> And the question of whether (and how) Western historical narratives can populate deep history with actual lives, as well as understand and represent the thoughts, feeling and senses of people who lived thousands of years ago, is still to be answered.

>This uncertainty is not unique to Australia, as a recent statement on decolonising research by the American Historical Review makes clear. The ethical demand to engage with, acknowledge and include Indigenous forms of history has extended the discipline into new, albeit sometimes challenging, epistemological territory around the world.

Citing

https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article/123/1/xiv/4825089

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I find nothing in this article to cause anger?

If: you're going to get angry without actually reading the article

Or: if you're going to get angry over different approaches to history

Then: history is the wrong hobby for you. There's a lot of reading, and there's a lot of methodologies and approaches.

They can say that but knowing the dates of things would be useful towards comparative analysis that attempts to find commonalities over the events that were occurring for the entirety of the continent. We could make inferences much more easily about the factors which lead to certain things if we knew the order they happened even if that order is not stated directly.

For instance we can know that the Haudenosaunee confederacy was form at some point, and we can assume that the story of its formation is accurate, but the union of the five nations could have happened centuries before the sixth was added (which is something we know the exact date of) or it could have formed literally just decades before contact with europeans. If we knew with better certainty we could perhaps determine if there was some great event which created the factors which lead to its creation.

Dates allow you to add context to event the original historians who recorded the events themselves might not have thought to provide. We've gained significantly greater insight into Roman history for instance by comparing it with archeological and climatological evidence which can track the movements of the "barbarians" and that the golden age corresponds with a warm climate period and the migrations correspond with a cooler period. We couldn't do that if the histories lacked dates.

From our westernised perspectives dates are useful. It’s interesting to try and imagine such a totally different worldview where our dates are irrelevancies.

I feel the title is a bit baity. Sure, dates add nothing to a culture when they obscure or de-prioritize the content that doesn't have dates. But they aren't suggesting that dates have no value to history at all, just that their history, which is largely undated, should not be lost to their culture.

And it's a valid point: the idea of "everywhen" fits nicely into a relativistic view of time as a dimension. We may not know where it lies, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

A linear sense of history based on dates will leave out dateless knowledge.

A good chunk of my cultural history is undated and lost to time, including European cultural history and women's history. It's great that some people have been keeping time on what they consider to be important, but we lose a massive amount of information when we only accept dated events as history.

How often in Roman works are dates actually mentioned? There certainly are some Greek and Roman ones which give some comparative context, but there are others which are quite vague. We can only date them today because of the other works, or archaeological evidence, which do specify (or we do our best to guess, there's several major events which can't even pinpoint to a year, or even decade). And then there's some which do specify, and often, like Diodorus Sic., that we can look at now and say "well, actually, this dating is really off, these calendars don't sync up."

I find years and dating useful for organising things when first gaining an understanding, but that's because it was the system I grew up learning with. I think that's the point, it's the system I'm familiar with, versus a system they're familiar with, and how it's important to not assume one is superior. Even Romans would have found our modern dating methods odd.

>westernised perspectives

No. Dates tell you when exactly things happened. We can compare events to events in china that happened at the same time and create a grand unified history of both the west and the east. The problem comes in integrating the global south into this grand unified history because the global south lacked dates.

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Dude I just want to compare different native groups to see if there were any interactions or butterfly effects between them. I can't do that right now unless I sift through a bunch of different oral histories and try to piece together an order and chain of causality.

For instance we still don't technically know if the Xiongnu and the Huns are the same thing but because of dates we know it is theoretically possible they were the same and that the start of a potential migration can be determined by a particular date in Chinese history when they started trying to move west away from China.

What potential questions are we not asking (such as if the Xiongnu and the Huns are same thing) simply because we don't know yet if the dates could line up?

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You said in your post

>We couldn't do that if the histories lacked dates.

My point was that the Roman histories often lacked dates.

And nowhere did I suggest that you couldn't try and see how these groups line up, just that you can understand that not everyone is going to do a comparison that way. I actually am wondering why you would need the exact date line up to do such a comparison in the first place? What evidence do you have for culture, linguistics, mythology, and other such things that can be more useful to compare their similarities?

But I'm not familiar with the Xiongnu and Huns historiography, which works are you using as the basis for your methodology which can give some background on why this is important?

>I can't do that right now unless I sift through a bunch of different oral histories and try to piece together an order and chain of causality.

You can sift through the oral histories and still find the dates then doesn't it prove that these dates in the works are not completely necessary to convert it into a more linear timeline?

If we don't know the important details about their culture, then the dates don't really do anything for us. Two cultures can exist at the same time. Compare this with the studies of the Greeks, Minoans, and Myceneans. They weren't leaving dates that we know of, but they did leave other archaeological evidence that we can compare and make arguments from. And again, see my first comment on how even those that leave dates, we can't always trust them, in fact, we often cannot for things from antiquity.

Okay cool we get it. Thanks.

These folks live differently, and jr's interesting to see/hear their perspective.

It isn't like the lack of dates complete frustrates attempts to understand but it would be significantly easier if they existed. Lack of dates is not the end of the world but it is something which is missing and you have to do a significant amount of work to just achieve the same level of understanding that would be available if it just had dates. When the dates don't exist the dates need to be created through meticulous work because dates are needed.

As asked above: What/who are you basing this methodology on, how is the better than other evidence in culture, and how are you going to be certain of the dates in the evidence?

Yes dates can be made up but so can literally everything else.

Basically this is just a question of if having an additional piece of information (a date) is good or not. I think having more information is a good thing.

I think you need to re-read the article.

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Fascinating yet flawed, forward thinking whilst also boringly non-innovative or even secretly exoticizing.

The Australian experience of denying the lengthy period of pre-European contact habitation of Australia is an terrible legacy which despite being definitively disproven so long ago continues to pop up in popular discourse. Equally, there has been a realization since the days of the first Orientalists that linear time is not ubiquitous. And for almost just as long various scholars have argued that non-linear understandings of time may be beneficial ways of looking at the world.

Yet things change. Questions of continuity and discontinuity, i.e. of change, are what history is and hence what historians do: there have an implication of temporality. There is the now and there is the not-now, a not-now we appear to be connected to and yet unable to impact from the now. Change is all the differences perceived between the now (that which we can impact) and the not-now (that which we can not). Philosophically it is possible to argue temporality is an illusion, but it is a surprisingly widespread concept which no society seems to have ever deviated from. Even cyclical time or eternal unending time still proposes change, i.e. time. The author can be excused for not thinking about this, and for resting on a far simpler understanding however, but beyond that the article has some problems.

Hilariously though, the author, despite mentioning Chakrabarty, seems to extract the complete opposite of Chakrabarty's point. Colonial narratives place the 'native' in a timeless void. "Africa has no history," to quote from Hegel. They have no history because they have no change. They are 'natural'. They always existed as they forever existed and change is only brought to them by Europeans. In denying ability of the 'native' to change, they are exoticized. Chakrabarty's point is that this is flawed, a point which nearly all academic historians agree with.

And yet the author does exactly what Chakrabarty warned against:

>Aboriginal claims that they had always been here didn’t seem unreasonable alongside archaeological finds that measured their presence at 65,000 BCE.

Obviously the point that humans were in Australia at 65,000 BCE isn't absurd, the absurdity is that she uses this to both paint all Aboriginals the same both today (positing no variation) as well as in the past. The author removed any possibility of temporality -- reducing the Aboriginal people to a timeless never-changing 'natural' existence identical to the colonizing discourse she supposedly is rallying against. She even goes on to claim that there may be a:

>cultural memory of the last Ice Age.

Whilst hypothetically possible, this is a ridiculous claim to make off of one philological point. Philology is difficult for commonly-spoken languages today with substantial written records, yet alone trying to back-date for a language without written records. Not only that, but even if true, supposing one philological remnant inherently implies a whole system of cultural memory is naive. Even the occasionally heavy-handed Nora wouldn't be that simplistic.

Her point about the unique sense of time within The Dreaming is also highlights her odd understanding which exoticizes:

>The Dreaming conjures up the notion of a sacred, heroic time of the indefinitely remote past, such a time is also, in a sense, still part of the present”

This is an interesting point. Sacred and heroic time is a fascinating thing which merges the untouchable past with the immediate present. She doesn't seem interested in looking into this though. And yet instead of that, the author also -- by displaying little interest in understanding either The Dreaming in-of-itself, its plural cultural meanings, or its cross-cultural comparisons -- posited it as a unique development. In an 'aren't they so different!' sort-of-way of exoticism. Yet these same patterns show up across the world in epics from various times and cultures. It is an intruging understanding of the world which we should think about and explore. The author chooses not to do that though, preferring to exoticize. Again, she is denying them their rightful place as equal humans within the vast, colourful, and fascinating universe of the human experience.

This vein of errors continues with:

>“Dates add nothing to our culture … We know their value. It has nothing to do with time”

An excellent point which isn't disagreeable. The desire to count, measure, and categorize is a modern concern which does not always have parallels in the past. But instead of nuances she takes this to be everywhere. Dates do add little, but they also point out change. It is sad that, if read with even a basic understanding of the pseudo-permanence claims made by hypernationalists the world over, someone who did not know the oppression and destruction Aboriginal communities faced could assume she is promoting the same sort ideological worldview as the hypernationalists. It is depressing she accidentally stumbled, unbeknownst to her, into that.

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Yes. The title is pure click bait. Essentially not knowing dates does not make the history any less important. Dates, however, are important to history.

I case you hadn’t noticed - and this seems to be a trend among science deniers- all life lives in a linear fashion. Our existence is linear. People can pretend otherwise all they want - all that does is make them wrong.

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There are many constructs of time. We choose that which suits us.

🤣Do try living your life backwards - or explaining to your employer that deadlines don’t matter - just an arbitrary construct. What a load of cobblers. Our world and all our experience operates on time flowing in one direction- that is not open to suggestion, options or directions. Other constructs are purely theoretical and can be philosophized but have no meaning in reality.

> Other constructs are purely theoretical and can be philosophized but have no meaning in reality.

Indeed - time is physical, anatomising them into abstracts kills them.

>Time and Space are real beings, a male and a female: Time is a man, space is a woman, and her masculine portion is Death.

> William Blake, A Vision of the Last Judgment

Seems to be more about spirituality and culture and social conflicts than history per se.

But that would probably not controversial enough.

I think we all recognize that different cultures have different views.

But dates are simply a very useful piece of info for learning about history.

This situation of "Well, they like see things differently man! Your view is so western!". Is ridiculous and just because they choose to see things that way doesn't mean the rest of the world should burn all records of dates nor should we stop seeking out more.

Sounds like a world with a lot of missing information and even more questions we wouldn't have the answers to.

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What would it look like to integrate the two traditions for a better story of humanity?

Sometimes I think the issue is trying to shoehorn concepts. Maybe the indigenous Australians didn't think it important to study history. Many societies don't have strong history traditions. It's easier to name the few that do, like China, Greece, the Jews, to an extent the Romans -which is the only reason western society has it's historical tradition today. Most of our knowledge of past events comes from sources in these civilizations. So maybe the Australians never took history seriously, and because of this the concept just isn't there, and we don't need to meld the approaches, because they aren't approaching the same thing?

I'm also open to history being a wider idea than that held by western society, maybe history is more than what Herodotus said it was.

> Maybe the indigenous Australians didn't think it important to study history.

There is more than one Australian Aboriginal culture here. They all though have their particular view of ‘history’. These people don’t use abstractions as we do.

> Land, water, and sky all connect as one space, and the stories of ancestral figures and the creation of features on the land, in the water, and in the sky are all connected.

That sounds closer to legend or even myth, rather than history. We have many other examples of this thinking in other cultures and wouldn't, we don't, consider it history. Is Heracles putting up Gibraltar history?

This might be the wrong subreddit for this article, OP.

I'm not familiar with anthropology as it's practiced in Australia, but most sources on world history/anthropology I've read date the earliest civilizations back to 15-20,000 BCE.

>Jim Bowler’s famous work at Lake Mungo in south-western New South Wales in the 1960s and 1970s pushed back the date of Aboriginal occupation even further – to an extraordinary 40,000 years. By the early 21st century, Aboriginal claims that they had always been here didn’t seem unreasonable alongside archaeological finds that measured their presence at 65,000 BCE.

Is this a joke? And then the article links to another article on said "remains" which says,

>While animal bones do not survive in the earliest levels of Madjedbebe, remarkably, plant remains do survive as a result of charring in ancient cooking hearths.

My main issue with the thesis of the book (as presented by the article writer) is as follows. Time, as most people understand it today, is not merely an experiential thing.* Conceptions of or the experience of time are not necessarily time itself. Current international time standards and metrics were imposed by Europeans onto the rest of the world, primarily for commercial reasons. Perhaps what the book might be for is a space for imagining or entering the mental space of Indigenous peoples, which is, to use a kind word, icky. The book is promoted as a break from the conception of "purity or wholeness before" of a colonized people but this angle fails by having Indigenous sources be interpreted through that same lens of being "out of time."

>And the question of whether (and how) Western historical narratives can populate deep history with actual lives, as well as understand and represent the thoughts, feeling and senses of people who lived thousands of years ago, is still to be answered.

While the process of making characters, settings and narratives is most commonly associated in the liberal arts tradition with the discipline of history, when describing civilizations/cultures/social practices on their own accord, studies become anthropological in nature. The archaeological findings described in the article should/would be bigger news if they were true and scientifically validated. Yet unclear what the book's author(s) are presenting the book as,** if the philological "evidence" or "substance" of the text is authentic, given the shakiness of the scientific evidence it is presented alongside. Again, if the book's contents are as the author describes, it seems as though while challenging a narrative of Indigenous Australianness as "atemporal," the author(s) fall into the same kind of conceptual "traps."

TLDR - A wonderful article that touches on issues in understanding the role of an oral tradition or philology in establishing historical study/review, but confusingly tries to establish the text and its findings in science and doesn't really describe any kind of true timeframe.

*Otherwise, what was the point of the scholars supposedly carbon-dating the remains?

**a cultural survey? or a textual sample? a documentation of languages/traditional narratives

> Aboriginal people are known to have occupied mainland Australia for at least 65,000 years. It is widely accepted that this predates the modern human settlement of Europe and the Americas.

https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/evidence-of-first-peoples

http://www.workingwithindigenousaustralians.info/content/History_2_60,000_years.html

https://library.norwood.vic.edu.au/c.php?g=947355&p=6863582

Etc etc

That title is a bit sad. Personally if my culture was like that I wouldn't be going around telling people that, but that's just me.