| j7ake wrote:
| Technically it's how unlikely of an event under a null
| model.
|
| The null model is key: if you are mischievous, you can just
| define a seemingly benign but incorrect null model and
| generate extreme p values without discarding: all values
| will be significant!
| em500 wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/882
| skybrian wrote:
| I'm wondering how often p-values are even used in papers about
| archeological digs? It seems like historical arguments are
| often made without doing statistics at all?
| llamaimperative wrote:
| I don't think they're talking about literal p-values, but the
| more general practice of defining your question in terms of
| the desired result.
| skybrian wrote:
| Yes, but I'm annoyed with the low-effort use of science-
| based metaphor, and taking it more seriously leaves an
| opening for someone who actually knows something to
| elaborate.
| faragon wrote:
| https://archive.is/PJ18y
| wtcactus wrote:
| We all knew that Chinese just couldn't deal with being reck by
| the British in the 19th century, but now we learned they still
| didn't accept that the Roman Empire won Antiquity.
|
| Stay tuned for their beef stretching all the way back against
| Neanderthals.
| transcriptase wrote:
| In the world of plant genomics there's a somewhat interesting
| trend where teams of Chinese researchers eventually, owing to
| newly collected specimens in China unavailable to other groups,
| conclude that that whatever their group works on just so
| happens to have originated from China.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _but now we learned they still didn't accept that the Roman
| Empire won Antiquity._
|
| Only in our racist western mindset.
|
| The Roman Empire, at its time, meant nothing to those parts of
| the world, no influence, economic, cultural, or otherwise. They
| had their own empires, and often far greater development and
| refinement.
|
| > _Chinese just couldn't deal with being reck by the British in
| the 19th century_
|
| Not different from writing: "African-Americans just couldn't
| deal with being reck (sic) by the slave owners in the 19th
| century".
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Roman Empire, at its time, meant nothing to those parts of
| the world, no influence, economic, cultural, or otherwise_
|
| Rome, China and the North Indian kingdoms traded.
|
| > _They had their own empires, and often far greater
| development and refinement_
|
| This is as silly as claiming Rome was the centre of the
| world.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Rome, China and the North Indian kingdoms traded_
|
| Yes, well established. But in limited amounts, and without
| much knowledge in either side about the other, not much
| influence, cultural, social, economic, military, and such.
|
| Which is way Marco Polo's journey, which happened close to
| a full millenium later after the final centuries of the
| Roman Empire, is still a landmark of the civilizational
| meeting between Europe and China.
|
| > _This is as silly as claiming Rome was the centre of the
| world_
|
| Not anywhere near as silly.
|
| For most of history, millenia before and after the Roman
| empire (until about the later modern era), China is
| considered by economists and historians to have been the
| top global economy.
|
| And that's not due to population (in fact, it was smaller
| than the Roman Empire population wise, even about half),
| but with impressive organization, culture, and
| infrastructure.
| auc wrote:
| Sad to see blatant racism on HN
| dredmorbius wrote:
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13328926>
| mannyv wrote:
| The CPP repudiated Old China back in the day. Now they want to
| embrace Old China because it gives the CPP legitimacy.
|
| So the world turns.
| zzzbra wrote:
| CCP*
| pessimizer wrote:
| CPC
| ginko wrote:
| PCP
| meiraleal wrote:
| It makes sense because Old China was guilty of putting them in
| that situation. Even Older China was the richest country in the
| world for many centuries tho.
| gumby wrote:
| Scouring trade route history is a two-edged sword: which way did
| influence run?
|
| I'm sure ideological archeology can solve that though. _That_
| path also has a lot of history.
| cs702 wrote:
| _> ideological archeology_
|
| A short, memorable, oxymoronic, and yet _accurate_ description
| of these efforts.
|
| I like the term so much that I'm going to start using
| "ideological [scientific field]" to refer to similar pseudo-
| scientific efforts in other fields.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _which way did influence run?_
|
| Usually the way of the site of higher riches and more advanced
| technically, organizationally, etc, to the less one?
| mistrial9 wrote:
| imagine a way of the sword and a way of the cloth. The cloth
| ways prosper while the sword ways train to fight. The sword
| way group then kills or threatens to kill the cloth way
| group, demanding payment. So it begins.
|
| Later, roving hordes on horseback arrive without warning from
| far away, and simply take everything, breaking any balance.
| The horse masters are the new rulers. Later, the horse
| masters lose. etc
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| You leave out the bit where the sword way freeze to death
| because they have no technology to deal with the harsh
| weather (which obviously is present because there's a need
| for cloth in the first place).
| Spivak wrote:
| The West really isn't winning this one if that's your
| standard. The Mongol empire which amassed all the wealth,
| technology and military prowess of China during their
| expansion destroyed the Arabic world (arguably the most
| advanced civilization at the time), Russia, and the West they
| encountered like a bulldozer through wet cardboard. And did
| so with armies 1/3-1/5 the size of their opponents.
|
| We don't really acknowledge in history class just how lucky
| the west got with Temujin dying and stopping the expansion
| that was literally right at our door.
|
| Edit: The sibling comment is grossly misleading, the west
| _barely won_ against a scouting battalion that we had time to
| prepare for that was frozen and starving because the greatest
| wingman in history tricked the army into taking the long
| dangerous way through the mountains and sent us a heads-up.
|
| The Mongol army wasn't primitive, it's that their purposeful
| strategy (and what made them so dangerous so far from home)
| required they plunder food and supplies regularly along the
| way. It made it so they didn't need huge supply lines and
| could outmaneuver armies that did.
| bugbuddy wrote:
| In an alternate timeline, the whole world population look
| like some mixture of Chinese.
| soufron wrote:
| Well the mongols weren't "chinese" to begin with. So...
| bugbuddy wrote:
| They became Chinese pretty quickly...
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| There were structural, geographic, and ecological, reasons
| for why mongol invasions stopped before they reached
| western Europe (aside from some relatively short-lived
| attempts at imperiogenesis in eastern Europe). The same
| reasons were present for Arab "invasions" up from Iberia.
|
| Walter Scheidel has written a fascinating book that takes a
| very hard historical look at possible historical
| counterfactuals comparing post-roman Europe to imperial
| China and finds the chances of Mongol success in Europe to
| have been very small despite their incredible string
| successes leading up to that point. Europe's greatest
| benefit was an incredible political polycentrism; Europe
| was hard to invade while China wasn't. That pushed China
| into sustained imperial centralization like many other
| empires with close steppe proximity.
|
| https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691172187/e
| s...
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > aside from some relatively short-lived attempts at
| imperiogenesis in eastern Europe
|
| Hm? The Golden Horde seems to have lasted for a fairly
| respectable period of time as far as empires go. Mongol
| rule in Russia outlasted Mongol rule in China by more
| than a century.
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| Mongol rule in Russia posed no serious threat to western
| Europe in terms of imperial conquest. The horde was
| fragile on its western frontiers. Steppe invasions and
| conflicts on the east between the Mongols and Chinese
| empires shaped that area for millenia. Russia, as an
| outlier, if we consider it a part of Europe, is uniquely
| exposed to the steppes in a similar way to China. The
| Mongol threat to greater Europe, however, was not that
| great. The tactics, ecology, and technologies, that made
| them a remarkable threat would not have been effective in
| western Europe during the same time periods.
|
| It's certainly an interesting "could have been", but you
| need to move very far away from what actually happened to
| make it a convincing possibility.
| Spivak wrote:
| Fascinating, the takes I've seen from most historians was
| that polycentrism was actually likely to be Europe's
| undoing because the Mongols were the best to ever do it
| at recognizing that armies weren't as united as they
| first seemed and, before the fight, made deals with
| fractions to get them to stand down (and then kill them
| later) and, during battle, taking advantage of split
| command and breaking ranks.
|
| I don't think that there was really anything that could
| stop the Mongols at that time because they had Chinese
| siege engineers to deal with fortifications and plenty in
| the way of "normal" soldiers but I'm happy to read the
| argument. The strongest case I've heard against them was
| that away from the steppe the conditions that produced
| hardy soldiers with their talent for shooting started to
| fall off.
| card_zero wrote:
| I was reading about Keraites recently:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keraites
|
| Some of the invading Mongols were Christians, with a
| particular reverence for the biblical Magi (the three wise
| men), and Genghis Kahn, and his son, and his grandson
| Kublai Khan, all married into this group.
| dragonelite wrote:
| Thats not so weird before Christianity became big in
| Europe it was big in west and east Asia. At least from
| what i can remember from Peter Frankopan's book The
| Silkroads mentioned this. Also Dan carlins mongol series
| also talked about a big Christian king/savior in the far
| east.
| gumby wrote:
| The case of the Mongols was the example I was actually
| thinking of. But there's a long history of ideologically
| interpreted archeology in the west as well.
|
| I don't understand why your comment was being voted down.
| 77pt77 wrote:
| > just how lucky the west got with Temujin dying and
| stopping the expansion that was literally right at our
| door.
|
| For geographical reasons they would have gone further west
| than Germany.
| skybrian wrote:
| Yes, sometimes research is funded due to political motivations.
| The researchers could discover and publish interesting historical
| facts anyway. Hopefully they will still be able to do good work?
| It's good that _someone_ funds it, even if their motives aren't
| pure.
|
| It's unlikely that this is really going to move the needle as far
| as rivalry between China and other countries goes; it's more of a
| side effect of that rivalry, like national museums, the Olympics,
| and moon landings.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| The myth of China being China for millenia is such a propagandist
| rewrite of history in that region; I hate to see NYT headlines
| fall for it.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| https://www.camphorpress.com/5000-years-of-history/
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| It would be akin to Italy claiming that they are Romans...sure
| Romans lived there, but there is a whole lot of history between
| then and modern day state that would make this claim at best
| tenuous.
| card_zero wrote:
| Mussolini was fond of making that claim. Wikipedia says "the
| entire Mediterranean was redefined to make it appear a
| unified region that had belonged to Italy from the times of
| the ancient Roman province of Italia, and was claimed as
| Italy's exclusive sphere of influence."
| meiraleal wrote:
| Every place has millenias of history. The countries in the
| American continent start to count from when they were invaded
| by Europeans, that's their (our) loss.
| hollerith wrote:
| >The countries in the American continent start to count from
| when they were invaded by Europeans
|
| That's because it is hard to learn about pre-Columbian
| America because we have very little writing from that period
| -- mainly because they didn't write much down compared to for
| example how much was recorded in writing by people in China
| 3,000 years ago.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _mainly because they didn 't write much down compared to
| for example how much was recorded in writing by people in
| China 3,000 years ago_
|
| Civilisation in the Americas started later than in the Old
| World. Columbus also arrived in the wake of wide-ranging
| ecological disasters in Meso-America and the ancient
| Pueblan territories.
| khuey wrote:
| Also because the colonial period that followed
| intentionally destroyed much of the written record.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| That there is history in the region is not really in
| contention, but rather that the concept of single "China"
| has endured millenia as a single civilization, and not the
| multi-cultural, multi-national, mileau that it was.
| amriksohata wrote:
| The british re-wrote history from the east, revisionism is part
| of any major empire, China is just doing it back
| ramblenode wrote:
| Unlike many commenters here, I actually read the article, and
| this quote seems to be the basis for the tenuous link between
| archeaology and geopolitics suggested by the title:
|
| > The extent to which present-day politics hovers over China's
| archaeological ambitions became clear during a Wall Street
| Journal reporter's encounter with an Uzbek researcher at the
| ruins of an ancient Kushan city near Chinor. "Tell the Chinese
| that they will not find any traces of the Chinese here," he said.
|
| Kind of an interesting story if you can look past the attempt by
| WSJ to shoehorn in a geopolitcal angle.
|
| > Asked whether Beijing could use the Yuezhi to make territorial
| claims, Wang said the notion was absurd because the nomads are a
| historical people and no one serious would put forth that
| argument.
|
| "We're just asking questions", etc.
| Leary wrote:
| Exactly, the Yuezhi is about as Chinese as the Japanese are,
| both first entering into the historical records in official
| Chinese dynastic history during the Han Dynasty.
| beloch wrote:
| Archaeology does not take place in a vacuum. It has always been
| a product of political human beings. Archaeologists are keenly
| aware of this. Mussolini excavated Pompeii with bulldozers to
| reveal the past greatness of Italy on a schedule compatible
| with his ambitions. British archaeologists conducted digs
| around the globe through the lens of empire. Natives in the
| Americas, to this day, hesitate to trust archaeologists because
| they have, far too often, ignored the culture and concerns of
| descendants while digging up their ancestors. Most
| archaeologists strive to tell the truth, but truth is often a
| matter of perspective.
|
| It's not being anti-Chinese to observe that China is currently
| an expansionist totalitarian state, and that Chinese
| archaeologists will be under pressure to support a state-
| approved narrative. Their research should be viewed with their
| cultural context firmly in mind.
| nuc1e0n wrote:
| Yep. They also did partial reconstuction work of the great
| wall in modern times and passed it off as ancient. Similarly,
| Stonehenge in the UK was also partially reconstructed in the
| 20th century.
|
| Sensoji temple in Tokyo was also rebuilt to its original
| design in the 1950s.
|
| The giant stone Buddhas of Afganistan could do with
| reconstructing IMHO as well.
| peterfirefly wrote:
| > hesitate to trust archaeologists because they have, far too
| often, ignored the culture and concerns of descendants while
| digging up their ancestors.
|
| Or more likely: because they have, far too often, proved the
| natives wrong and also shown that the people the natives
| called ancestors weren't... or, if they were, they were also
| the ancestors of those terrible people from the Evil Enemy
| Tribe that Nobody Likes.
|
| Natives have political agendas, too.
| nuc1e0n wrote:
| What a fabulous comment. I'd upvote it twice if I could.
| These kind of issues of cultural identity over time are one
| of the topics in Frank Herbert's Dune series.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| Their political history also included a lot of slavery.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Part of recognizing the full and equal humanity of
| indigenous peoples is to accept that they're just as
| greedy, deceitful, and chauvinistic as the rest of us.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| Don't expect them to unravel the mystery of the tocharians.
| feedforward wrote:
| You see this in cross-Atlantic history education too. In US and
| European history, everything seems to flow out of Europe, or at
| least the Mediterranean. Menes becomes king of Egypt around 3150
| BC. Then we fastforward to Honer and the Olympic games in 7th
| century Greece. Then there are the Punic wars and Rome wins the
| Battle of Cornith in 146 BC. Then the Battle of Hastings in 1066
| and so on. With some things like the revolts in Judaea against
| Rome as a kind of dialectic counter-narrative.
|
| If we look at what was happening in India, in Mali, in Japan and
| China, in Tenochtitlan or Caracol or Cusco, we see a different
| history happening.
|
| From the failure of the siege of Vienna in 1683, to the end of
| World War II, Europe and the US did dominate the world. That has
| been fading, and the narrative is facing too.
| ahazred8ta wrote:
| There was a cartoon of a high school history teacher asking "So
| how should we cover this - dialectical materialism, or Kings
| and Battles?"
| 77pt77 wrote:
| The next step is to start taking "1421: The Year China Discovered
| the World" seriously.
|
| Vide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavin_Menzies
| slater wrote:
| I read that book when it came out. Really liked it, but, from
| that link:
|
| "The reasoning of 1421 is inexorably circular, its evidence
| spurious, its research derisory, its borrowings unacknowledged,
| its citations slipshod, and its assertions preposterous ...
| Examination of the book's central claims reveals they are
| uniformly without substance."
|
| Whelp!
| 77pt77 wrote:
| If that were true, when the Portuguese and Spaniards got to
| tne new world 90% of the people would have died recently of
| disease.
|
| Those chinese ships were small floating cities and disease
| would have spread throughout the continent.
| tm-guimaraes wrote:
| That did happen to the big Central American civilizations.
| Killing by a mix of inter conflicts and mass desease
| dredmorbius wrote:
| If I'm interpreting parent correctly, they're arguing
| that had the Chinese _recently_ visited the Americas, the
| Portuguese and Spanish would have encountered native
| populations which were _already_ decimated by disease. As
| this isn 't the case, the epidemiological argument
| _against_ shortly prior Chinese encounters with American
| populations is strong.
|
| That _post_ Portuguese /Spanish contact native American
| populations were annihilated by disease is now well
| established fact. That again argues _against_ earlier
| Chinese contact.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| You seem to be arguing against your first comment to this
| thread.
|
| Why take an account from an author of dubious
| qualifications and veracity seriously if the most
| significant evidence of such an encounter is entirely
| lacking?
| nuc1e0n wrote:
| Travellers from Asia journeyed to the Greco-Bactrian kingdom of
| Ghandara (whose name is a corruption of Alexandria) and took
| Buddhism back with them to the east. This is fictionalised in the
| story 'Journey to the West'. Nippon TV in Japan did a cool TV
| series adaption of this story that was dubbed into English and
| shown on kids TV in the UK as 'Monkey', which was quite popular
| back in the day. If you spend enough time wandering around the
| British Museum you learn all this stuff.
| Keysh wrote:
| Gandhara (not "Ghandara") is mentioned in the Behistun
| inscription of the Persian emperor Darius, from about two
| hundred years before Alexander, so it's clearly not "a
| corruption of Alexandria".
| nuc1e0n wrote:
| Oh really? Maybe that's wrong then. Is the name a
| transcription or a translation? What script were the records
| written in originally? Names can be retroactively applied,
| especially in translation. Looks like I've got some reading
| to do. Edit: Maybe I got confused between different folk
| etymologies for the name of the city of Kandahar.
| Onavo wrote:
| > _Nippon TV in Japan did a cool TV series adaption of this
| story that was dubbed into English and shown on kids TV in the
| UK as 'Monkey', which was quite popular back in the day._
|
| Nah, HN readers might be more familiar with its anime
| adaptation, "Dragon Ball".
| nuc1e0n wrote:
| Interesting. I've not watched that show and didn't know it's
| the same story. I know the same graphic artist who worked on
| the design for the band Gorillaz also did idents based on
| this story for the Olympics in Beijing a few years back.
| foobarchu wrote:
| It's less an adaptation, more just loosely inspired by
| journey to the west (disclaimer: I have not read journey to
| the west)
| peterfirefly wrote:
| And Journey to the West is a fairly modern book, only a
| few centuries old. It is based on many older folk tales
| of China (including many that weren't originally Chinese)
| and connects them with a framing story, a bit like
| Decameron or One Thousand and One Nights (Arabian
| Nights). Some of them had already been connected before
| the book was written.
| riffraff wrote:
| Or Starzinger, Saiyuki, The Monkey... there's a zillion anime
| adaptations (or rather, vaguely inspired stories).
|
| It's kinda like Pinocchio, which you may find in Ergo Proxy
| or a thousand other stories.
| pjmorris wrote:
| FTA: "We are studying the past to understand and shape the
| present and future," said Wang.
|
| I was of the persuasion that "History is written to say it wasn't
| our fault" - Sam Phillips, but it may play a more active role
| than that.
|
| I recently read and enjoyed 'The Silk Roads', Frankopan, which,
| to oversimplify, takes as its thesis the idea that "...for
| millennia, it was the region lying between east and west, linking
| Europe with the Pacific Ocean, that was the axis on which the
| globe spun." I was persuaded that he has a point.
|
| I'm currently reading 'The New China Playbook', Jin, together
| with an ideologically-varying friend as a way to base our
| discussions more on knowledge than opinion.
|
| So I'm particularly interested in what others have found helpful
| in understanding China's past and present. Any recommendations?
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