This is kind of hard to put into words. What I’m asking is, how would an archaeologist be able to tell if what they’ve just found is evidence of a massive cultural phenomenon or just a weird and singular thing?
Like, if someone dug up an ancient carving that they hadn’t seen before, would they assume that it had some sort of religious or cultural purpose immediately? Or would they just think “the guy that made this must’ve been really into carving”? Do they just always assume the latter until they see the carving pop up in different areas, or do they go towards the former more often without explicit backup evidence?
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To call something a widespread cultural tradition it must be spread widely. A single unique artifact can mean many things. But large numbers of similar artifacts can only mean the object was commonly used. How they interpret the cultural uses of things is trickier, but in terms of your question, the more common am object is in dig sites of similar age and geographic area the more certain we are that it was a part of the culture in question and not just one person’s eccentric thing.
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