The Losses Are Not Random

What survived · Page 1 of 2

Name Date
DIRECTIONS: Are the things that vanish a fair sample of what was there? Compare the two columns.
Ask what each column has in common.
Nearly always survivesNearly never does
A stone templea house made of wood and mud
A gold ring in a gravethe clothes everybody actually wore
A king’s name carved into rockthe name of the person who carved it
A clay tablet listing grainthe conversation about the grain
A sword buried with a warriorthe plow used every day for forty years
The left column is not a random selection of the past. It is stone and metal rather than wood and cloth; it is writing rather than speech; and — look again — it is nearly all things belonging to somebody rich, or made to impress, or made to last on purpose.

So the record does not simply have holes in it, which would be a nuisance. It leans, and it leans the same way every single time. That is much worse and much more useful, because a leaning you can predict is one you can correct for.
  1. Which way does the record lean? Name at least two of the three kinds.
  2. If everything in your house had to last three thousand years, what would still be there — and what would somebody conclude about your family from only that?

The Losses Are Not Random — The Mistake

What survived · Page 2 of 2

Here is the mistake the leaning causes, and it is made constantly.

Nearly every burial we find from some periods is a rich one, full of objects. It is tempting to conclude that those people were mostly rich.

They were not. Poor burials contained nothing that lasts, so they are almost invisible — often just a shape in the soil, and only if somebody dug carefully enough to notice. The rich are not over-represented because there were more of them. They are over-represented because their graves were full of stone and metal.
  1. Somebody says "we know from the graves that this was a wealthy society". Say what is wrong with that, and what a careful version of the sentence would be.
  2. Give one thing an archaeologist could look for that would NOT be tilted this way — something a poor household leaves behind as readily as a rich one.