The Forum

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Stay Focused!

The May/June 2005 issue was such a disappointment. Why waste pages in the magazine by running modern folk art (“Sailing with Odysseus,” Past Perfect)?

If I wanted art-movement articles I would purchase an art magazine. Let’s keep the focus of Archaeology Odyssey on archaeology.

Keep Doing What You’re Doing!

The May/June 2005 issue surpasses all previous issues. The two articles on Catalhoyuk (Michael Balter, “Discovering Catalhoyuk,” and Shahina Farid, “Excavating Catalhoyuk”) are fascinating, and the photos make me want to visit the site.

I also found the Romare Bearden paintings (“Sailing with Odysseus”) beautiful and intriguing, especially in connection to Homer.

A Riff on Pinturicchio

In the lovely article on the artist Romare Bearden and his paintings based on the Odyssey, you include a photo of a work titled Odysseus Enters the Door Disguised as an Old Man. This is an enchanting reinterpretation of The Suitors Surprising Penelope, a fresco by the Florentine artist Bernardino Pinturicchio (1455–1513), now in the National Gallery in London.

Also, the articles on the excavations at Catalhoyuk do not mention textiles. I would imagine the new dating of the site has changed some ideas about early textiles.

Shahina Farid replies:

The excavations at Catalhoyuk have not found any evidence of textiles, but we will soon be publishing material on basket weaving from the site.

Disrespecting Businessmen

In the May/June 2005 editorial, Jack Meinhardt (“Who Owns Archaeology?”) takes a shot at the arrogance of the “professional elite” who think they “own history.” I have no quarrel with his attack on them, but I was disturbed by his gratuitous attack on businessmen; he says businessmen erroneously “think they 010make the world go round.”

Fact is: (1) Businessmen do make the world go round, and (2) very few of them bother to think so, for they have too much work to do.

Consider, for example, who ran the Silk Road? Who invented a way to substitute symbols for sounds that is so easy to learn that anyone can learn it? Who spread it all across the Mediterranean so well that even today we use almost the same symbols? It was businessmen, traders. Priests and court bureaucrats were perfectly happy with awkward forms of writing that were difficult to learn. Who began to dig Europe out of the Dark Ages, the decayed remains of what was formerly known as the Roman Empire? Wasn’t it businessmen, traders?

Open the Discussions

As a now-retired chemistry professor currently writing about archaeology as an avocation, it never occurred to me that I lacked the right to publish about topics such as those on which Camille Paglia was challenged (see Camille Paglia’s letter, and “Who Owns Archaeology?”, in May/June 2005). In archaeology, a thorough knowledge of the relevant literature, and a clear exposition of one’s thesis, seems to me to provide a quite sufficient basis for authority.

Indeed, as a “hard” scientist I have found professional archaeologists, most of whom have only limited education in physical science, to be quite deferential to my views on their specialty.

Arrogance, professional or otherwise, is certainly unneeded—the challenges of archaeology are more than sufficient to humble us all.

Must Reason Prevail?

Richard D. McKirahan (“Quod Erat Demonstrandum,” Origins, May/June 2005) poses the question of “what to do when reason conflicts with the senses” and answers that “the only rational answer [is that] reason must prevail.” Isn’t this a tautology, and wouldn’t it also be correct to say that the only sensible answer is that the senses must prevail?

Implicit in Professor McKirahan’s statement is an assumption that reason is innately superior to the senses. But didn’t Aristotle reason that objects would fall faster or slower according to their weight? And didn’t Galileo disprove the rational conclusion by actually dropping different objects and observing the results with his senses?

Richard D. McKirahan replies:

I’m glad that your perceptive reader noticed this point. In fact, I intended the statement “the only rational answer [is that] reason must prevail” to be something like a tautology. People who don’t value reason as highly as the Greek philosophers did are certainly allowed to say that sometimes what’s rational isn’t right.

Stay Focused!
The May/June 2005 issue was such a disappointment. Why waste pages in the magazine by running modern folk art (“Sailing with Odysseus,” Past Perfect)?