Why didn’t they just mix red and blue to make purple?

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Part of why it was extremely rare.

and it took something like 10-30 thousand shells to make like an ounce of dye

In Europe, purple was reserved for royalty because it was extremely rare, being extracted from the Dye Murex. Two cultures where royal purple was obtained from a kind of snail.

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I think you need to re-read the article.

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.

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?

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.

Okay cool we get it. Thanks.

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

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.

We had plants available in the region that would be foreign to Europe that were suitable as an organic dye.

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Do they use pee too or did they have a less stinky method?

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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>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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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> 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?